farneti. the mythical foundation of leviathan

© 2001 University of Southern California and Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

362 PACIFIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

362

Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 82 (2001) 362–382 0279–0750/00/0100–0000© 2001 University of Southern California and Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Published by

Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

THE “MYTHICALFOUNDATION” OF THESTATE: LEVIATHAN IN

EMBLEMATIC CONTEXT

ROBERTO FARNETI

Abstract: The author draws attention to the ‘animadversions’ written in re-sponse to the Leviathan, arguing that Hobbes’s ‘theological enemies’ exploiteda mythical meaning embedded in the symbol adopted by Hobbes by associatingit with a monstrous animal. The way Hobbes’s enemies altered the symbol ofleviathan reflects the description of animals in emblematic literature. Hobbesunwittingly deployed a mythical image that redounded against him, revealinghim to be vulnerable to those “relics of the religion of the Gentiles,” whichshow up in the shape of mythical images liable of achieving political effects.

He thinks by means of animals as others do by means of concepts.Elias Canetti, Die Fliegenpein

The Mind very often sets itself on work in search of some hidden Idea, and turns, as it were,the Eye of the Soul upon it; though sometimes too they start up in our Minds of their ownaccord, and offer themselves to the Understanding; and very often are rouzed and tumbledout of their dark Cells, into open Day-light, by some turbulent and tempestuous Passion;our affections bringing Ideas to our Memory, which had otherwise lain quiet and unregarded.

J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

In what follows it will be argued that Hobbes is keenly aware of the factthat human communities are affected by a mythical-symbolic element.Such an awareness seems to be lacking in the “received view” of Hobbes’sthought:1 but a close examination of the second half of the Leviathansuggests that we should restore that knowledge to a central position withinhis system of thought. To further this line of enquiry I intend to make useof certain ‘continental’ sources which seem particularly suitable to open

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THE “MYTHICAL FOUNDATION” OF THE STATE 363

up new perspectives on the texts. The objective is to prove that the seminaltext of political modernity conceals from the perception of its moderninterpreters a meaning that has not been exposed in its “effective history”.2

This meaning consists in the awareness of the “mythical foundation” ofpolitics, a mythical quid alien to the rational and contractual grammarthat liberal modernity considers capable of exhausting the entire logic ofhuman association.3 This hypothesis is not even taken into account bymodern interpreters of Hobbes, set to consolidate his ‘identity’ as thefounder of political and philosophical modernity. Yet, the presence ofmyth at the heart of Hobbes’s thought is amply demonstrated both bythe mythical nature of the symbol chosen to represent the State, and bythe sustained efforts made by Hobbes’s ‘theological enemies’—the firstreaders of and commentators on Leviathan—to ‘work on’ that mythicalimage.4 By concentrating on the Leviathan (and, in particular, on thehistory of its early reception), I intend to explain the significance of themyth chosen by Hobbes. Clearly, what follows is little more than a con-jecture, which I shall attempt to render plausible, by reconstructing a‘dynamic context’, by ‘repairing’ the web of inferences damaged by thepassage of time.

1.

An analysis of the meaning of myth in Hobbes is not exhausted by aninternal reading of his text. Because Hobbes’s statements about myth andabout the reasons for choosing the leviathan are few and fragmentary,the attempt to flesh out the phantoms of the author’s intentions cannotbe conclusive. I will try to provide an account of how Hobbes—in puttingforward an intensely mythical image to represent the State—chose tooffer a solution to the problem of political disorder. My aim is also to geta better understanding of why it was that his enemies feared the sub-versive contents of that solution. In my view the symbolic contents of theimage picked by Hobbes from a tradition that stretches back to ancientmythologies, can be disclosed by examining the polemical reaction ofHobbes’s enemies to the publication of his Leviathan.

To fix one’s attention on that episode implies digging up several ruins,to uncover ignored information about the “canonical story” of modernpolitical thought.5 Hobbes, both in choosing the symbol of the State, andin providing an imposing argument on how to escape the Kingdom ofDarkness (in the fourth book of his Leviathan), ponders the destructiveaspects of political myth, to find out the means to neutralize them. Themyth Hobbes opposes with his icon of the Leviathan is the myth of a‘mystical’ community believed to exist in history: a Kingdom of Christalready installed before the end of time; a mystical anticipation of His

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second coming. It is a ‘flaw’ in the heart of Christianity itself, the con-tingency and ‘incompleteness’ of the Reformation, which opens up aspace for the return of other knowledges, other untimely pasts whichfigure in history as a residue (L, xlv, passim), a residual trace of a mythicalelement.6 Hobbes expands upon the essentially anti-political character ofmyth in chapter xlv of Leviathan: “Of Demonology and other Relics ofthe Religion of the Gentiles”. Hobbes was convinced that myth—in theshape of demons and other idols—had survived within Christianity as agenetic flaw, eventually capable of infecting a body politic not entirelyimmune to the demonology of the Gentiles. But Hobbes also realizedthat the only way to remove this residue was to affirm the impressiveanti-mythical power of Christianity, expressed in the belief that the “lastprophecy” heard in the world referred to Christ’s next coming. Hobbesunderstood that the mythical residue which posed a threat to the paxchristiana, and which had never been fully neutralized and removed, re-emerged in the form of counter-forces whose only objective was to destroythe great leviathan. My thesis is that Hobbes opposed this myth with acounter-myth, a figure capable of disclosing and actively neutralizing theresidues of the religion of the Gentiles, of uncovering “the greatest andmain abuse of Scripture” (L, xliv, 4): the belief that the contemporaryChurch is the Kingdom of God. In picking up a symbol he intuitivelyreferred to Judeo-Christian tradition, Hobbes aimed at neutralizing theresidual mythical images from the religion of the Gentiles. At the beginningof his most important work he placed an intensely mythical image: inchoosing the leviathan Hobbes was persuaded to pick a biblical symbolwhich might provide a ‘special’ access to his theological-political argument.

Hobbes’s first opponents saw in the Leviathan what we apparently failto see. We should acknowledge the reasons for their hostility, which wehave often simplified by, on the one hand, accusing Hobbes’s enemiesof attachment to dogmas, and, on the other, recognizing Hobbes as“the foundational philosopher of our political institutions” who had theunfortunate fate to face the champions of bigotry.7 My thesis is that thecontroversy between Hobbes and his ‘enemies’ occured in a context whichcan be identified by the presence of standard mythical images: in thatcontext took place the attempt to ‘work on’ those images, in order tomanipulate the symbolic structures underlying a specific world view. Hobbes’senemies understood that the Leviathan was threatening the standard worldview they were trying to preserve, based on the conviction that the King-dom of God was already established on earth and that—as I will show insection 5.—its elective site was the ‘land’ as opposed to the ‘sea’.

The vantage point I would like to suggest for understanding this con-text, was first adopted by Carl Schmitt in his 1938 essay on the Leviathan.Schmitt—who, in a letter to Ernst Jünger dated in July 1938 referred toHobbes’s Leviathan as a “book esoteric in every sense”8—was trying to

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establish a relation between Hobbes and a study of “political myth as anarbitrary (eigenmächtige) historical force”.9 In this connection JacobTaubes is right to point out that credit is due to Schmitt for enablingHobbes scholars to extricate themselves from the swamp of an “endlessphilosophical discussion”, by identifying in myth the foundation uponwhich an organic interpretation of Hobbes’s text could be constructed.10

It is then necessary to look to the reception of the text to discover a storywhich reveals very clearly how the mythical images brought into play hadan essentially political function. Hobbes tried to figure a way to keepthese powers under control, to neutralize the mythical heart of all poli-tics. The reconstruction of the context capable of demonstrating such athesis challenges our preconception of the myth. This treatise of ‘anti-mythology’ continues to resist the fragile classificatory categories of mod-ern readers of history of philosophy, for the simple reason that our criticalacumen has been for too long tamed by a brand of humanism which putsforward only edifying explanations of myth.11

2.

The history of the earliest reception of the Leviathan remains obscure.12

Hobbes’s modern interpreters seem to have lost the original context ofdebate, that is the lengthy episode of ‘animadversions’ published duringthe fifty years following the first edition of the Leviathan.13 It should benoted that our perception of the ample anti-Hobbesian literature hasbeen mediated by modern editors and commentators: the animadversionsare presented as homogeneous contributions within an imposing theoret-ical controversy; and regarded as an historical chapter of ‘political theory’,a group of proposals working on the level of demonstrative rationalargumentation.14 In this reading Bramhall, Seth Ward and Clarendon areseen as constructing a theoretical and argumentative mechanism with thepurpose of blocking the reception of Hobbes’s political theory. It is hardto believe, however, that such an imposing weight of theoreticalconfutation alone could have scotched the reception of the Leviathan. Inmy view, the crucial episode of the ‘defamation’ of the text should belooked into by examining an aspect of the controversialist literature notexposed to the light of the theoretical confutation, an aspect revealing the“mythical images” at stake.15 The emotional and imaginative impact onthe “post-Elizabethan public” of those confutations published by Hobbes’senemies, should be taken into account: it is therefore necessary to iden-tify the particular symbolic and emotional register of this public, ratherthan its ability to follow rational arguments and debate sophisticatedtheological matters.16 Indeed, it is on this register that Hobbes’s Levia-than undergoes a symbolic metamorphosis: Hobbes’s myth, chosen to

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represent the rationally ordered State, having been associated with ele-mental symbols, soon acquires the typical anti-political features of amonstrous beast. And yet, the image on the frontispiece of his book isnot one to provoke a violent fear or a sense of panic. Hobbes did notconceive of his State as monstrous in any way. In fact he suggested theemblem of a well-ordered community in which the only abnormal char-acteristics were super-human size and strength—more typical of a magnushomo than of a monstrous being.17 Nevertheless, Hobbes, in naming theState Leviathan and its opposite Behemoth (the destructive forces of civilwar), brought into play two ancient mythical images, the two biblicalmonsters described in the Book of Job.

When assigning a name to the myth chosen to represent the strengthand unity of the State, Hobbes was not aware of its buried mythical andsymbolic meanings: he chose one of “those mythical names that cannotbe cited with impunity”.18 We have lost sight of Leviathan’s profoundsymbolic nucleus, which nonetheless comes out if we make an effort totake into account the reaction of Hobbes readership. Representatives ofthe ecclesiastical establishment responded by exploiting a ‘latent myth’,by turning it against the same symbol put forward by Hobbes. He didnot seem to have realized that the name of the leviathan carried with it alegacy of mythical images.19 Hobbes remained intuitively convinced ofthe anti-mythical force of the leviathan, a symbol which he was acquaintedwith only in its biblical and Christian version. But the “elementary forces”of myth took revenge on Hobbes’s ingenuity by means of those ‘theolo-gical enemies’ who reinvest the Hobbesian symbol with the full weight ofits mythical substance.20 What was intended as no more than a symbolic‘relic’, resurfaces as repressed material, and brings about on the still sur-face of human relations a dangerous turbulence: the evoked symbol“strikes at the foundation that is indestructible in the relations betweengreat powers”.21

One cannot understand this dynamics without seeing the three distinctsides of the context under examination: Hobbes (who instinctively ‘strikes’at the mythical foundation, at the residual trace of myth); his theologicalenemies, who aim to intervene in the symbolic space opened up by Hobbeshimself; and the ‘public’, which is the potential repository of the world-view embedded in the mythical images at stake in the controversy underexamination. It is because of this public aspect that the controversyassumes ‘political’ proportions.

3.

There is a curious gap between the symbol conceived by Hobbes (thebiblical beast) and the image his enemies claimed to see in that symbol (a

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sea monster).22 Reinhard Brandt asks “what is the exact meaning of thechoice of the biblical leviathan as a symbol wielding power, that is to say,what is the meaning of the marine monster as a symbol of the peace-bearing sovereign?”.23 In my view the idea of a marine monster wasessentially an earlier mythical figuration, which in later times was super-imposed on the Hobbesian mould such that they merged into one. In itspre-Hobbesian history, the leviathan always figures as a large marineanimal (a crocodile, a whale, or in general a large fish) while behemoth isa terrestrial animal, for example a bull or an elephant. On the basis ofwhat has been said we might conclude that the monstrous and demonicnature of the leviathan is a later accretion, the outcome of a “work onmyth” implied in the fight for survival between elemental forces.24 At thevery moment when Hobbes’s book is published, the leviathan undergoesa deep process of mythologization and the ancient biblical symbol istransformed into a monstrous beast, the savage embodiment of politicalevil.

Those interpreters who have endeavoured to clarify this particularaspect of Hobbes’s thought, seem to have missed the dynamics of thehistory of its reception. They have preferred to concentrate instead on“Hobbes’s original iconographical intentions”.25 As far as Brandt is con-cerned, the question that needs to be asked to understand the mysterybehind the frontispiece of the Leviathan, is: why did Hobbes choose abiblical monster? While Kinch Hoekstra asks: why did Hobbes entitle abook about the State Leviathan?.26

By selecting the leviathan, Hobbes takes on a symbol that is repletewith layers of mythical meanings as a cipher for his own blueprint for theconstruction of the State. Hobbes’s ‘naivety’ in the choice of the levia-than as a symbol for the State, is shown in his failure to calculate thedeleterious outcome the appropriation of the myth and the subsequentpolitical use of the ‘name’ of the leviathan could lead to. It has beenstressed that “the predominant connotations of ‘Leviathan’ were of agreat sea monster: a whale, a crocodile, or a fantastic dragon of the deep.It would be surprising if these aspects of the biblical and Hebraic tradi-tion were altogether passed over by Hobbes”.27 Yet this is exactly thecase. It is precisely this blind spot that prevents Hobbes from fully com-prehending the stratified character of the inherited symbol. Hobbes in-vokes a political symbol, the impressive mythical-symbolic power of whichhe totally ignores. He plunges into the ‘arcana’ of the symbol’s hiddenmeaning equipped only with the illusion that he can manipulate matterthat he believes to be inert, which eventually, however, having beenrevived in its untameable symbolic power, will turn against him. Hobbes’s‘theological enemies’ were to select the torpid image of an elementarymyth from the ‘multiple meanings’ of a remote myth, which had not yetbeen tested against the historical possibilities of its various re-workings.28

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The symbol of leviathan was in the process of losing its biblical connota-tions and re-acquiring the characteristics of a sea-monster.29

We have to draw a distinction between the leviathan’s history as asymbol before Hobbes’s time, and its subsequent development.30 Byunderstanding the Leviathan as the vehicle of a ‘fundamental myth’, weare able to examine the attitude of the ‘theological enemies’, and to trackdown the changes to the body of the symbol picked by Hobbes to rep-resent the well-ordered State.31 If, on the one hand, it has been acknow-ledged that “it is Hobbes who stamped his book with the name of amyth, rich in traditional association”, on the other, the negative charac-terization of the Leviathan, brought about by Hobbes’s enemies’s criticalreception, has not received much consideration.32 Nonetheless, the inter-pretation of the symbol which begins to prevail during the 1650s is essen-tially the one Hobbes’s theological enemies had conceived. The ‘work onmyth’ consisted in collecting ancient symbols and in associating them tothe great leviathan: the sea-monster in its iconographic variants of croco-dile, whale, and aquatic snake, subsumed into itself the biblical symbolHobbes had naively evoked.33

In the following section, I shall attempt to reconstruct the dynamics ofthe myth’s development. My thesis is that the sum total of mythical andsymbolic elements that form the buried contents of the ‘work on’ theexamined myth, find in emblem books—those repertories of mythicalimages—an embryonic cataloguing.

4.

I intend to focus on the emblematic literature as it appears to be the areaof expression of a ‘national’ circuit of symbolic information, the literaryplace in which mechanisms reflecting a deep-rooted imaginative sensibilityemerge. Frances Yates’s survey into emblem-book literature has helpedto bring to light phenomena—in the heart of Elizabethan English culture—connected with the regenerative role of imperial ideology. From themid-sixteenth century onwards, collections of emblems began to form aspecific literary genre that, in the course of a century, became surprisinglywidespread.34 Emblem books mark a deep level of opinion- and consensus-forming; their use is connected to the pursuance of “sociopolitical object-ives of the use of visual media”.35

By circulating mythical images, Hobbes’s theological enemies broughtlatent memories to the surface, and by so doing, they activated a circuitof associations capable of dragging the name of the leviathan down intoanother process of myth-making. The visual emergence of “the mythicalfoundation” is to be sought in the depths of the ‘national’ subconscious,where age-old archetypes pertaining to collective identity are to be found.

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The symbol chosen by Hobbes to represent the irresistible power of theState is dressed in a deep-seated symbolic figure of a latent myth sum-moned from “the darke Cell and Grave of oblivion”.36 Emblems made itfeasible to circulate once more the contents of latent memories: it is theemblem that carries out the development and adaptation of the “funda-mental myth”, by offering a version which could be publicly recognised.The structural elements, characteristics and sequences, are updated with-out losing the original thematic nucleus: “even though emblem books usestandards images and stories of the past, they reinterpret these receivedtraditions”.37

The iconography (registered and codified in the emblem-books) of thekind of aquatic beast associated with the leviathan, reveals its propensityto conflict and ‘antipathy’: that is to say, to ‘capital hatred’. The ‘work onmyth’ in this context consists in the symbolic association of the leviathanto images prone to determine a reaction of rejection and aversion. Thestruggle between animals forms the stock-in-trade imagery of emblematicliterature: the crocodile’s vicinity to the habitat of rivers place it at thecenter of violent clashes with aquatic creatures.38 In the Iconology of CesareRipa there are two emblems of combat between the crocodile (who is classi-fied among terrestrial creatures and not among the ‘acquatili’) and anaquatic creature. The clash between the crocodile and the sea scorpion,finds in the emblem of “capital hatred” an exemplary registration: themarine scorpion clashes with the crocodile “for as soon as these two animalscatch sight of each other, they spontaneously meet up to kill each other”.39

Rosemary Freeman, in her survey of emblem books published in Eng-land up to 1700,40 brings to the fore a structural constant within Englishemblematic literature: the opposition between land and sea, in which thesea, represented by the carriage of the ocean drawn by the great whale,was a predominant symbol. The same theme is represented in the onlyemblem in which the whale Freeman refers to appears. The motto Nusquamtuta fides is illustrated by the image described by Geoffrey Whitney, “aship anchored to a Whale”.41 It is quite common to find the leviathanassociated with the whale. Its association with “a kind of Whale” is putforward both by Thomas Wilson in his Christian dictionary42 and by JohnMilton in Paradise Lost.43 If we turn our attention to the other greatHobbesian monster, behemoth, we see that it is uniquely represented bythat very unjust animal (animal inustissimum), the hippopotamus, whichtraditionally is chosen to represent a symbol of “Iniquity and Violence”.44

5.

Let us now return to the reception of Hobbes, attempting to follow thestructural relations between symbolic representations of the leviathan in

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the anti-Hobbesian literature and the emblems of enmity illustrated inemblem books. In the Leviathan Drawn out with a Hook or Animadver-sions upon MR HOBBES HIS LEVIATHAN by Alexander Rosse, theLatin inscription reads: “In doctissimum marinae belluae domitorem, Al.Rosseum”.45 Rosse is described as a ‘tamer’ of a marine monster that caneasily be fished out with a hook (while, on the other hand, the biblicalleviathan—consistently with a drastic re-working of the original contentof the myth—“cannot be captured by a hook or tied up with a rope”46).The ‘work on myth’ undertaken by Hobbes’s enemies excavates a deeplevel of symbolic understanding, where we can see the “original and ele-mentary conviction that peace and right take their place only on land”.47

The opposition land/sea constitutes the principal level of the ‘work onmyth’: it is at this level that the “mythical foundation” manifests itself.The shift of England to a maritime existence does not only imply a trans-formation of political institutions, but it also affects the ‘field of tension’between antipathetic ‘families’ of symbols. The space in which the oppositeforces come into play is manifested in the clash between two opposingworld views, and the only possible interaction between the two appearsto be that of “capital hatred”. It is at this level of tension between ele-mentary myths (which are visible here through their specific symbolicrepresentations) that the polemical literature against Hobbes is situated.

In the dedicatory letter in Rosse’s text, we read that “the Ichneumon isbut a small rat, yet it can kill the great crocodile”. In this context thework on myth consists in revitalising a long buried tradition of mythicalrepresentations, of archetypal symbols which could immediately be asso-ciated with the leviathan. The Italian doctor Girolamo Cardano in hiswork De Subtilitate reports the mythical story of the ‘enmity’ betweentwo different beings. Michel Foucault gives a detailed report of Cardano’stale, pointing out that the figure of ‘sympathy’ is, in “natural history”,always “compensated by its twin-figure, antipathy”, such that, “throughtime, the beings of the world will hate each other, and without sympathyretain their ferocious lust. “The Indian rat is pernicious to the crocodilebecause nature itself supplied it as its enemy [ . . . ]; seeing the crocodiledozed off [ . . . ] with its mouth open, he steals through it and insinuatesitself in its ample throat, and gnawing its guts, comes eventually out ofthe belly of the dead beast ”.48

The tradition of the sympathy/antipathy antithesis continuously repro-duces itself; and so enters the theological and political controversies ofthe age of Hobbes. In his seminal work Emblematik und Drama, AlbrechtSchöne, in the place where he examines a book of emblems by the title ExRe Herbaria, Ex Animalibus Quadrupedibus, Ex Volatilibus Et Insectis,Ex Aquatilibus Et Reptilibus, published between 1590 and 1604 by theGerman doctor Joachim Camerarius, reports a particular emblem: “as anemblem of the unexpected danger to the threat of tyranny, Camerarius

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has illustrated the crocodile slain by the Icneumon, the Pharaoh’s rat”.49

Donald Lupton in his Emblems of Rarities, reports a re-worked version(in which, according to Blumenberg’s thesis, the work carried out on the‘fundamental myth’ can be identified) of the struggle between the rat andthe tyrant/crocodile. Here the threat of tyranny is no longer representedby the crocodile (which, however, remains a symbol of persecution inLupton) and a story is told of a tyrant who is devoured by rats, “andthey came forth so fast, and in such a multitude, assaulted and set up onthis Tyrant in his banquets”.50

6.

In emblematic literature the crocodile is represented as a symbol of per-secution and panic. In Ripa’s Iconology (in the English translation of 1709),the emblem of persecution (as well as of cupidity) represents a crocodilemounted by a young woman: “The Crocodile, because it annoys only theFish that flee from it; so Persecution desires nothing more than to findthose who do not resist it by their own Strength”.51 An identical fabulacan be found in the splendid emblematic work by Henry Peacham, MinervaBritanna, in which under the entry Pulchritudo foemina the author dis-plays “A virgin naked, on a Dragon”.52 Donald Lupton writes: “it is afearefull beast flying from those that persecute him, and persecuting thosethat fly from him”.53 Deep-seated mythical images echoed in the ‘name’of the crocodile/dragon echoed; this explains how that name could easilybe exploited by Hobbes’s theological enemies. In essence, the associationwith the crocodile or the whale brought out the profound negativity ofHobbes’s chosen symbol: Rosse’s main objective was to provide groundsfor an accusation of heresy, such as the one levelled at Hobbes in 1666,when a committee of the House of Commons pointed to the Leviathan asa cause of “atheism and Profaneness”.

In order to represent the unity of the State and neutralize a mythreminiscent of the “Religion of the Gentiles”, Hobbes imprudently pickeda symbol of which he perceived only the superficial layer, the Christianskin, leaving his political construction vulnerable to the threat of element-ary forces. Hobbes’s enemies were prepared to reactivate these forcescompletely passed over by Hobbes but seated within the symbol itself.After three hundred and fifty years we cannot distinguish the profile ofthe image originally picked by Hobbes from its subsequent mythical-symbolic envelope.

The thesis of the ‘symbolic destruction’ of Hobbes’s Leviathan is con-firmed by the further analysis of John Bramhall, bishop of Derry. In 1658his book The Catching of Leviathan, or the Great Whale was published tothe acclaim of the bishop of Vesey, who judged it a well-aimed blow to

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the “brutish doctrines” of Hobbes. Bramhall’s attack on the marine mon-ster adopts Rosse’s metaphorical register, culminating in the violent catch-ing of this “formidable creature”.54 What needs to be stressed, though, isthat for Bramhall the leviathan was ultimately a beast, a fish or a whale,essentially devoid of deep biblical and theological meanings:55 here, again,we see at work the same ‘fundamental myth’: Bramhall’s descriptionoffers the image of the tiny mouse stealing through the elephant’s trunkto eat his brain, of the Indian rat creeping into the stomach of the croco-dile to gnaw at its bowels, and of smaller fish gaining entry into theleviathan’s belly. To echo Frances Yates’s words, these examples “consti-tute much more than just a simply literary parallel”.

7.

The earliest readership of the Leviathan—whom Hobbes identified indis-tinctly as one “confederacy of deceivers” (L, xliv, 1)—diverted attentionfrom the text by repositioning the Hobbesian symbol on the level ofpolitical myth. Hobbes’s enemies succeeded in manipulating the clues theauthor had incautiously scattered in his text. Hobbes’s attempt to con-struct a counter-mythology, which was itself capable of powerful myth-making, crumbled miserably under the concerted attack on the myth hehad chosen. Hobbes’s treatise of ‘anti-mythology’ failed to avoid themost radical mythologizing. Interpreted by its first readers through thelens of a long-forgotten symbolic tradition, the image of the leviathanevoked by Hobbes was made to interact with hidden elemental forces andtransformed into the anti-political myth symbolised by a monstrous beast.56

One of the predominant devises in the symbolic repertory of emblembooks was the image of the big whale (or more in general a huge fish).57

Geoffrey Whitney in one of his rare political emblems reports of a seabattle in which the State is represented as a shoal of small fish ( frie)besieged from the bottom by big fish, and from the top by the marinebirds who comb the surface of the sea.58 Bramhall’s thesis, according towhom “God hath chosen the weak things of this world to confound themighty” clearly illustrates the antithetical geometry of the elemental mythstaken into account: the struggle between something large and powerfulon the one hand, and a number of small creatures on the other, consti-tutes a deep-seated symbolic structure of enmity.59 The story told byDonald Lupton in his collection of emblems exhibits the same structure:in this context, the tiny aggressors are mice who attack the tyrant “andthey came forth so fast, and in such a multitude, assaulted and set up onthis Tyrant in his banquets”. A symbolic archetype, this time relating topassionate love, is reversed in a poem by John Donne, The Broken Heart:just as love devours the heart of lovers by swallowing them whole without

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even chewing them, a large fish—“The tyran[t] Pike”—devours a shoal oftiny fish (“the Frye”).60

Hobbes’s enemies transformed the symbolic surface of the Hobbesiandoctrine of the State into a vessel containing an ancient political myth,into the archetypal symbol of ‘antipathy’ and ‘capital hatred’. But thesuccess of their re-working seems due to something that escapes us. Whenmodern readers of Hobbes attempt to interpret the received text, theyremain blocked in their respective prejudices. Deluded that ‘ideas’ circu-late exclusively on the symbolically sterile plane of literary communica-tion, they tend to presuppose a universally valid model of republic ofletters, possibly not perturbed by the emergence of mythologies whosesubliminal activity they are complacent to ignore. What escapes us is thesimple fact that during the second half of the seventeenth century, theleviathan was caught in that web of symbols its opponents had populatedwith marine monsters prone to generate political disorder and impiety.That the beast evoked by them was a sea-creature, hostile to land, showsthe scheme of symbolic reference of Hobbes’s enemies. We might inferthat they wanted to prevent England from a sea-oriented future, andprovided a wide symbolic context in which to re-work the fundamentalmyth of the great sea-monster.61 Hobbes’s enemies aimed to re-describehis Leviathan (conventionally associated with an aquatic animal) as asymbol of cruelty and persecution, disparaging its intended positive sig-nificance by a reworking of its intrinsic mythical-symbolic content.62

8.

At the outset I mentioned that Hobbes understood that Christianity wasan extraordinarily powerful anti-mythical force, as long as it postponedthe second coming of Christ, that Kingdom of God that Hobbes’senemies pretended to inhabit at the present time. Hobbes understoodthat this claim of the historical presence of the King of God was a relic ofthe religion of the Gentiles, for true Christianity had promised the insti-tution of such a Kingdom only after the next coming of Christ. Duringthe time of “regeneration”—as Hobbes calls the timeframe “between theascension and the general resurrection” (L, xlii, 7)—the Christian Statemust beware of any abuse of Scripture, of any argument reminiscent ofthose ancient superstitions of the Gentiles which might interfere with thetrue content of Christianity, that is, Christ’s last prophecy about His finalreturn. Hobbes understood that only by shifting the Kingdom of Christto the Heaven designated by His promise, would all controversy andenmity be put off indefinitely. For Hobbes the civil war was the outcomeof idolatry and of the false worship of God, the outcome of the need tofill the temporal void, the interim interrupting the history of salvation,

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defeating the expectations of the final fulfilment of the Kingdom. Theachievement of a period emptied of the idols of the pagans is an effect ofChristianity: as Hobbes points out, “in the planting of Christian Religion,the oracles ceased in all parts of the Roman empire, and the number ofChristians increased wonderfully every day and in every place, by thepreaching of the Apostles and Evangelists” (L, xii, 31).

For Hobbes, the task ahead was to reveal the ultimate integrity ofChrist’s promise. This explains why his system is prefigured by a biblicalsymbol, which was meant to represent the irresistible power of the Chris-tian State.63 Conversely, for his ‘enemies’, who believed that Christ “isKing of his Church militant here, and raigneth in the hearts of his faithful,and performs all the offices of a King, even in this world”, the task aheadwas to defend the notion of the eucharistic presence of Christ and to‘slander’ Hobbes’s political construction by associating it with those myth-ical images which had dwelled in the “darke Cell and Grave of oblivion”.64

It has to be stressed that, in their own ‘mythical-symbolic’ understandingof politics, that ‘presence’ could only take place on ‘land’ (as opposed tothat ‘sea’ into which England’s symbolic existence was progressively slip-ping). That the principles contained in the Leviathan were “not onlydestructive to all Religion, but to all Societies”,65 became the widespreadconviction of a time that believed Hobbes’s work heralded the end of theEucharistic permanence of the substantial presence of Christ. If—on theone hand—the ‘mythology’ of the actual presence of the Kingdom ofGod is a constant in the anti-Hobbesian literature, on the other, Hobbes’s‘mistake’ was to give substance to an idea of great power by using asymbol he naively thought stemmed exclusively from a Judeo-Christiantradition, totally ignoring that behind this segment of relatively recenthistory (the history of the ‘apparitions’ of the leviathan in that tradition),there stretched out a pre-history his enemies succeeded in re-awakening.

The controversy between Hobbes and his enemies did not take placeexclusively on the level of the theoretical argumentation: instead, Hobbes’senemies opened the chasm of myth below his political symbol, so as toexpose the entire construction to the deadly influence of ‘elementary’imagery. Therefore, at the outset of its reception, we observe an imposinginvestment of myth onto a symbol whose potential side-effects Hobbeswas not fully aware: in Schmitt’s words, Hobbes was not aware of thefact that “no clear chain of thought can stand up against the force ofgenuine, mythical images”.66 Hobbes’s enemies sense the immeasurablepower of these “elementary forces”; they activate its symbolic potential inorder to create new and more effective ‘antipathies’, and, in this way,succeed in reworking its mythical nucleus. They expose the archaic scenedwelling in the depths of Hobbes’s chosen symbol, and show unequi-vocally how it conceals a mythical ‘quality’, a ‘name’ which from then onwould not be allowed to “be cited with impunity”.67

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9.

In my view, a ‘mythical-symbolic’ reading of Leviathan would seem to hintat something which still concerns us. This kind of reading legitimates itselfinsofar as we are willing to follow a non-conventional path in the historyof modern ideas. At the margins of the canonical story of liberal moder-nity, there is a series of authors who tried to conceive of politics withoutlosing that dimension which has been ignored by liberalism; without, thatis, ignoring “the diabolic powers at work”.68 If we are willing to trace thisperipheral descent of modernity, we encounter authors who were deeplyconcerned with the mythical foundation of politics. They have scatteredclues which still stand unexplored in the history of modern political ideas.69

The overall picture I have outlined is schematic, fragmentary, and vague.I have relied on first-hand sources, ruins piled at the margins of thereceived tradition of the text. Nevertheless, I think such an incompletepicture can be perfected by means of more extensive historical research. Icannot claim to have proved my case, but only to have opened a door.Others may choose to ignore it, or venture to cross its threshold. Myargument is relatively weak because my use of sources is selective. I haveendeavoured to illustrate this episode of the reworking of myth by refer-ring to the emblematic literature, and not to countless other sources thatcould have made my argument less fragmentary. In doing so I havepreferred to follow Lupton’s suggestion that emblems worked as obscurereceptacles of ‘hidden’ recollections. Through their use it turned out to bepossible to test the symbolic imagination of that historical entity whichYates calls the “post-Elizabethan public”. This public was, unknowingly,at the receiving end of a reworking of myth carried out by the custodiansof that elemental world view (that the Kingdom of God was alreadyestablished on earth and that its elective site was the ‘land’ as opposed tothe ‘sea’) the Leviathan threatened to disintegrate.

I think Hobbes belongs to the line of authors who are aware of thetragic aspect of politics, aware of the fact that to live ‘politically’ does notsimply mean to seek out a more consistent theory regarding the rational-ity of our mutual obligations. In my view, Hobbes was supremely awarethat the political space is inhabited by forces that escape our rationalityand which, in the face of no resistance, dominate us. He is the distantprecursor of a series of authors who have appeared in a casual order inmy reconstruction, such as Nietzsche, Weber and Schmitt: in all of them,the awareness of the “mythical foundation of the State” is alive. Thatsame foundation also emerges from an unconventional reading of Hobbes,made possible by putting the texts into that reconstructed context which,in my view, might offer unexplored avenues of research. I think, in con-clusion, that the picture I have outlined offers the significant advantageof firmly placing at center stage something which the “canonical story of

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modernity” has passed over. This element turns out to be totally alien tothat ‘political philosophy’ which is determined to think of the ‘political’as a mere rational allocation of resources, and has chosen to ignore whatits seventeenth-century precursors were perfectly aware of: that politicsretains a mythical and symbolic constituent that cannot be suppressed.

Università di Bologna

NOTES

I would like to thank Kinch Hoekstra and Peter Schröder (as well as the three referees ofthe PPQ) for their comments on a first version of this article.Quotation of Leviathan in the text (abbreviated L) is made in accordance with EdwinCurley’s edition (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett; 1994): to which reference is madeby chapter and number of paragraph. I write ‘Leviathan’ when I refer to Hobbes’s book,and ‘leviathan’ when I refer to the pre-existing figure.

1 See R. Shaver; Hobbes. (Aldershot: Ashgate; 1999).2 H. G. Gadamer; Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen: Mohr; 1972). Engl. transl. Truth

and Method (London: Sheed and Word; 1989). Effective history translates the GermanWirkungsgeschichte (literally, history of effects, of consequences) and refers to the text’scritical history.

3 «The state itself has no unwritten laws more powerful than the mythical foundationthat guarantees its connection with religion and its growth out of mythical representations»;F. Nietzsche; Die Geburt der Tragödie. In Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe. (Ed. by G. Colliand M. Montinari. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter; 1972); Engl. transl. The Birth of Tragedy outof the Spirit of Music (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books; 1993), 109.

4 In writing this essay, I have constantly taken into account H. Blumenberg; Arbeit amMythos (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag; 1979); Engl. transl. Work on Myth (Cambridge,Mass.-London: MIT Press; 1985).

5 S. Stuurman; “The Canon of the History of Political Thought: Its Critique and aProposed Alternative”; History and Theory 2 (2000), 147–166.

6 On the theme of the «incompleteness of Reformation», see M. Whitaker; “Hobbes’sView of the Reformation”: History of Political Thought 1 (1988).

7 R. Tuck; Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress; 1993), xvii.

8 «Be careful! Have you already heard about the great Leviathan? Something that mighthave encouraged you to read this book? Be careful my dear! This is an esoteric book inevery sense, and its immanent esotericism increases the more you become absorbed in thebook. Better keep your hands by your side and leave it there, at its shelf mark. Don’t grabit with your very fingers, however clean and manicured they might be, or stained with theblood or the colour of this time of ours! Wait until the time when this book may cross yourpath again and, only then, if you are attuned to it, will its esotericism disclose itself to you!The Fata libellorum and the Fata of its readers belong to one another in an inscrutable way.I say this to you in friendship. Do not plunge into the Arcana, but wait; at least until sucha time when you are—in a proper form—introduced to these and eventually admitted. Forotherwise you might be possessed by a fit of rage, which would be harmful for your health,and try to destroy that something which is beyond any destruction. This would certainlynot be to your advantage. So keep your hands down, and leave the book in its place [ . . . ]».Ernst Jünger-Carl Schmitt; Briefe. 1930–1983 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta; 1999), 193. Curiously,the letter appears to have been posted in June 1945, but is dated July 11, 1938.

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9 C. Schmitt; Der Leviathan in der Staatslehre des Thomas Hobbes. Sinn und Fehlschlageines politischen Symbols (Cologne: Hohenheim Verlag; 1982), first published in 1938; Engl.transl. The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes. Meaning and Failure of aPolitical Symbol (Westport, Conn.-London: Greenwood Press; 1996), 26.

10 J. Taubes; “Statt einer Einleitung” in J. Taubes (ed.); Der Fürst dieser Welt. CarlSchmitt und die Folgen (Munich: Fink/Schöningh Verlag; 1983), 11.

11 «We no longer consider mythological monsters as a supernatural or even naturalspecies; they are no longer theological or even zoological genres. They belong instead to thequasi-genres of the imaginary, ‘archetypes’ of fable heaped in an unconsciousness that iseven more mythical than the myths themselves». R. Girard; Le bouc émissaire (Paris: Grasset;1982); Engl. transl. The Scapegoat (London: The Athlone Press; 1986), 37–38.

12 M. Goldie; “The Reception of Hobbes” in J.H. Burns-M. Goldie (eds.); The Cam-bridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press;1991), 589–615 (: 590). «To study the reception of Hobbes is to discover, among his enemies,a powerful continuation of scholastic Aristotelian styles of philosophy, and, among hisallies, an urgent campaign to dethrone scholasticism». It should be stressed that, in theyears following the publication of Leviathan, Hobbes gradually became a polemical targetin a debate traversed by strong theological controversies. Goldie recognises in this sensethat much of this debate «was metaphysical and theological in character».

13 «The pervasiveness of philosophical theology is not properly recognized in modernhistories of political thought written from a secular standpoint». Ivi.

14 The publication of works which have not appeared in print since the seventeenth-century has made it possible to situate the intellectual context of Hobbes’s political proposal:G. A. J. Rogers (ed.); Critical Responses to Hobbes, 6 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan;1996). An introductory sample of anti-Hobbesian political literature is in G. A. J. Rogers;Leviathan. Contemporary Responses to the Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Bristol:Thoemmes Press; 1995). It contains extracts of the ‘animadversions’ of Robert Filmer,George Lawson, John Bramhall and Edward, Earl of Clarendon.

15 C. Schmitt; The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes; 81.16 My research on the leviathan as political myth inevitably intersects the seminal work

by Frances Yates, and especially her analysis of the «Elizabethan public» as the readershipof a mythical-symbolic message (which, in Yates’s case-study, aimed at transforming theQueen into «a celestial object of worship»): F. A. Yates; Astraea. The Imperial Theme in theSixteenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; 1975), 29.

17 See R. Brandt; “Das Titelblatt des Leviathan und Goyas El Gigante” in U. Bermbach-K. Kodalle (eds.); Furcht und Freiheit. Leviathan-Diskussion 300 Jahre nach Thomas Hobbes(Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag; 1982), 215–216.

18 C. Schmitt; The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes; 53.19 John Steadman identified two underlying etymological traditions associated with the

name of the leviathan: the first was the tradition associating him to the devil, the second(actually a ‘minor’ tradition) identified him with the legitimate monarch. While Hobbestried to follow this line of interpretation, his enemies skilfully evoked the demonic sense ofthe term associated with Hobbes’s symbol; J. N. Steadman; “Leviathan and RenaissanceEthymology”; Journal of the History of Ideas 4 (1967), 575–576.

20 When referring to Hobbes’s “theological enemies” Schmitt does not target the authorsof the ‘animadversions’. In this article I entirely reject Schmitt’s unfortunate identificationof the political forces responsible for Leviathan’s failure as a political symbol. Anyway, Istill rely on Schmitt’s analysis on political myth, trying, tentatively, to identify the effectiveinstitutional subjects which had aimed at dismantling the Leviathan’s anti-mythical force.

21 C. Schmitt; The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes; 49.

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22 See F. Rigotti; “Rassegna introduttiva sulle metafore storico-politiche”; Annalidell’Istituto storico italo-germanico di Trento (1989), 75. According to Rigotti «critics generallyagree in recognising in the Leviathan a sea-animal, a fish, a snake, or a crocodile, created onthe fifth day of the creation in order to dominate over all marine animals. In Rabbinicaltradition its function was to provide food to the righteous at the messianic banquet. In theChristian tradition it is metaphorically identical to Satan, and represents the icon of thedefeat of the devil by God».

23 R. Brandt; “Das Titelblatt des Leviathan und Goyas El Gigante”; 209.24 «Because the matter under consideration concerns the actual combat of elementary

forces, the leviathans appear as huge animals». C. Schmitt; The Leviathan in the StateTheory of Thomas Hobbes; 49.

25 N. Malcolm; “The Titlepage of Leviathan, Seen in a Curious Perspective”; The Seven-teenth Century 2 (1998), 124–155 (: 124).

26 K. Hoekstra; “The Figure of Leviathan”; 2. Quotations are from the manuscript kindlyprovided by the author himself. It was originally a paper read at the Sorbonne on 28February 1998.

27 Ivi; 6.28 H. Blumenberg; Arbeit am Mythos; 14 ff.29 T. Magri; “I mostri di Hobbes”; Rinascita 1 (1980), 40. «This demonic content of the

two figures progressively lost its significance. The Jesuit F. Vavasseur, in a commentarypublished in 1632, limited himself to reporting this interpretation without endorsing it. Calvin,on the other hand, had already openly rejected it. Leviathan and Behemoth are simplyanimal creatures, even though monstrous, as well as specula both of God’s power, and ofmen’s impotence. We would lose this meaning if we consider them demonic symbols».

30 Hans Blumenberg maintains that the fundamental myth is not what existed at theoutset, but what remains, that which was capable of satisfying reception and expectation.«The historical power of myth is not founded in the origins of its contents, in the zone fromwhich it draws its materials and its stories, but rather in the fact that, in its procedure andits ‘form’, it is no longer something else». H. Blumenberg; Work on Myth; 16.

31 Rosse, for instance, considers the leviathan as an animal or a monstrous beast: «GoodReader, David encountered with a Lion and a Bear; Daniel conversed among Lions; Paul foughtwith Beasts at Ephesus, Hercules skirmished with a Erymanthian Bear, a Nemaean Lion, aLernaean Hydra; Aenaeas drew his sword against the shaddows of Centaures, Harpies,Gorgons and Chimeras. But I have to do with a Strange Monster called Leviathan»; A. Rosse;Leviathan Drawn out with a Hook or Animadversions upon MR HOBBES HIS LEVIATHAN(London. Printed by Tho. Newcomb, for Richard Royston at the Angel in Ivy-Lane. 1653).

32 S.I. Mintz; “Leviathan as Metaphor”; Hobbes Studies 2 (1989), 3—illustrates the his-tory of the name of the leviathan, showing the progressive loss of its demonic connotation:the ancient biblical beast was a symbol used (in seventeenth-century) to identify permetaphorem the king or prince. From the simple equation: leviathan=sovereign—which hereaches from the examination of a few isolated sources—Mintz concludes « . . . that heinvested the Biblical myth of Leviathan with political meaning; that some of this meaningswere suggested to him by the exegetical tradition; that he expanded the figure of Leviathaninto a cluster of related metaphors—of all of this there can be no doubt»; ivi, 6.

33 The marine monster that was to be the protagonist of numerous ‘animadversions’published after 1651 against the Leviathan, had entirely lost (already before 1651) its Biblical-demonic character; C. Schmitt; The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes; 24 ff.

34 «The heyday of Iconology lasted throughout the entire 17th century; though the ideaand its basic realization were a product of the 16th century, it was the following centurywhich produced the greatest number of publications in the field». W. Tatarkiewicz; Historia

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estetyki. Estetyka nowoczesna (Warsaw: Ossolineum; 1967); Engl. transl. History of Aesthetics;vol. III (The Hague and Paris: Mouton/Warszawa: PWN-Polish Scientific Publishers, 1974),224. Tatarkiewicz also points out how «their influence was considerable; the more so sincebooks of emblems and allegories were used as textbooks for rhetoric, so that they also reachedpeople in the form of the spoken word»; ivi; 226.

35 J. A. Maravall; La cultura del Barroco. Análisis de una estructura histórica (Barcelona:Ariel; 1975); Engl. transl. Culture of Baroque. Analysis of a Historical Structure (Manchester:Manchester University Press; 1986), 251 ff.

36 Donald Lupton; Emblems of Rarities, or Choice Observations out of worthy Histories ofmany remarkable passages, and renowned actions of divers Princes and severall Nations.Collected by D. L. (London: Printed by N. Okes; 1636). The quotation is from the dedicatory«To the Gentle Reader».

37 See H. Diehl; “Graven Images: Protestant Emblem Books in England”; RenaissanceQuarterly 39 (1986), 49–66 (: 51). See also, by the same author, the index: H. Diehl; AnIndex of Icons in English Emblem Books, 1500–1700 (Norman and London: University ofOklahoma Press; 1986).

38 The crocodile becomes part of the emblem-book tradition through the Renaissance-Hieroglyphik. See the fundamental study by A. Schöne; Emblematik und Drama im Zeitalterdes Barock (Munich: Beck; 1968).

39 C. Ripa; Iconologia (In Padoua per Pietro Paolo Tozzi; 1611), 391.40 R. Freeman; English Emblem Books (London: Chatto & Windus; 1948), 238. This is an

extremely interesting work for the wealth of materials and their effective cataloguing. Thecriteria of inclusion in the category of «emblem books», though, are not convincing. I referin particular to the criterion of including only those works that are explicitly collections ofengravings illustrating a motto or sententia and a literary passage in verse or prose, whichclarifies its meaning. I don’t think that this criterion of classification does justice to thecomplexity of the phenomenon.

41 G. Whitney; A Choice of Emblemes and other Devises, for the moste parte gathered outof sundrie writers, Englished and Moralized. And divers newly devised, by Geffry Whitney(Imprinted at Leyden, in the house of Christopher Plantyn, by Francis Rafelengius, 1586).Freeman, in «appendix I», refers to the Emblems of Rarities by Donald Lupton. Althoughthe entry «description of Whales» appears in the index of the work, it does not occur withan iconographic apparatus.

42 T. Wilson; A Christian dictionary. Opening the signification of the chiefe Words dis-persed generally through Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, tending to increaseChristian Knowledge (1611) (London: William Iaggad; 1622). At the entry Leviathan, wefind the following definition: «Properly a Sea Fish, a Whirlepoal, or kind of Whale, as inJob. Figuratively the king of Babel, or Antichrist, which is strong in power as a Whale,subtle as a Serpent, cruel as a Drago».

43 The identification of the Leviathan/Whale does not seem to give rise to any mis-understandings in Paradise Lost; I, 200 ff.: «[ . . . ] or that sea-beast/Leviathan, which Godof all his works/Created hugest that swim the ocean stream:/Him haply slumbering on theNorway foam/The pilot of some small night-foundered skiff,/Deeming some island, oft, asseamen tell/With fixed anchor in his scaly rind/Moors by his side under the lea, while night/Invests the sea, and wished morn delays»; J. Milton, Paradise Lost. In The Poems of JohnMilton (Ed. by J. Carey and A. Fowler. London and New York: Longman; 1980). Theimage of whales «at least as large as hills»—and consequently mistaken for floating islands—seems to constitute a literary topos: the commentators of this edition of Milton’s Poemsexplain that the anecdote of the illusory islands was quite familiar and «was not only re-peated in Renaissance encyclopaedias, but even achieved the currency of visual representation.

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At Hardwick House, e.g., there is an emblematic mural showing a ship anchored to awhale, with the legend Nusquam tuta fides» (ivi). The emblem concerned is also displayed inGeoffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes (see above note 40); it is worth noting thatHobbes had served the Cavendish family at Hardwick House. See D. Lupton; Emblems ofRarities; 119: «Sometimes many cast their anchors upon Whales backes, thinking them tobe some Isles, and so become in great danger».

44 Ripa in his Iconologia introduces the motif of the hippopotamus (in the emblem of‘Impiety’), and maintains that, «so as he has grown old , pushed by the desire to possess hismother, he kills his father [ . . . ]; in the same way the impious, to go along with his unre-strained appetite, acquiesces wickedly to the ruin of his superiors and benefactors (de’ suoimaggiori & benefattori)»; C. Ripa; Iconologia; 243–244. It’s interesting to see the persistenceof this myth up to the twentieth-century: we find a sample of its re-working in ThomasMann’s Die Geschichten Jakobs (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Verlag; 1974); engl. transl. TheTales of Jacob (London: Martin Secker; 1934), 76. We find here the episode in which Reuben,Jacob’s son, is caught in the act of ‘sporting’ with Bilha. Jacob, furious, calls him «Ham,the shamer of his sire, the dragon of the prime; Behemoth, the shameless hippopotamus—the last with reference to an Egyptian legend that this animal has the devastating habit ofkilling its father and mating with its mother by violence» (translation slightly emended).

45 The inscription is followed by a short dystich: «alcides clava Lernaeum perculit hydram,/Sed tu, Ros, calamo, monstra marina domas./Quantum Leviathan superavit viribus Hydram;/Tantum Ros superas Amphytrioniadem»; J. Bowle; Hobbes and his Critics. A Study inSeventeenth Century Constitutionalism (London: Jonathan Cape; 1962), 62.

46 T. Magri; “I mostri di Hobbes”; 40.47 C. Schmitt; Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum (Berlin:

Duncker & Humblot; 1974), 146.48 M. Foucault; Les mots et les choses (Paris: Éditions Gallimard; 1966), 39. Foucault

quotes from a French translation of Girolamo Cardano’s De Subtilitate.49 A. Schöne; Emblematik und Drama; 27; Schöne points out that «the res pictae in

[Camerarius’s] emblems, came more often from ancient literature than from personal observa-tion of nature».

50 D. Lupton; Emblems of Rarities; 126.51 C. Ripa; Iconologia or Moral Emblems (London: Benj. Motte; 1709), 58.52 H. Peacham; Minerva Britanna, or a garden of heroical Devises. (London: Wa. Dight;

1612. Repr. Amsterdam-New York: Da Capo Press; 1971), 58.53 D. Lupton; Emblems of Rarities; 327.54 See J. Bowle; Hobbes and his Critics; 111.55 «And yet his Leviathan, or mortal God, is a meer phantasme of his own devising,

neither flesh nor fish, but a confusion of a man and a whale, engendered in his own brain:[ . . . ] a mixture of a god and a man and a fish. The true literall Leviathan is the Whale-fish.Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook? Whom God hath made to take his pastime inthe great and wide sea. And for a metaphorical Leviathan, I know none so proper to per-sonate that so huge tody as T. H. himself. The Leviathan doth not take his pastime in thedeep with so much freedom, nor behave himself with so much height and insolence, as T. H.doth in the Schools, nor domineer over the lesser fishes with so much scorn and contempt,as he doth over all other authors; censuring, branding, contemning, proscribing whatsoeveris contrary to his humour; bustling and bearing down before him whatsoever cometh in hisway, creating truth and falshood by the breath of his mouth by his sole authority withoutother reason. A second Pythagoras at least. There have been self-conceited persons in allAges, but none that could ever king it like him over all the children of pride. Ruit, agit,rapit, tundit & prosternit.

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Yet is not his Leviathan such an absolute Soveraign of the Sea as he imagineth. God hathchosen the weak things of this world to confound the mighty. The little mouse stealeth upthorough the Elephants trunke to eat his brains, making him die desperately mad, TheIndian rat creepeth into the belly of the gaping Crocodile, and knaweth his bowels asunder.The great Leviathan hath his adversaries; the sword-fish which pierceth his belly beneath,and the thrasher-fish, which beateth his head above: and whensoever these two unite theirforces together against him, they destroy him. But this is the least part of his Leviathanssufferings»; J. Bramhall; The Catching of Leviathan, or the Great Whale (1658). In Works;870 (Dublin: Printed at His Majesties Printing-House; 1676).

56 A rehabilitation of the Leviathan was pursued in Campbell’s edition of Hobbes’sWorks, published in London in 1750. Campbell made use of Richard Blackbourne’s VitaeHobbianae Auctarium, to which he added an ample commentary. He declared himself satis-fied that «that the Spirit of Prejudice and Prepossession which pursued him living, is in agood Measure extinct, and that before he is condemned he will be allowed a Hearing, andnot receive Sentence according to the Representations given of his Writings by his Enemies,who perhaps have done more Hurt to the Christian Religion by their Surmises, and pub-lishing atheistical Notions extracted, as they pretended, out of his Books, than ever he didby his Philosophy or Politicks, when read unaccompanied by such Comments»; RichardBlackbourne; “The Life of Thomas Hobbes, the Philosopher of Malmesbury”; xxvii. InThe Moral and Political Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury. Never Before CollectedTogether (London: 1750).

57 At the time, whales and large fish were generally regarded as hateful symbols. This wasthe consequence of the scanty scientific knowledge available at the time about whales.Among the earliest samples of a kind of ‘scientific’ observation of whales, there is the workby T. Browne; “Notes on certaine fishes, etc., found in Norfolk” (1662). In T. Browne;Notes and Letters on the Natural History of Norfolk (With notes by T. Southwell; London:Jarrold & Sons; 1902), 32. There is a curious mention of the Sperma-Ceti in T. Browne;Pseudodoxia Epidemica (Ed. by R. Robbins; Oxford: Clarendon; 1981; vol. 1), 272: «WhatSperma-Ceti is, men might justly doubt, since the learned Hofmannus in his work of Thirtyyears, saith plainly, Nescio quid sit».

58 The emblem is entitled Iniuris, infirmitas subiecta: «The mightie fishe devowres the littlefrie/If in the deep, they venture for to staie,/If up they swimme, newe foes with watching flie/the caruoraunt, and Seamewe, for theire praie:/ Betweene these two, the frie is still destroi’de,/Ah feeble state, on everie side anoi’de»; G. Whitney; A Choice of Emblemes and otherDevises; 52. The interpretation of this emblem put forward by H. Diehl; An Index of Iconsin English Emblem Books; 95, is not convincing: «Like a small fish men in ‘feeble state’ areattacked from every side». Whitney is not referring to men exposed to the danger, but to theState, which is, when ‘weak’, destroyed by forces represented by two birds and a big fish. Toclarify the meaning of the term ‘frie’ I have used the Middle English Dictionary (Ann Arbor:The University of Michigan Press; 1971): «Spawn or the young of fish; small fish».

59 Elias Canetti describes «the condition of the great single individual who finds himselfbefore a multitude of tiny aggressors». This condition is seen as a ‘constant’, «the represen-tation of which is situated among the central myths of the history of the spirit. It constitutesthe peculiar model of the dynamics of power». The image in question emerges essentiallyfrom «the state of delirium as such» in which one of the pivotal myths of the history ofhuman spirit tends to be reproduced; E. Canetti; Masse und Macht (Frankfurt a. M.:Fischer Verlag; 1994), 396.

60 «Hee swallows us, and never chaws:/ By him, as by chain’d shot, whole rankes doedye,/ He is the tyran Pike, our hearts the Frye». The Poems of John Donnes (Ed. by H. J. C.Grierson. London: Oxford University Press; 1951), 214.

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61 C. Schmitt; Der Nomos der Erde; 144. In this connection, see the ‘epic’ description byCarl Schmitt of the shift of England to a maritime existence, in C. Schmitt; Der Nomos derErde; 145: «from the middle of the sixteenth-century on, English pirates were showing up inall the oceans of the world, arranging a new set of liberties, which consisted of ‘amity lines’,of a great taking of land (Landnahme), and eventually of the new liberty of the sea. Thisachievement turned into a great taking of the sea (Seenahme)». It is interesting to see howthe arguments of Hobbes’s enemies echoed in Gonzalo’s prayer: «Now would I give athousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground, long heath, broome, furze, anything.The wills above be done! but I would fain die a dry death» (W. Shakespeare; The Tempest;I, i, 76 ff.). See I. Villinger; “Shakespeare als politischer Denker: Prosperos Sturm”; DerStaat 4 (1990), 546: «The historical and political contingency in which Shakespeare’s Tem-pest was written [ . . . ], is that [ . . . ] of England at the beginning of its maritime expansionand progressive development as an Empire». I conjectured (on the basis of what has beenargued by Carl Schmitt in Der Nomos der Erde) that this ‘contingency’ entirely consists inthe ‘emblematic context’ in which the Leviathan’s ‘animadversions’ take place.

62 See H. Diehl; “Graven Images”; 51. Diehl maintains that «the emblem soon becamepopular with Protestants, who used it to advance their reformed theology, and Jesuits, whoadopted it as a weapon in the counter-reformation. Emblems, I would like to argue, areimportant expressions of their own age, a period of reformation and counter-reformation».See also G. R. Dimler; “The Jesuit Emblem Books in 17th Century Protestant England”;Archivum Historicum Societatis Jesu 53 (1984), 357–369.

63 See R. Tuck; “The Civil Religion of Thomas Hobbes”. In N. Phillipson and Q. Skinner(eds.); Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press;1993), 120–138.

64 The first quotation is from A. Rosse; Leviathan Drawn out with a Hook; 65 (the italicsare mine).

65 John Bramhall; The Catching of Leviathan, or the Great Whale; titlepage.66 C. Schmitt; The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes; 81.67 Jacob Taubes has maintained that the ‘name’ of a myth «is not at all hollow words»;

J. Taubes; “Statt einer Einleitung”; 12.68 M. Weber; “The Profession and Vocation of Politics”. In Political Writings (Ed. by

P. Lassman and R. Speirs; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1994), 366–367. Thepassage quoted refers to the second of two conferences held by Weber at the «Freistuden-tischer Bund», that is “Politik als Beruf”. But a reference to those ‘powers’ appears in thefirst conference too: “Wissenschaft als Beruf”, in which Weber states that the disintegrationof «the grandiose pathos of Christian ethics» ended up making the individuals face a moreradical intellectual responsibility, and namely forcing them not to pass over the confrontationwith the ‘diabolic’ powers at work: we cannot any longer compromise with those powers,for nowadays «the ancient gods, having been divested of their magic power and thus re-duced to impersonal forces, rise from their tombs, strive to get hold of our lives, and resumetheir eternal contest»; M. Weber, “Wissenschaft als Beruf”. In Gesammelte Aufsätze zurWissenschaftslehre (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr; 1973), 582–613 (: 605).

69 Heinrich Heine wrote in 1854: «I often and particularly referred to those demons,which prowled from the lower layers of society, and from that obscurity would crop up atthe right time. One used to consider these monstrous creatures, to which belongs our ownfuture, through a reducing scale, and they used to be regarded as insignificant bagatelles—this notwithstanding I displayed them in their effective life-size, and they resembled prim-arily the dreadful crocodiles, which have arisen from the sludge up to the surface»; H. Heine;Lutetia. In Sämtliche Schriften (Ed. by K. Briegleb; Band V. München: Carl Hanser Verlag;1974), 238–239.

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farneti. the mythical foundation of leviathan

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