A walk in the moonlight. part 1

A walk in the moonlight. part 1

A walk in the moonlight

Around the myth of Endymion: poetry, moon and immortality

The ancients narrate that the moon, the beautiful goddess coated with silver, the one that the Romans called Diana, the Greek Artemis, but who is also called in Greek Selene, fell in love with a very handsome young man, named Endymion. Thus the Moon asked for him the father of the gods, Zeus, for eternal youth; and Zeus kept him asleep in a cave of Caria, on Mount Latmos, as well as when the goddess had seen him for the first time and had fallen in love with him. There the young man remained forever, and every night the Moon, with her silvery rays, came down to contemplate her beloved in the cave where he slept, and to give him her love.
This charming myth hides the issue of immortality, possible to the stars and the gods, but unknown to humans; but love and beauty can ascend until the immortals. That's why, in late antiquity, the myth of Endymion was often represented on the sarcophagi, as a sign of hope that the soul could survive;  though oddly the name derives from the Greek word enduo, meaning "I set, fade". The heavenly beauty of the moon links the two, seemingly opposite meanings.

The myth of Endymion has fascinated more than one poet, as well as the Moon does. At the time of Shakespeare, in 1588, one of the most acclaimed British intellectuals, John Lily, the author of the novel Euphues, hence the term Euphuism (the English Baroque style, full of paradoxes, figures of speech and far-fetched expressions), represented in the court Endymion or the man of the moon, where the young man ages during his sleep (though this is the work of a spell), but he retrieves his youth thanks to the kiss of the Moon. The style of the play appears too heavy, but it seems that it was to be read allegorically: then the Moon would be the "Virgin Queen", that is Elizabeth I, and Endymion her favorite, the Earl of Leicester. But the idea that the Moon can give back eternal Youth to her beloved by her kiss is fascinating.

                                           Sarcophagus representing the myth of Endymion

The Moon and the myth of Endymion are the background and a corollary to another love myth of antiquity, a very "romantic" one: the story of Leander and Ero. Young Leandro, every night, dived into the waters of Hellespont to reach his beloved Ero on the other side. Ovid, in his Heroides (fake letters of lovers from the myth), weaves the beautiful night, with the moon shining on the sea, the memory of her love for the young man and the beautiful story of the lovers separated by the sea itself .

Night fell - it is a pleasure to remember - when, in love, I left my father's house; without delay, I deposed my clothes along with fear, I moved my arms regularly in the flowing waters of the sea. The moon almost always offered me, while I advanced, a pulsating light, as a caring friend of my journey. I said: "Assist me, silvery goddess, and remember the cliffs of Latmos! Endymion does not allow you to have a hard heart; turn, I beg you, your eyes toward my secret love! You, a goddess, descended from heaven to look for the love of a mortal - allow me to tell the truth! -; what I'm trying to reach is herself a goddess. (...) And if you do not believe my words, look yourself! As all the stars disappear in comparison of your light when you shine with your silvery rays, so she is the most beautiful of all the beautiful women: if you do not believe, Cynthia, your light is blind ". While I was saying these words, or certainly not dissimilar words, I let myself be transported at night on the water, which did not resist me. The wave was gleaming thanks to the image of the moon reflected on it in the silent night, and there was a light as by day.

In this case, love challenges huge obstacles and the moon acts as a helper for lovers.

The myth of Endymion continued to fascinate and to evoke love, immortality and more, in modern age. In 1818, the English Romantic poet John Keats, who was to die young out of tuberculosis, in Rome (next to Spain Sqaure) in 1821, published a wonderful poem, Endymion; I report here its beginning:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: 
Its loveliness increases; it will never 
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and sleep 
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. 

Here the myth of Endymion becomes a symbol, in the song of some pastors (Keats imagines his poem, 4 books of 1000 lines each, in a bucolic setting), a symbol of the eternity of beauty and the aspiration to this eternity; therefore, they continue to intertwine crowns despite sad and dark days, and a little beauty still radiates from the "hood" that weighs on their minds (the hood is called pall). These forms of beauty are the sun, the moon, the trees that shade the sheep and the daffodils in the green; and then the springs, the stories, the immortality imagined for the great people and so on ....

          Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in ...

The moon is here an image of eternal beauty, almost no hope for humans who lie in the shadows.
An equally beautiful poem about Endymion was written down by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (in a surge of Christian charity for my readers, I will avoid the German text), where the sleeping hunter is still inhabited by a confused set of dreams on the hunt, its excitement, dogs, forests; and the Moon is the eternally virgin goddess, never married, who comes to fullness in heaven without any help from anyone, and yet she lies alongside the handsome young man asleep and shines like his dreams. The eternity of heaven that bends before beauty and love (to be continued).