Wei,
While Pound would recognize that humankind did not create the universe, he
would also agree, I think, that humankind's depiction of deity in myth often
reflects states of mind which men and women have entered for as along as our
species has existed. One needs to distinguish between Pound's discussion of
deity per se and his discussion of how men have imagined deity.


You wrote:
> [...]  I am arguing that Pound conceives of purely subjective gods,
> in this sense:  The gods have no objective existence for Pound in
"Religio";
> though they do symbolize the objective state of "becoming divine."
>
> Thus for Pound while "the Divine" has objective existence,  Athena,
Demeter,
> and Dionysus may not. I would ask you to give your interpretation of this
> statement that Pound made with regard to polytheism:
>
>
>   The selection of monotheism, polytheism, plural, dual,
>   trinitarian god or gods, or hierarchies, is a pure matter
>   of individual temperament (in free minds), and of tradi-
>   tion in environment of discipular, bound minds
>        (S.P., 50).
>

> My reading of this passage is that Pound here indicates a belief in "God",
> in "Deity,"  but that the Divine Reality is not to be constrained by
> reference to it as a specifically characterizable Entities or group of
> Entities. The question of Pound's belief (in his early phase, at least) is
> complicated by the fact that he does not appear to care whether any
> particular god has an independent existence, apart from the mind.  Even
> though a god is "an ETERNAL state of mind," as you rightly point out, for
> Pound, I think this means that the mind merges with the ETERNAL, and that
> this is called "becoming a god."
> Later in life, Pound states more straightforwardly "the gods exist," and
> appears to be giving them objective reality.



>
>
> I think an archetype has a certain consistency, depth, and hardness, and a
> relation to other archetypes which are put forward within the same mythic
or
> religious framework.

Agreed.  I'd add this: the psychic archetypes are cross-cultural.

You wrote:
>
> But I don't think Pound can not be called a mystic in the proper sense of
> the word.  You don't use the word "mystic" in connection with Pound, so
> maybe you agree with me on this point.

Were I to have a mystical experience, and to look at Pound's Art with my new
mystic's eyes, it would no doubt be as simple a thing as breaking bread to
know whether he was or was not a mystic. However, my sense of the mystical
is not immediate, and so I am reluctant to offer any opinion on Pound's
mysticism. Pound has an acute appreciation for the fact of his
existence-in-time --an existential experience but it doesn't seem beatific.
Pound's appreciation for the chthonic seems worshipful, but it also does not
seem to show the signs of beatitude...whatever they would be. ;-)

Regards,
Tim


>  I believe Pound's attitude is more
> typical of a kind of "semi-mystic" who appears, according to Kerenyi,
> alongside "pure" mystics in an age when mythologies or religious
orthodoxies
> are crumbling.  Allow me quote Kerenyi again on this point:
>
> "When solidly constructed monads break down, as at the end of an antique
> era, or when their dissolution is advanced, as  it is today,  we find
> ourselves closer to various kinds of mysticisms than to mythology.  That
is
> why Plotinus can tell us about pure mystical experience, and why his
> contemporaries, the Gnostics, can tell us about what comes closest to
> mythology in mysticism.  And that too is why the modern psychologist finds
> in man the same mystical or semi-mystical phenomena as in a handbook of
> Chinese mysticism  or in the Gnosticism of late antiquity.  What we meet
in
> both cases has the appearance of something midway between the archetype
and
> a monadic fragment,
> a mythology at once germinating and disintegrating."
>         (Kerenyi, 23).
>
> What we find in the Cantos seems to be precisely what Kerenyi is talking
> about here: that is to say,  a vast
> reflection of many of the world's mythologies interacting, while they
> simultaneously germinate and disintegrate, both in the world and in
Pound's
> mind.  The light symbolism partly succeeds in uniting the diverse strands
of
> what Pound probably hoped the Cantos would become:  an epic springing
forth
> from a newly emerging universal myth.  But the mystical basis of the
project
> falls apart, I think, not only because Pound's mysticism is half-hearted,
> but also because he makes associations which hold little promise for
> anything resembling a meaningful myth -- such as the identification of
> Manes, Dionysus, and Mussolini as divine or semi-divine figures all
equally
> worthy of religious reverence.
>
> I want to emply to many other interesting points you made in your last
post.
>   But I will do so later.
>
>
> > >   When is a god manifest?
> > >   When the states of mind take form.
> > >   When does a man become a god?
> > >   When he enters one of these states of mind
> > >         (SP., 47).
> > >
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>