David Jones
“These, if the cult
grows strong, need hope and hope is only given
by the men of rule for their purpose, and so
it will be with your sibyls, baals, the lord
of the gibbet who would free the world.
Let them plant his signum where they choose —
let the empire acclaim him Rex, let Caesar
be the vicar of a Syrian mathematici, let
Roman Jove go hang, call the Great Mother
by some other name — what’s the odds?
The men of rule know all about such
trifles and how to accommodate, if needs
must”
In his work as a poet, David Jones spent much of his time following the publication of In Parenthesis (1937) working on a poem that centred on the conversations between the Roman soldiers of occupation in the Middle East at the time of the crucifixion. This work appears in The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments (1974), The Roman Quarry (1981), and The Grail Mass (2018). It was initiated by a vision Jones experienced during a visit to Jerusalem in the mid-1930s where his sighting of British mandate soldiers in Palestine summoned up Roman antecedents (See Thomas Goldpaugh and Jamie Callison, introduction to The Grail Mass and Other Works [London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018], pp. 1–24 [p. 3]).
In the passage above from The Grail Mass, roman syncretism is pictured, by the lowly Roman soldier speaking, as coercive. In allowing the growth of local cults with an eye to appropriating them once they reached a certain scale, Rome discovered a new vector of power that helped contain the potential for dissent. The shrug of ‘call the Great Mother | by some other name — what’s the odds?’ illustrates the disdain in which non-Roman traditions are unofficially held. In their nonchalance, the ‘men of rule’ are contemptuous of even their own culture. The imperial mindset leads Rome (and by implication the European empires of the twentieth century) to dismiss out of hand symbolic life of all stripes. Any cult that grows sizable enough is shunted into the state religion. Distinctive features of weaker traditions are disregarded to present the ‘sibyls, baals, the lord | of the gibbet who would free the world’ as a type of the appropriate Roman deity. Creative expression is transformed, co-opted and turned against its creators rather than recognised and celebrated. For Jones, the mystical element of religion is the elusive, creative dimension of religion that is all too easily disregarded in a contemporary society structured by empire and industry.
Image: Front cover of David Jones's The Grail Mass and Other Works, ed. by Thomas Goldpaugh and Jamie Callison (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). Image courtesy of Bloomsbury Academic.
