Y

Yama

As you approach the Judge of the Underworld, Yama – appointed to the post because he was the first man to die – remember to salute him and thank him for sending you his five secret messengers. These are (in order): a child, an old man bowed down by age, a cripple, a bound criminal, and a dead body. Tell him you have understood their meaning.

The message is that it is every man’s fate to be born, grow old, fall sick, suffer punishment[*], and to die.

If you fail to explain this to him, he will order the guards to imprison you in a house filled with fire, where you will burn for all eternity.

Yama is the master of Time, identified by the Hindus with Death, and thus with the Judge of the dead. Like Minos, his counterpart in Greek mythology, his house is a bewildering place, full of mirrors and false turnings.

[S. Sunderland, Soul Avatars, p. 174]


the houses are full of smoke

child, crock, cripple, criminal or corpse?

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[*] See >Xanthippe.

Yates, Frances (1899-1981)

In her magisterial summary of classical mnemonics, The Art of Memory (1965), Frances Yates describes a vast number of systems of artificial memory, none stranger (perhaps) than that exemplified by “the Hypnerotomachia Polyphilii, written by a Dominican before 1500, in which we meet, not only with curious archaeology, but also with Hell[*], divided into places to suit the sins and their punishments, with explanatory inscriptions on them.” She goes on to suggest that “the mysterious inscriptions so characteristic of this work may owe something to the influence of visual alphabets and memory images, … the dream archaeology of a humanist mingles with dream memory systems to form the strange fantasia.”

[G. de Souza, Masters of Memory, p. 17]


[F. Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Polyphilii, p. 403]

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[*] See >Xanthippe.

Young, Edward (1683-1765)

The Complaint,
or Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality (1742-1745):

There’s no prerogative in human hours.
In human hearts what bolder thought can rise
Than man’s presumption on to-morrow’s dawn?
Where is to-morrow? In another world.
For numbers this is certain; the reverse
Is sure to none; and yet on this perhaps,
This peradventure, infamous for lies,
As on a rock of adamant we build
Our mountain hopes, spin out eternal schemes
As we the Fatal Sisters[*] could out-spin,
And big with life’s futurities, expire.

[Night the First, ll. 373-82]


Where is tomorrow?
In another world.

By following the connections I arrive
Where?
Atlantis? Antiterra?

The imaginary museum

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[*] See >Xanthippe.