SOURCE: “The Madness of Art and Science in Poe's ‘Ligeia,’” in Essays in Arts and Sciences, Vol. 24, October, 1995, pp. 21-32.

[In the following essay, Hume analyses Poe's “Ligeia” as a synthesis of mythology and science.]

In a September 1839 letter to Philip Cooke, Edgar Allan Poe expressed his view that “Ligeia” was “intended to convey an idea of truth to the narrator” (Letters 118). Although numerous critics have offered theories about what this “truth” might be, they all tend to treat Poe's narrator either as a romantic artist or madman, diminishing his scientific ruminations in this tale. However, a close reading of this narrator's “scientific” speculations in relation to his treatment of the mythological dimensions of Ligeia reveal that he is, as D. H. Lawrence first suggested in Studies in Classic American Literature, as much a mad scien-tist as an artist in his investigation of Ligeia's phenomenal return from the dead. More, this narrator develops, however unsystematically, a “theory” about human nature that both forces the issue of his authorial sanity and draws into question the mythological meaning and relationship of the “Lady Ligeia” to both his literary and scientific Western heritage.

“Ligeia” is a tale of the narrator's “remembrance” of his wife Ligeia and also of his speculation about the significance of her return from the dead in relation to his understanding of both physical and metaphysical reality. Almost immediately, he tells the reader that his memory has been made “feeble through much suffering.” Except for his memories of Ligeia, however, he has been “buried in studies of a nature more than all else adapted to deaden impressions of the outward world” (110). Such sentiments suggest that Ligeia is, at present, dead and that the meaning of her death is one which extends beyond the narrator's bizarre conclusion about her brief return and strange symbiosis with his second wife, Rowena. That is, the narrator early reveals that he is attempting both to reconstruct a phenomenal event and to piece together, in as credible terms as possible, one of the “many incomprehensible anomalies of the science of mind” (113) with which he claims familiarity. The precise nature of his present “suf-fering” or the kind of studies in which he is obsessively “buried” is unclear, but they have clearly failed to bring him any more than a dull understanding of the complex nature of reality and of the natural world. His vague memory of Ligeia and her phenomenal return from the dead (however temporary) promises him that there is still something more to be learned about the natural world, something beyond his immediate comprehension, something that he is on the “verge” of remembering—and does, indeed, seem vaguely to apprehend at the end of his narrative.

Although no summary can do justice to Poe's (or to his narrator's) complex narrative, it is, I think, safe to say that it details an unnamed narrator's discovery of the meaning of what he believes to be his first wife's, Ligeia's, struggle against death and her subsequent return from the dead and “possession” of his second wife, Rowena. Poe was not a consciously feminist author, but the symbolic intricacies of this plot have not only invited recent feminist or gender criticism, but also provoked gender-related speculations from among Poe's earliest critics, including the above-noted Lawrence who not only first drew attention to the vampire motif in “Ligeia” but used it to examine the disconcertingly “scientific” attitude of Poe's narrator. Although Lawrence was concerned principally with describing the narrator's (and Poe's) diseased sexuality, he aptly perceived Poe's “science” as central to an understanding of the vampire motif in this tale. Subsequent critics, however, have tended to focus more on this latter motif in “Ligeia” than on the narrator's quasi-scientific detailing.

Yet such detailing in “Ligeia” is crucial, I will demonstrate in this essay, to an understanding not only of the implied vampirism in the story but also of the narrator's fantastic synthesis of mythology and science—a synthesis which like most fantastic literature remains precariously balanced between “the hesitation experienced by a [narrator] who knows only natural laws” and the existence of an “apparently supernatural event” (Todorov 29). The narrator takes great pains to detail and rationally comprehend the nature of Ligeia's various transformations in his narrative, but those transformations are directly related to her mythological stature. Although Ligeia has been variously compared by critics to Eve, to a siren, to a vampire, to a romantic or a linguistic icon, to a transcendent being or symbol, and to a nightmarish illusion,¹ none have considered the relationship of two ancient, mythological deities mentioned in the text (the “misty-winged Astophet” and the “grim Azreal,” Ligeia 111, 115) not only to Ligeia but also to the narrator's “science.” However, these mythic creatures are central to an understanding of both the narrator's romanticism and scientism.

Whereas “Azrael” is the Angel of Death in Moslem and Jewish legend, “Astophet” is not the actual name of a deity but seems, as David Galloway points out, to refer both to “Ashtoreth, the Phoenician and Egyptian goddess [of love and fertility] and Tophet, a version of hell associated in the Old Testament with the Egyptian worship of Moloch” (528). Ligeia is also indirectly associated with mythological realms through her actual name which is identical to one of the sirens in Milton's Comus and one of the dryads in Book IV of Virgil's Georgics. Simultaneously, she is allusively associated by Poe's narrator to the legendary Greek “daughters of Delos,” with the “Houri of the Turk,” with the celestial “twin stars” (or sons) of the legendary Leda, and with the feminine “tribe of the valley of Nourjahad” created by Frances Sheridan in her 1767 Oriental romance, The History of Nourjahad (Ligeia 111-112). Through such mythological allusions, Ligeia becomes aligned not only with death and with demonism but also with legendary and literary femininity, with both feminine mortality and immortality.

The narrator's allusions have not only produced numerous critical conjectures about Ligeia's relation to various mythological and metaphoric figures, but have encouraged many critics to regard the narrator as essentially a humanist, albeit a mad one. Ligeia is, as the narrator says, an unknown, perhaps unknowable, being whose presence he recalls only as a series of complex correspondences and analogies. Although he does not think he can fully comprehend her mystery, I would like to suggest that it is indirectly related to yet another mythological deity with whom Ligeia is indirectly associated—that is, to Lilith, the mythic Hebriac figure who was one of Ashtoreth's most well-known variants in the nineteenth century and also the first wife to the Biblical Adam, mother to countless demons, consort to God, and a creature who maintained a steadfast place in vampire lore and in Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian and Roman mythologies.² Indeed, one of Ligeia's most definite aspects in the narrator's remembrance resides in “the delicate outlines of [her] nose” which possesses a “perfection” that he has seen “nowhere but in the graceful medallions of the Hebrews” (111).

Yet if Ligeia is a mythic creature who bears a resemblance to immortal demonic variants such as Ashtoreth and Lilith, what makes her “fantastic” is the narrator's belief that she is simultaneously an actual, mortal, living (or once-living) woman. As some critics have noted, both Rowena and Ligeia are comparable to the dark and fair-haired women of western literary tradition and convention. As such, they can be relatively easily aligned with Poe's own western literary (and patriarchal) heritage. However, here the alignment ends, for Poe's narrator posits Ligeia, not Rowena (or, to put it in the implied mythological terms of the text, Lilith not Eve) as the true maternal figure of that heritage. Unlike Ligeia, Rowena is not only a mortal woman but also an afterthought to the narrator (who barely describes her and then with contempt); as Joan Dayan observes, Poe “did not [even] add the description of ‘the fair-haired, the blue-eyed’ Rowena until the 1845 version of ‘Ligeia’” (189).

In contrast, Ligeia's “immense knowledge” and refined complexity is, in the narrator's view, part of “a wisdom too divinely precious not to be forbidden” (115). The narrator's fascination with Ligeia's “forbidden” knowledge, Jules Zanger suggests, reveals that he regards her as a kind of malignant Eve—not only as a mythic woman who tempts this Adamic narrator to his destruction but also as a “metaphor for original sin, and, by extension, for carnality” (537). If she is an alter “Eve,” however, Ligeia would seem to be a combination of both Lilith and Eve, for the narrator's description of her aligns her not only with she-demons from various religious traditions, including the Judeo-Christian one from which both Lilith and Eve rise but also with a vampire tradition with which Lilith (and not Eve) is most often associated (Man, Myth, and Magic 292-3).³

Ligeia's complex, quasi-demonic nature is strangely clarified by the narrator's quasi-scientific interest in it, an interest which transforms Poe's narrative, I believe, into one of his most unusual science-fantasies. Although the narrator's evident familiarity with mythology and philosophy, along with his highly allusive narrative and “vision” of Ligeia, reveals his partial knowledge of art and literature, his scientific perspective has been too often understated. For example, most critics regard the allusion to Joseph Glanvill, an English philosopher associated with spiritualism and the occult, as one which was probably contrived by Poe (since it has never been found in Glanvill's writings) to enhance the supernatural or fantastic quality in the narrative. Certainly, this allusion does enhance that quality, particularly in light of Glanvill's stated belief in witches in A Philosophical Endeavor towards the Defense of the Being of Witches and Apparitions (1666).

However, Glanvill was also a philosophical skeptic engaged, as was popularly depicted in then-contemporary journals and as Poe most likely knew, with understanding man before the Fall or at that time when he had “knowledge of things in their true, immediate and necessary causes” in relation to man after the Fall, the present time, when he is unable to any longer know “the hidden things of Nature … the first springs and wheeles that set the rest agoing” (Scepsis Scientifica 15). For Glanvill, as for Poe's narrator in “Ligeia,” the senses are deceptive and one's knowledge of the world is, to some degree, necessarily uncertain. Although Poe's quotation from Glanvill has not been found in Glanvill's writings, it is consistent with Glanvill's skepticism and philosophical uncertainty and with his perception of God's will and vast and purposeful presence. This quotation is also strangely consistent with Glanvill's then-popularized interest in Hebrew cabalism and the possibility of spiritual manifestations of the soul's immortality. However, where Poe's narrator differs markedly from Glanvill is in his experiential perception of Ligeia and her “will.”

In detailing Ligeia's strangeness, Poe's narrator seems, as Lawrence was first to observe, as much a scientist as a romantic writer. When, for example, the narrator attempts to describe Ligeia, he says that he “examined” her, carefully observing “the contour of the lofty and pale forehead” and her cadaverous and “ivory” skin and “raven-black … tresses” (111). Although he states that their relation is probably best understood as a romantic one, he feels compelled to add that her vampirish yet strangely spiritual eyes are hypnotic and compelling “orbs” for which there are “no models in the remotely antique” (113). These eyes, he continues, contain a hidden mystery, one which he apprehends in “the commonest objects in the universe,” in “certain sounds from stringed music,” and in Glanvill's “sentiments” about the mysterious power of the will (113)—words which, in the context of what has come before, not only allude to Ligeia's bewitching demeanor and, possibly, to Glanvill's version of religious truth but also to her relation to the “commonest objects in the universe”—in a “rapidly growing vine”; in “a moth, a butterfly, a chrysalis, a stream of running water”; in “the ocean; in the falling of a meteor”; in “the glances of unusually aged people” or in “one or two stars in heaven”—those that are “double and changeable” (113). What these “common objects” all suggest to the narrator is that her eyes are connected to natural growth, to natural transformation or change, to the natural process of aging.

Two other cryptic, but notable, allusions are made to scientific thinkers in “Ligeia”: to Democritus and to Francis Bacon. Although these allusions are brief, even dismissive, they shed some additional light not only on the narrator's reading interests but also on his “scientific” perspective in coming to terms with what he thinks Ligeia is. He alludes first to Democritus. Democritus was one of the first men to pose a “materialist philosophy of nature,” a philosophy in which he explored the possibility that “all substance consists of atoms, that is, of indivisible and imperceptively small particles” and that “the finest, smoothest, and most agile atoms constitute the substance of mind” and that therefore human perception can be explained “as an emanation of tiny copies of sensible things (eidola), which, through their impact upon the atoms of mind, leave impressions responsible for the facts of memory” (Philosophy 91). The other allusion is to Francis Bacon, most well-known in Poe's time (and ours) for his utilization and development of the scientific process of inductive reasoning, of apprehending a general law from observed details of specific data. Poe's narrator approaches the mystery of Ligeia inductively, moving from his specific observations of all that he has witnessed (or can recall witnessing) toward the general “law of the will” presumably proposed by Glanvill and cited several times in his narrative, once even by Ligeia before she dies.

Poe's narrator attempts to reconstruct Ligeia not only by dissecting her down to the last nerve ending but also by recalling those specific details about her which he has been unable to remember about her. In so doing, he hopes to understand the relation of her mortal (or immortal?) will to the most common, but evolving or transforming, objects in the natural world and the universe. Described by some critics as the narrator's transcendentalist tendencies, such detailing instead suggests that the narrator is attempting to use inductive reasoning in order to understand not only Ligeia but also the universal principle or law which he suspects that her nature embodies. Although New England transcendentalists also incorporated inductive reasoning into their philosophical treatises and strategies, they did not do so with the uncertainties, hesitations, and general sense of exploratory dread communicated by Poe's narrator in “Ligeia.” Unlike the New England transcendentalists, this narrator does not really want to discover the truth about Ligeia's transcendent aspect; rather, he feels driven by his need to know the “truth” that her existence reveals.

To this narrator, Ligeia has come to represent more than a mere mortal woman or literary artifact; she has transformed before his close and rational scrutiny into a feminine entity who exists beyond human realms and history. Writing about Ligeia's return from the grave (an event which has already happened and which may or may not have been temporary), his narrative offers his attempt to reconcile his vision of her essentially inhuman and vampirish nature with his sense that she is far more than this—an entity “upon the very verge of [his] remembrance” (113). Despite Ligeia's vampirish qualities, the narrator “senses” she is no typical vampire. For Ligeia not only appeals, according to the narrator, to a “Divine Father” before her demise, but she is more knowledgeable than all other mortal men and women and does not have a clearly evil nature.⁴

Before he met Ligeia, the narrator recalls, he had only a limited knowledge of metaphysics. Indeed, he can only recall with admiration Ligeia's complex knowledge, the “most abstruse of the boasted erudition of the academy” since she is a woman who has “traversed, and successfully, all the wide areas of the moral, physical, and mathematical science” (114). She becomes his guide “through the chaotic world of metaphysical speculation” with which he is evidently unfamiliar, despite his familiarity with myth and romance and his considerable knowledge of “medical reading” (124). The narrator, then, is a limited Renaissance man, one who has dabbled in philosophy, literature, science, and medicine, but only with the entrance of Ligeia does he begin seriously to contemplate metaphysics. Although Poe's interest in Newtonian science, in earlier Greek cosmogonic and atomic theories, and in scientific materialism is critically common knowledge, “Ligeia” suggests, albeit erratically, that there may be some mystery beyond such ancient and then-contemporary science, some unifying principle which will finally prove them all inadequate.

Although the “principle” is intricately related to Ligeia's femininity, it is involved, more broadly, with what can be loosely classified as her “biology.” Biology in Poe's nineteenth-century America was, as William Coleman suggests, a science that was still being “introduced” (1), a science in the process of being integrated with other nineteenth-century sciences. Primarily concerned with defining the question of what “life” was, scientists interested in biological issues were still generally immersed in the debate between scientific “vitalism” (or the idea that there were two sets of natural laws, one for the living and the other for the dead or inanimate universe) and scientific “mechanism” (in which the inanimate universe and organic life were viewed as part of a complex machine).

In “Ligeia,” this debate takes on a curious, new form. Poe's narrator is principally fascinated with what he calls the nature of the human will and with the role it plays in both the life and death process. In his portrait of Ligeia, he offers a strange brew of both vitalistic and mechanistic thought in which he implies that the individual “will” is both part of a larger, cosmic, mechanistic design and simultaneously individual, vital, and separate from that design. In his search for the “truth” about Ligeia, he raises questions not only about the relation between the living and the dead but also about the nature of the “sentience” or conscious will of the individual in relation to the physical body, to natural laws, and, ultimately, to the universe. Ligeia's willful and biological defiance of death offers the narrator, among other things, a possible (and extraordinary) insight into the relation between vitalistic and mechanistic explanations of human biology—most significantly in relation to where blood comes from and where it goes.

William Harvey's seventeenth-century theory about the circulation of blood through the heart “was accepted by biologists generally” and remains an accepted early contribution to modern biology (Asimov 25). But this “mechanistic” theory that “the blood in the veins could travel in only one direction, toward the heart” and that veins and arteries were intricately related to the whole organic body opposed earlier vitalistic assumptions that both animate and inanimate forces were at work in the blood's circulation and were mutually exclusive. In short, Harvey's theory “opened a battle between [the] two opposing views of [mechanism] and [vitalism]” (Asimov 25) that was not yet resolved in Poe's early nineteenth century. In “Ligeia,” the question of where blood comes from and where it goes arguably extends beyond the human body. For the free-floating “ruby colored fluid”—symbolically reminiscent of blood—that Poe's narrator holds responsible for Rowena's death and final transformation into Ligeia offers a new source of speculation for him (125). Although blood is central to biological existence, this strange blood transfusion between Ligeia and Rowena suggests that it may be connected to an even larger organic whole (perhaps the universe itself) and can exist (as it evidently does in the dead Ligeia) in some altered form or stasis after death. More, the narrator implicitly speculates whether such personal yet simultaneously cosmic “blood” can be transferred, at will, from one body into another living organism (in this case, Rowena), even altering an existing biological creation. With both amazement and terror, Poe's narrator not only watches Rowena go through her final, convulsive death seizures after the “ruby colored fluid” is dropped into her cup but also actually “grow taller since her malady” (125). The transfer of blood from victim to victimizer is, as Poe knew, seminal to the vampire tale, but in “Ligeia,” he uses this motif to intensify the ambiguity and complexity of the narrator's quasi-scientific understanding of this phenomena.

Is this narrator a madman? Numerous critics have suggested that the “ruby colored fluid” the narrator imagines he sees “fall in the goblet” is poison (125) and that either Ligeia commits a supernaturally vicious act against Rowena or that the narrator himself is Rowena's murderer, and a mad one at that. Most of Poe's other critics have tended to follow the narrator's suggestion that the source of this illusion or hallucination may be related to his excessive consumption of opium after Ligeia's death; in this view, the narrator becomes more a man who is attempting to use language to reconstruct not only a phenomenal event, but Ligeia herself. I believe, however, that the “scientific” nature of his inquiry and detailing about this event also raises for him another alternative: the possibility that he has actually witnessed the transference of Ligeia's “universal” blood and consciousness into another biological organism, into Rowena. At the same time, all three views—Ligeia's supernatural demonism, the narrator's madness, and the possible, phenomenal existence of such a “ruby colored fluid”—remain possibilities in the narrative, hence its “fantastic” suspension between the natural and supernatural, the scientific and the mythological, the literal and the allegorical.

If, for example, this narrator is a madman who has murdered Rowena, it is also likely that he has murdered Ligeia. Both women die, in fact, in markedly similar manners—mysteriously and suddenly. Ligeia abruptly “grew ill,” the narrator says, whereas Rowena was “attacked with sudden illness” (115, 120). Both also have convulsions and resist death. Ligeia has “convulsive writhings” and a “fierceness of resistance to death” (115), whereas Rowena's frame is “racked” by the disorder as she struggles wildly against it (121). However, if this narrator has murdered one or both women, the question remains: why? In works such as “The Black Cat” or “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Poe's mad narrators re-veal their motives, however bizarre, for murder, but what motivates the narrator of “Ligeia” toward madness and murder? If such a character were to murder these two women, is it possible that he would do so as an “experiment,” one designed to satiate his desire not so much to possess a woman but rather to know, to understand, what he perceives (madly or otherwise) as the essential organic unity, or “Oneness” as Poe's later narrator in Eureka classifies it, of the universe? It is, in terms of his narrative, quite possible.

Offering a retrospective analysis of his situation, in fact, the narrator of “Ligeia” describes, in clearly distraught terms, what he, as a man with no initial interest in metaphysics but only in the natural sciences, did not think possible in either the natural world or in the universe—but what he, as a man, now thinks may be true. In the previously mentioned September 1839 letter to Philip Cooke, Poe observed that he should have revised his story to reveal that “Ligeia (who had only succeeded in so much as to convey an idea of truth to the narrator) should be at length entombed as Rowena—the bodily alterations having gradually faded away” (Letters 118). However, no such transformation took place, though Poe revised “Ligeia” in 1845 and wrote to Cooke again in 1846 to say that the story had been “much improved” (Letters 348). These “improvements” included not only the terse, stereotypical description of Rowena as the “fair” feminine counterpart to the “dark” Ligeia but also the introduction of Ligeia's poem, “The Conqueror Worm,” which had been published earlier and separately in Graham's Magazine in 1843.

What such revisions suggest is that Poe did not want only to create, as some critics have speculated, an opium-addicted madman or murderer in “Ligeia”; rather, they suggest that he wanted to convey, as he told Cooke, “an idea of truth to the narrator,” an idea that might drive his narrator to madness or murder, but would, in any case, prevent him from ever being restored to his former sense of normalcy or reality. Poe wanted not only to illustrate further the typological connection between the “dark” Ligeia and the “fair” Rowena but also to make both Ligeia's mythic stature and her indictment of “Man” pronounced. The inclusion of “The Conqueror Worm” intensifies the reader's sense that Ligeia's struggle is not only biologic, but mythic—one between the gendered angels, gods, and demons of a sentient universe.⁵

In both the 1838 version and in the 1845 version, Ligeia does not reveal either her origins or her paternal name to the narrator; she possesses more wisdom than any mortal man or woman the narrator has known; and she loves the narrator (he claims) with excessive, aggressive, and extraordinary feminine passion. The 1845 poem, however, offers the reader Ligeia's nightmarish vision of a grotesquely phallic “Conqueror Worm” who consumes “Mimes” and whom she links to the “tragedy, Man” (116-117) in what seems to be, as Leland Person suggests, a “pointed reference” to gender vic-timization (22). When Ligeia appeals to a paternal figure (“God! O Divine Father!”), she also asks, “[S]hall this Conqueror be not once conquered? Are we not part and parcel in Thee?” (117). She expects to be given both divine guidance and sanctioning with such a request. Ligeia asks not merely to survive the “Conqueror Worm” of “death” and this “tragedy, Man,” but to conquer it, to defeat it, and to do so through her connection to a “Divine Father.”

The “truth,” then, that Ligeia seems to represent to Poe's narrator (and perhaps even to Poe) is that she, as an immortally feminine demon, is in conflict with an equally immortal and patriarchal god and universe. Although Poe never specifically cites the Lilith legend in his statements about Ligeia, his narrator's allusions to Biblical and classical mythology suggest that Poe intended, at least in part, to create in his narrator's portrait of Ligeia an exaggerated synthesis of popularized female vampires and ancient, albeit sinister, female fertility “goddesses”—mythic “sisters” such as the narrator's invented “Ashtophet” or her sister goddesses Ashtoreth, Astarte, and Lilith who (whether Poe consciously realized this or not) have similar mythic origins (Graves and Patai 68-9).

If Ligeia is a fictive variant (or at least an equivalent she-demon and fertility goddess) to figures such as Lilith, then it seems that Poe envisioned in his Ligeia a mystery which he felt that only an undefined narrator with broad scientific and humanistic knowledge might “examine” and understand. Such a narrator might also speculate, as he does, on the relation of the living to the dead (the organic world to inanimate matter), and, finally, on the relation of man (and woman) to a complex reality and universe. Could the existence of a being like Ligeia (a mortal woman with more complex knowledge than generally imagined possible) drive such a man to murder, to delusion, to mad-ness? Could Ligeia actually be “real”? Could there be a “mortal” woman who, through the vagaries of her knowledge and her will, might temporarily return from the grave, take temporary possession of Rowena's body, and then die again—leaving him in his current mental state? The reader can never “know,” given the complex nature of this narrative, a narrative suspended as it is between “truth” and “madness.” This narrator's unique correlation of interrelated but abstract ideas about mythological female deities and the nature of the universe serves to intensify the ambivalent effect Poe desired and make his narrative one in which the supernatural and the natural remain equally plausible “realities.”

Along with the mythic allusions already discussed, the narrator's response to Ligeia's “death” reinforces her stature both as a demonic goddess and as a mortal woman. After Ligeia's death, the narrator transforms his home into a gothic nightmare, as he becomes a “bounden slave in the trammels of opium” and soon finds little difference between his home and his opium hallucinations (118). Interestingly, his transformed home, aside from being, as the narrator says, arabesque and grotesque, also becomes a suggestively mythic realm in which pagan and civilized religious artifacts and images run rampant, creating “bedlam patterns” (118). For example, the narrator has “grotesque specimens of a semi-Gothic, semi-Druidical device”—evidently some mysterious remnant from that ancient and mysterious Celtic priesthood. Further, he decorates his chambers with ritualistic or representative artifacts from Eastern religious traditions—with a “huge censer” of Arabian design for burning incense; with ottomans and “golden candelabras of Eastern figure”; with a “bridal couch—of an Indian model”; and with “a gigantic sarcophagus of black granite … from the tombs of [ancient Egyptian] kings” (118-119).

More, all these ritualistic or religious artifacts are enclosed by a “heavy and massive-looking tapestry,” which was “spotted all over, at irregular intervals, with arabesque figures,” bizarre but undefined “ghastly forms” which he simultaneously associates with “the superstitions of the Norman” (or paganistic Vikings) and “the guilty slumbers of the [Christian] monk” (120). Finally, the “phantasmagoric effect” of these figures is “vastly heightened by the artificial introduction of a strong current of wind behind the draperies—giving a hideous and uneasy animation to the whole” (121). Although this wind is artificial, it is eventually this same wind which signals Ligeia's startling, if not sinister, return and possession of the innocent Rowena. A sister to the female demon or wind spirit “Lilitu” as much as is Lilith (Graves and Patai 68), Ligeia belongs in this room which, to all appearances, has been arranged by this semi-conscious male narrator to reveal his—or “Man's”—complicity in her creation. Oriental or Eastern imagery, then, is fused with Judeo-Christian and pagan imagery in this narrator's disturbed imagination, offering further reference to the mixed patriarchal heritages from which female literary doubles such as Ligeia and Rowena are born.

As a participant in a patriarchal tradition that romantically envisions denigrated and submissive Eve-like creatures such as Rowena, the narrator guarantees that Ligeia, her mythic (and less consciously known) counterpart, will not only return, but do so with a vengeance. More, in terms of the universe that he has now come to apprehend (and perhaps even fear) as an essentially mechanistic but paradoxically “sentient” (and vital) one which can embody fantastic beings like Ligeia, such an “apocalypse”—both secular and immortal—becomes inevitable. Like Ligeia, the universe is not “dead”—not an object that can be studied and dissected; rather, it is, the narrator now realizes with both awe and terror, an organic, sentient creature which has, as much as Ligeia, a will and transformative capability of its own. He thus thinks he discovers, with similar horror and awe, that there is no such thing as biological “death”—in either the conventional or scientific sense of the term.

The forbidden knowledge which Poe's narrator gains may be vaguely related to sexual knowledge, but it does not have, as G. R. Thompson and other critics have speculated, a strictly “vampirish quality” (186). Rather, it involves the narrator's conscious recognition that before the mythological (and Western) Fall from the Garden, Ligeia and Rowena were one woman but that after it, they were “divided”: one into the vampirish, immortal and all-knowing fantastic creature that is Ligeia, the other into the mortal, submissive and denigrated female counterpart, the Eve-like Rowena, the mother of all mortal women, for whom he feels unqualified contempt. When Ligeia assumes Rowena's body and identity, it does not matter, as Poe told Philip Cooke, whether Ligeia remains dominant, or Rowena comes briefly back to life, then dies. Poe's primary interest was, as he said, in revealing the “idea of truth” that their strange symbiosis brings, however temporarily, to his narrator's (and perhaps his own) conscious and tormented awareness. It is the disturbing “truth” that these volatile feminine doubles, one immortal and the other mortal, ultimately share the same divine or universal nature and simultaneously bear an intimate but forgotten (and near incommunicable) relationship to the “truth” and the unrealized complexity of his own nature and existence.

Notes

1. See, for example, Joseph Andriano “Archetypal Projection in ‘Ligeia’: A Post-Jungian Reading,” Poe Studies 19 (1986): 27-31; Maurice J. Bennett “‘The Madness of Art’: Poe's ‘Ligeia’ as Metafiction,” Poe Studies 14 (1981): 1-6; Ronald Bieganoski “The Self-Consuming Narrator in Poe's ‘Ligeia’ and ‘Usher,’” American Literature, No. 2 (1988): 175-198; Joan Dayan “The Intelligibility of Ligeia” in Fables of Mind: An Inquiry Into Poe's Fiction (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987): 179-192; James W. Gargano, “Poe's ‘Ligeia’: Dream and Destruction,” College English 23 (1962): 335-42; Clark Griffith “Poe's ‘Ligeia’ and the English Romantics,” University of Toronto Quarterly 24 (1954): 8-25; Daryl E. Jones, “Poe's Siren: Character and Meaning in ‘Ligeia,’” Studies in Short Fiction Vol. 20, No. 1 (1983): 33-37; D. H. Lawrence, “Edgar Allan Poe” in Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1953): 73-92; G. R. Thompson “Proper Evidence of Madness: American Gothic and the Interpretation of ‘Ligeia,’” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 18 (1972): 30-49; and Jules Zanger “Poe and the Theme of Forbidden Knowledge,” American Literature 49 (1978): 533-542.

2. The primary text consulted on Lilith's Hebraic heritage was Raphael Patai's definitive text The Hebrew Goddess. Patai summarizes Lilith's significance to this heritage: “The main features of Lilith's mythical biography first appear in Sumerian culture about the middle of the 3rd millennium B.C.E. What she meant for the Biblical Hebrews can only be surmised, but by the Talmudic period (2nd-5th centuries C.E.) she was a fully developed evil she-demon and during the Kabbalistic age she rose to the high position of queenly consort at God's side” (221). Complementing this text is Patai's co-authored work with Robert Graves, Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis, a text which supplements Patai's examination of Lilith's relation to later vampire lore and to earlier mythic counterparts in Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Roman mythology.

3. Although none of Poe's named sources for “Ligeia” indicate that he consciously had Lilith in mind, literary references to Ashtoreth and Astarte, demonic feminine goddesses who are variations on Lilith, were common in Poe's nineteenth century. Feminine demons such as Lilith, Graves and Patai observe, “not only are characteristic of civilizations where women are treated as chattel [and] … must adopt the recumbent posture during intercourse which Lilith refused” (69), but are characteristic of all living patriarchal religious traditions such as Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam where women have “as a normal rule … been expected to play a role, religious and social, second to that of men” (Abingdon Dictionary 806).

4. Vampire lore typically depicts the vampire as one alienated from God; the vampire is a walking corpse, not a spirit, and is typically associated with Christian demonology, hence its fear of the crucifix (which can kill it), the name of God, holy water, and pious Christians generally (Man, Myth, and Magic 11, 292-295).

5. In Kabbalistic tradition, “Lilith's greatest triumph and the high point in her career came with the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple” (Patai 249), for when this happened, Lilith became God's concubine, replacing the Matronit, the “spouse of God” (Patai 152). This usurpation will not end until the apocalyptic “coming of the Messiah” at which time Lilith will cease to exist (Patai 250). Because of his vision of Ligeia, Poe's narrator seemingly experiences a similar, albeit personal, apocalypse.

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