The Tower of Tarshish and the Dungeons of Tertullian

From a reproduction of the wonderful Hereford Mappa Mundi (ca. 1300 AD). The inscription on Sardinia: Sardinia Grece Sandaliotes dicta a similitudine pedis humani Corsica, ab oriente patet CLXXXVIII passuum, ab occidente CLXXXV , a meridie LXXVII, a septentrione CXX. [Sardinia is called Sandaliotis by the Greeks due to its resemblance to a human foot. It lies 188 miles from the east, 185 miles from the west, 77 miles from the south, and 120 miles from the north.]

This room seemed to be a mockery of the Tarshish Tower, with the thirteen clock faces here turned inward

I hate working with Excel, but in my role as a department chair, it at least gives me time to think about other things—when I should be productively scheduling classes for the fall semester.

Today, my thoughts keep returning to the above line from Where Have You Been, Sandaliotis?

In Chapter 9, readers are given an intellectual tour of the Tarshish Tower after having already spent time with Constantine Quiche in the thirteen-sided Dungeons of Tertullian.

With Lafferty’s recurring point in the novel that every human being must stand under the Tarshish Tower, let’s think a little about what that would be like.

The Path to the Tower

First, we will not reach the tower unless we pass through the Roman Circus. As Constantine learns, the Roman Circus surrounds the tower.

"Surrounding the Tarshish Tower was the Roman Circus with the thirteen major streets leading into it."

So to stand under the tower, we would have to pass through a place of extreme spectacle. Depending on how we move through the Roman Circus, we would eventually reach the open space where thirteen major streets converge at the tower’s base. Some of these roads have very old names. Others, like the Strato Napoleon, are relatively recent.

The Experience of the Tower

The experience of standing here would be one of layered time—secular history visible in a single moment, where the old and the contemporary coexist in spatialized form. The Tarshish Tower itself is weathered and imposing. Lafferty describes it as mottled and scarred by divine fire. It is not impossibly tall, nor was it built to reach heaven. Instead, its tapered and stepped form suggests a device designed to pull heaven down to earth. (This must be a very important piece of information.)

One striking feature is how the stone of the tower bears the marks of fire—both the fire of judgment and the fire of theophany, the lightning of wrath and the fire of the Burning Bush. The inscriptions covering its surface are intricate and unreadable, engraved in every tongue by the very flames that engulfed it.

Looking skyward, we see the tower’s most enigmatic feature: the thirteen-faced clock. Each face bears its own civilizational design, script, and horological system. The effect is one of fragmented yet synchronized time. The faces represent different civilizations and their temporal traces: Roman, Greek, Carthage, Jerusalem, Babylon, Han, Damascus, Alexandria, Tarshish, Sandaliotis, Nial, Middle American, and Constantinople.

The Roman Circus funnels all movement toward this point, making it clear that the tower is more than just a structure. It is the axis upon which everything here turns. The inscriptions and fire-scarred stone shift under the gaze, some appearing as letters, others as symbols of divine intervention.

Returning to Lafferty’s Big Clue

Again:

"This room seemed to be a mockery of the Tarshish Tower, with the thirteen clock faces here turned inward."

What do we know?

• The Roman Circus leads to the Tarshish Tower with its 13 faces.

• The 13-Sided Dungeon of Tertullian refers to Tertullian’s theology.

• The Dungeons are the parody of the Tower.

• A parody is a satirical imitation, but it is also, as Lafferty would have known, a para ode, a song that sits beside another song.

• Therefore, we can expect a para-relation between the tower and Tertullian’s theology.

  
  

With this in mind, let’s revisit Section XXX of Tertullian’s De Spectaculis, which I discussed in yesterday’s blog post.

Tertullian’s Vision and Lafferty’s Apocalyptic Parody

Lafferty satirizes Tertullian to make a serious point about Hell by subverting and expanding his vision into an even more elaborate metaphysical labyrinth. Tertullian had condemned the Roman Circus as a theater of bloodlust, cruelty, and idolatry. He wrote that those who despised God and reveled in chariot races, gladiatorial combat, and theatrical excess would one day become the spectacle themselves. But the final spectacle takes place in an arena far more terrifying than the Roman Circus: the Judgment of Christ, witnessed by the Church Triumphant.

In Tertullian’s vision of apocalyptic judgment, the rulers and philosophers of Rome are no longer spectators but the damned, suffering in a cosmic amphitheater. The charioteer burns in his own chariot of fire, wrestlers are tossed into flaming billows, actors scream in their own agony, and the persecutors of Christians burn in a fiercer flame than they once kindled.

This inversion—where the person oriented toward temporal spectacle becomes a spiritual spectacle in hell—finds its place in Sandaliotis.

The Tarshish Tower is the center of the Roman Circus, not as a monument to secular power but as a ticking bomb, a timepiece counting down to reckoning in Sandaliotis. Ironically, it is the most important Fortean Construct in the novel, but Lafferty has given us a wonderful set of red herrings—or as he puts it in the book, the “red snapper drawn across the trail.”

From the beginning are the many misdirections. What really ticks, the true center of the novel’s metaphysical machinery, is the Tarshish Tower and Dungeons of Tertullian.

As Grishwell says to Constantine in Chapter 1 about the Fortean sky bomb:

"Call me every 30 minutes then, Quiche." "Should the best detective in the world be tied to the end of a telephone? I’ll call you from time to time if I think it necessary." "Is it ticking, Quiche, is it ticking?" "Is what ticking, Grishwell?"

Constantine never works out that the dungeon with its thirteen torture clocks is a counterpart of the Roman Circus, the spectacle of the circus and its Tarshish Tower. He is unaware that the rats, serpents, and thirteen clock faces have turned on him, the ignorant circus-goer.

He does not know how to read the most important clue, namely that Tertullian argued that the divine spectacle for Christians was not the Roman games but the damnation of Rome itself.

Lafferty’s Sandaliotis is that world. And Constantine, like the figures in Tertullian’s apocalyptic vision, is in Hell. Just as the charioteer in Tertullian is consumed by a chariot of flames, Constantine Quiche in Lafferty undergoes his contrapasso-style punishment reflecting his actions in life as a French cop—detection.

Apocalypses (1977)

I've heard it said that the two novels in Apocalypses are unrelated, that their inclusion in the same volume is incidental. This is a mistake. Both books explore the nature and consequences of evil within the Catholic context of the four final things: death, judgment, heaven, and hell. Both examine temporal and spiritual power, which is central to Lafferty’s interest in conspiracies. Both are apocalyptic. Both use satire to mine eschatological horror. Their placement next to each other is a statement.