"This isn’t the fish – It’s the bait."

The Leviathan, by Charles Dufresne (1876-1938)

“Devil, Devil, come in hate! Take the fine Evita bait!” the wild-girl chanted, but her eyes no longer focused, and she was frozen in hysteria. Past Master

“The ambivalent attitude towards the fish is an indication of its double nature. It is unclean and an emblem of hatred on the one hand,but on the other it is an object of veneration.” Aion

I’ve written before about the importance of connecting the allegory of the devil-hydra episode in Past Master (1968) with the dream sequence involving John Sourwine. Together, these scenes reveal something essential about how the programmed persons relate to Ouden. But this post focuses on a different thread: the symbolic logic of bait, fishing, and the monstrous, particularly how Thomas More is cast as Christ-bait, and how that image ultimately connects to Maxwell's transformation.

This logic extends in every direction. Paul fishes Thomas More from the past. More’s first conversation with Paul is about fishing. The first climax in The Feral Lands centers on a fishing event. More’s interactions with the people of Astrobe are repeatedly cast in terms of fishing. Even the mouth of Ouden is described as a gaping maw, wide and exposed, vulnerable to being hooked. The Metropolitan of Astrobe wears the fisherman’s ring. One could go on cataloging such moments.

The Christian symbolism in Past Master is hard to miss, but some of its deep cuts are easy for modern readers to overlook. This post calls attention to one of them. The Christological theme of “fishers of men” runs parallel to the other pattern in the novel: the fishing for the devil.

The idea that the devil might be caught on a hook is ancient. It appears in the writings of Jerome and St. Basil. Its source is Job 41:1–2: “Can you pull in Leviathan with a fishhook or tie down its tongue with a rope? Can you put a cord through its nose or pierce its jaw with a hook?” That passage gave rise to a long tradition of imagery in both Talmudic Judaism and Catholic patristics, and it continued through medieval and Renaissance art and theology. Thomas Aquinas addresses this in his Expositio super Iob ad litteram. The image is not limited to Catholic sources. It appears in Luther’s Table Talk, though Luther was not one of Lafferty’s favorites. Rabelais was. He made it central to Panurge's battle with the great sea creature, the physeter.

“Poor Panurge began to cry and howl worse than ever. Babille-babou,” said he, shrugging up his shoulders, quivering all over with fear,“there will be the devil upon dun.This is a worse business than that t’other day. Let us fly, let us fly; old Nick take me if it is not Leviathan, described by the noble prophet Moses in the life of patient Job.It will swallow us all—ships and men, shag, rag, and bobtail—like a dose of pills.” Gargantua and Pantagruel, 4:XXIII

Most readers pass over the devil-hydra scene without recognizing the tradition behind it. That kind of cultural amnesia deeply troubled Lafferty. As he wrote, “The world really has been chopped off behind us. Just how the old world ended isn't clear. There is a group amnesia that blocks us out from the details. It didn't end in Armageddon. The two world wars were only side lights to a powerful main catastrophe. The so-called revolutionary movements did not bring anything to an end. The world had already ended. Those things were only the grubbiest of brainless grubbings in the ruins.”

For many readers, this makes one of the most memorable scenes in Past Master an amnesiac fragment. It brings back the image of Christ as the hook that catches the Leviathan, now figured as the Christian devil, though it often goes unnoticed. Scratch away the devil-hydra, and the older image is still there, just as it appeared before the great forgetting, in works like the Hortus Deliciarum.

At the bottom of the image, a wing-scaled sea dragon thrashes as a cruciform hook pierces its jaw. The fishing line rises as a Jesse tree, passing straight into the monster’s open throat. The same logic is at work in Past Master, where the bait fish is sacrificed to draw out the devil-hydra. Its Christ-like blood spills in every direction, in what I have called bloodsmell: “It bled in spectacular fountains of dark rushing red that exploded with the lustful smell of rampant iron and stripped green wood and battlefield stink.” More’s martyrdom completes the pattern. His blood joins the bait’s blood. He, too, becomes Christ-bait, cast before the powers and principalities that govern Astrobe.

Why was this particular image on Lafferty’s mind in the late sixties? It likely has to do with how critically and creatively he read Jung’s Aion, a book he drew on heavily for the aquatic and fish symbolism in 1969’s Fourth Mansions, one of whose chapter epigraphs is taken directly from it. Some of the novel’s deeper layers open up when read alongside Aion, with its emphasis on quaternities and the ambivalence of the fish as Christ, devil, and anti-Christ, as well as St. Teresa’s Interior Castle.

The ambivalence of the fish symbol gives its title to Chapter IX of Jung’s Aion, where he examines the role it plays across human cultures and in the human mind. In that dense chapter, Jung writes, “The ambivalent attitude towards the fish is an indication of its double nature. It is unclean and an emblem of hatred on the one hand, but on the other, it is an object of veneration.” This doubleness is one of the things that unites the two sides of the devil-hydra in Past Master. It also runs through Fourth Mansions, where we see it in figures like Carmody Overlark and Wing Manion, each linked to fish in different moral registers.

“Carmody Overlark had had his head under water for more than five minutes, and the water itself was in constant change or parade. There were schools of small fish that passed through it laterally. They did not follow around the curve of the bowl, they disappeared. And other sorts of fish appeared, all traveling a parade in the same direction, coming out of the glass itself (for all that could be discerned of them), traveling across the bowl in a straight line and disappearing into the glass wall again. There was optical illusion or there was strong current flowing through that bowl.”

“Wing Manion came in, wrinkled her fish-nose in many-layered disgust, and stood over her sick-dragon husband Arouet. She also had sworn to break the weave. The Harvester mark was still livid on her forehead, but she would no longer be a Harvester.”

It is fascinating how much Lafferty draws from Aion in his earliest novels. This influence also helps explain one of the strangest elements of the devil-hydra scene in Past Master. One might wonder where Lafferty got the idea. It’s unclear whether he knew of the apocalyptic tradition of consuming Leviathan and Behemoth before reading Jung’s Aion, but he would certainly have encountered it there. The image stayed with him.

Father Oddopter says that eating the brains grants “a certain mastery of this enemy.” Consider Maxwell. He consumes the creature’s brain, and the act transforms him. He is perfected, initiated into the ordo gratiae. Transformation and transubstantiatio define his arc, marking a passage from infirmitas to auctoritas. “In Maxwell it was a sign of weakness and slowness, almost of witlessness. It was a good-sized, swarthy, almost sinister body that he wore, and it was a sepulchral voice he spoke with. But one had the impression that he had to stand on tiptoes to see out of his own eyes.”

It is one of the book’s most compelling developments when Thomas More tells Nortprophet that Maxwell is between bodies. Soon after, Maxwell enters the body of a minor character—the crone—who has just died. His eyes go from weak to strong. At the beheading scene, it is Maxwell, now inhabiting the crone, who sees more reality than the others.

“What is it in me that survives?” Maxwell asked.He had the shabby old lady's form and her voice, but they all knew him as Maxwell now."

“There were those who said that something disappeared from Thomas at the same moment—that he left in his essence, and that it was a shadow man who put his head on the block. A weird old woman cried out that she could see through him; but it was an illusion”

This eating of the devil's brains draws on Lafferty's appropriation of the midrashic tradition in which the messianic banquet includes Leviathan flesh. Jung returns to this image several times in Aion. In one note, he writes, “In Jewish tradition the Leviathan is a sort of food stored up for the faithful in Paradise. After death, they clothe themselves in fishrobes.” In another, he adds, “According to the Apocalypse of Baruch, Behemoth as well as Leviathan is eucharistic food. This is assiduously overlooked.”

Lafferty did not overlook it.

What brought all this back to mind was thinking again about Petersen’s work on Lafferty’s environmental strangeness. He defines the ecomonstrous as “any object, force, figure, vision, or experience that induces some sense of vertiginous, category-defying excess, without inherent moral valence.” It’s a helpful way to describe how Lafferty breaks categories open. That critical insight has helped me notice patterns I had missed. But once one moves past the surface weirdness and through the cultural amnesia, something becomes clear: the ecomonstrous very often carries a moral valence.