Word: seers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Great Britain?would be right in keeping with the current boom. England is experiencing such a resurgence of witchcraft and other occult dabbling that an ecumenical commission of Anglicans and Roman Catholics recently recommended that each diocese appoint an official exorcist to drive out demons. In France, a popular seer named Madame Soleil gives weekday advice on radio, and rumors say that Black Masses are being performed in Paris and Lyons...
...once observed that Eliot was part church warden, part twelve-year-old boy. Pound was on the side of the boy. His objections to Eliot's frequent use of "may" and "perhaps" ("Perhaps be damned") rise to pique when Eliot's narrator of the moment, the blind seer Tiresias, who by definition knows the past and the future, suggests that a half-formed thought "may" pass through the mind of a young woman after adultery. "You Tiresias," snaps Pound, "if you know, know damned well or else...
...weakest parts of the novel are Agathon's reminiscences about his past before he became a seer. He tells us of his marriage to Tuka, the beautiful daughter of an Athenian nobleman at whose home he was tutored, of his involvement with the gross but practical Solon, of his fascination with the Helot Iona, who later becomes a leader of the rebellion. Interesting enough, but all this smacks of soap opera, and at any rate the young Agathon seems pale in comparison to what he becomes...
...year 500-and-something B.C., the hero of this sharp and provoking little antihistorical novel finds no difficulty in giving verbatim quotations from the Dryden translation (17th century A.D.) of Plutarch's Life of Lycurgus (2nd century A.D.). It is true that he is a certified Seer of Apollo, and the future drifts before his eyes as effortlessly as the past or the present. So the reader need not be really surprised to find Lycurgus (spelled Ly-kourgos, in the barbarous tradition of contemporary university classics departments), a dim semi-mythological figure, flinging out his arms...
...seer's name is Agathon. He shares his cell with a family of rats that nibble his toes when he sleeps, and a gawky, earnest boy-disciple named Demodokos, who being only an apprentice seer is called Peeker. In alternated monologues, Seer and Peeker describe the cycles of personal passion and international politics that brought them to their stinking dungeon, lit at night by government buildings burned at the hands of revolting Helots, the Spartan slaves...