Author | Benjamin Disraeli |
---|---|
Language | English |
Publisher | Bulwer |
Publication date | 1834 |
Media type |
The Infernal Marriage is the eighth novel written by Benjamin Disraeli who would later become Prime Minister of Great Britain.
The novel is set in the Greek underworld. It depicts the marriage of the Roman deities Pluto and Proserpine. It includes a journey to Elysium and a discussion with the deposed Titans. Disraeli patterned the various gods of the narrative on political figures of his era, including George IV, Lord Byron, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Princess Dorothea of Courland, Charles X of France, F. J. Robinson, 1st Viscount Goderich, Robert Peel, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, and John Copley, 1st Baron Lyndhurst.
The Infernal Marriage appeared in a series of editions of the New Monthly Magazine published from July to October 1834. [1] [2] Its story was never concluded because the remaining manuscripts were stolen from Disraeli's chambers, and he "never had the heart to undertake it again". [3]
Pluto, the king of hell, whisks Proserpine, the daughter of Jupiter, away to Hades. They are greeted by Pluto's loyal but monstrous dog, whom Proserpine takes an instant disliking to. She asks Pluto to prove his love for her by banishing the dog, which he does by promoting him from his role of Guardian of the Gates.
Pluto and Proserpine are disturbed one morning by a furore brought to them by Terror and Rage concerning a mortal who has got into hell. The mortal explains to the Hades assembly that his wife has died and he wants Pluto to revive her. Pluto declines but Proserpine pleads with him to yield which he does. The assembly wishes to call the Guardian of the Gates to account but learn that he has been “promoted”. Seeing the influence of the queen, all the assembly members resign.
Shortly afterwards Proserpine falls ill but is brought back to health by an esteemed doctor brought to hell for that purpose. It is agreed that Proserpine should complete her recovery by visiting Elysium, Pluto remaining in Hades due to the difficult political situation. Proserpine's enemies see this as an opportunity to move against her.
Proserpine sets off with the seer Tiresias, the ship's captain and Lady Manto. En route they stop at a cavern owned by the Titan Porphyrion who has a toy model of the stars and skies which Saturn, who is now a dethroned monarch, made. Proserpine resolves to visit Saturn, whom they find in a magnificent palace with Titans. He attributes his fall to having unsuccessfully taken on the “spirit of the time”, embodied by Jupiter who, since coming to power, has not acted on the emancipatory liberal principles he espouses. Proserpine thinks they should embrace the spirit of the age.
Saturn then takes Proserpine to the Valley of Lamentations where they see the defeated Titans ,including Hyperion and Enceladus who laments their fall and, like Oceanus, is pessimistic about their prospects. Briareus the Titan thinks they should fight back and blames the loss of Mount Olympus (to Jupiter) on the Titans being disunited, thereby letting in the Olympians, whereas Rhoetus believes the only way to beat the Olympians is by ridiculing them.
Proserpine's party journeys on to Elysium which is wonderful. The novel ends describing the habits of the Elysians, e.g. if rumours start to spread of a couple being devoted to each other, people deliberately spread other fabricated tales so that people cannot separate the lies from the facts so that nobody knows what to believe. The Elysians just enjoy themselves, all the work being done by Sylphs and Gnomes.
The novelist William Beckford appreciated the novel conveying the message to its author via a friend, "Pray tell Disraeli that I have read, enjoyed, and admired his Infernal Marriage. The sly, dry humour of that most original composition is to me delightful." [4]
Disraeli's father, Isaac, also a writer, considered The Infernal Marriage and the novel it immediately followed, Ixion in Heaven , to be his son's most original contribution to literature. [5]
Much of the analysis of the novel has focussed on what its contents represented. Twenty years after publication, Disraeli himself wrote that Jupiter represented George IV, Apollo Lord Byron, Tiresias Talleyrand and Manto the Duchess of Dino. [6] The introduction to the 1926 edition extended the list by likening Saturn to Charles X, Oceanus to Lord Goderich, Hyperion to Robert Peel, Elysium to London and the Titans led by Enceladus to the Tories under the Duke of Wellington with the young Disraeli represented by the mocking Rhoetus. [7]
A more modern review, however, speculated that Enceladus represented Lord Lyndhurst before going on to suggest that, "Disraeli's propensity to autobiographical narratives," meant that the Pluto-Proserpine relationship reflected "Disraeli's own problems with Henrietta [Sykes]" with whom Disraeli was conducting an affair at the time of writing The Infernal Marriage. [8]
Hades, in the ancient Greek religion and mythology, is the god of the dead and the king of the underworld, with which his name became synonymous. Hades was the eldest son of Cronus and Rhea, although this also made him the last son to be regurgitated by his father. He and his brothers, Zeus and Poseidon, defeated their father's generation of gods, the Titans, and claimed joint rulership over the cosmos. Hades received the underworld, Zeus the sky, and Poseidon the sea, with the solid earth available to all three concurrently. In artistic depictions, Hades is typically portrayed holding a bident and wearing his helm with Cerberus, the three-headed guard-dog of the underworld, standing at his side.
Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second-largest in the Solar System, after Jupiter. It is a gas giant with an average radius of about nine-and-a-half times that of Earth. It has only one-eighth the average density of Earth, but is over 95 times more massive. Even though Saturn is nearly the size of Jupiter, Saturn has less than one-third of Jupiter's mass. Saturn orbits the Sun at a distance of 9.59 AU (1,434 million km) with an orbital period of 29.45 years.
In Greek mythology, the Titans were the pre-Olympian gods. According to the Theogony of Hesiod, they were the twelve children of the primordial parents Uranus (Sky) and Gaia (Earth), with six male Titans—Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetus, and Cronus—and six female Titans, called the Titanides or Titanesses—Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, and Tethys. Cronus mated with his older sister Rhea, who then bore the first generation of Olympians: the six siblings Zeus, Hades, Poseidon, Hestia, Demeter, and Hera. Certain descendants of the Titans, such as Prometheus, Atlas, Helios, and Leto, are sometimes also called Titans.
Elysium, otherwise known as the Elysian Fields or Elysian Plains, is a conception of the afterlife that developed over time and was maintained by some Greek religious and philosophical sects and cults. It was initially separated from the Greek underworld – the realm of Hades. Only mortals related to the gods and other heroes could be admitted past the river Styx. Later, the conception of who could enter was expanded to include those chosen by the gods, the righteous, and the heroic. They would remain at the Elysian Fields after death, to live a blessed and happy afterlife, and indulge in whatever they had enjoyed in life.
In ancient Greek religion and mythology, Pluto was the ruler of the Greek underworld. The earlier name for the god was Hades, which became more common as the name of the underworld itself. Pluto represents a more positive concept of the god who presides over the afterlife. Ploutōn was frequently conflated with Ploûtos, the Greek god of wealth, because mineral wealth was found underground, and because as a chthonic god Pluto ruled the deep earth that contained the seeds necessary for a bountiful harvest. The name Ploutōn came into widespread usage with the Eleusinian Mysteries, in which Pluto was venerated as both a stern ruler and a loving husband to Persephone. The couple received souls in the afterlife and are invoked together in religious inscriptions, being referred to as Plouton and as Kore respectively. Hades, by contrast, had few temples and religious practices associated with him, and he is portrayed as the dark and violent abductor of Persephone.
Hyperion, a Fragment is an abandoned epic poem by 19th-century English Romantic poet John Keats. It was published in Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820). It is based on the Titanomachia, and tells of the despair of the Titans after their fall to the Olympians. Keats wrote the poem from late 1818 until the spring of 1819. The poem stops abruptly in the middle of the third book, with close to 900 lines having been completed. He gave it up as having "too many Miltonic inversions." He was also nursing his younger brother Tom, who died on 1 December 1818 of tuberculosis.
The moons of Saturn are numerous and diverse, ranging from tiny moonlets only tens of meters across to the enormous Titan, which is larger than the planet Mercury. There are 146 moons with confirmed orbits, the most of any planet in the solar system. This number does not include the many thousands of moonlets embedded within Saturn's dense rings, nor hundreds of possible kilometer-sized distant moons that were seen through telescopes but not recaptured. Seven Saturnian moons are large enough to have collapsed into a relaxed, ellipsoidal shape, though only one or two of those, Titan and possibly Rhea, are currently in hydrostatic equilibrium. Three moons are particularly notable. Titan is the second-largest moon in the Solar System, with a nitrogen-rich Earth-like atmosphere and a landscape featuring river networks and hydrocarbon lakes. Enceladus emits jets of ice from its south-polar region and is covered in a deep layer of snow. Iapetus has contrasting black and white hemispheres as well as an extensive ridge of equatorial mountains among the tallest in the solar system.
The naming of moons has been the responsibility of the International Astronomical Union's committee for Planetary System Nomenclature since 1973. That committee is known today as the Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature (WGPSN).
Saturn has made appearances in fiction since the 1752 novel Micromégas by Voltaire. In the earliest depictions, it was portrayed as having a solid surface rather than its actual gaseous composition. In many of these works, the planet is inhabited by aliens that are usually portrayed as being more advanced than humans. In modern science fiction, the Saturnian atmosphere sometimes hosts floating settlements. The planet is occasionally visited by humans and its rings are sometimes mined for resources.
In Greek mythology, the Greek underworld, or Hades, is a distinct realm where an individual goes after death. The earliest idea of afterlife in Greek myth is that, at the moment of death, an individual's essence (psyche) is separated from the corpse and transported to the underworld. In early mythology the dead were indiscriminately grouped together and led a shadowy post-existence; however, in later mythology elements of post-mortem judgment began to emerge with good and bad people being separated.
Hades is a fictional character appearing in DC Comics publications and related media, commonly as an adversary and sometimes-ally of the superhero Wonder Woman. Based upon the eponymous Greek mythological figure, he is the Olympian god of the dead and ruler of the underworld.
Persephone, the daughter of Zeus and Demeter in Greek mythology, appears in films, works of literature, and in popular culture, both as a goddess character and through the symbolic use of her name. She becomes the queen of the underworld through her abduction by Hades, the god of the underworld. The myth of her abduction represents her dual function as the as chthonic (underworld) and vegetation goddess: a personification of vegetation, which shoots forth in Spring and withdraws into the earth after harvest. Proserpina is the Roman equivalent.
Genealogia deorum gentilium, known in English as On the Genealogy of the Gods of the Gentiles, is a mythography or encyclopedic compilation of the tangled family relationships of the classical pantheons of Ancient Greece and Rome, written in Latin prose from 1360 onwards by the Italian author and poet Giovanni Boccaccio.
In astronomy, a regular moon or a regular satellite is a natural satellite following a relatively close, stable, and circular orbit which is generally aligned to its primary's equator. They form within discs of debris and gas that once surrounded their primary, usually the aftermath of a large collision or leftover material accumulated from the protoplanetary disc. Young regular moons then begin to accumulate material within the circumplanetary disc in a process similar to planetary accretion, as opposed to irregular moons, which formed independently before being captured into orbit around the primary.
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The Heroes of Olympus is a pentalogy of fantasy-adventure novels written by American author Rick Riordan. The novels detail a conflict between Greek demigods, Roman demigods, and Gaea. In the fourth book of the series, there is also a fight against Tartarus, which, in Greek mythology, was the darkest and deepest point of the Underworld.
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Ixion in Heaven is the fifth novel written by Benjamin Disraeli who would later become a Prime Minister of Great Britain.