Josephus and "Kubla Khan"

When, on a day in September 1797, Coleridge put down his copy of Purchas His Pilgrimes to drift off into another one of his opium sleeps, the passage he had been reading was this one:

In Xandu did Cublai Can build a stately Pallace, encompassing sixteen miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddowes, pleasant Springs, delightfull streames, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the middest thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure, which may be moved from place to place.

On waking from his sleep, he started writing:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
⁠A stately pleasure-dome decree:
⁠Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
⁠Through caverns measureless to man
⁠Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

...and so on, until the visitor from Porlock interrupted him and the rest of the epic was lost. So far, so famous.

What do we know about this ‘dome’? It sits above a hidden river called Alph (for Alphabet, according to Ted Hughes) that flows underground and then bursts out in sublime magnificence (‘from this chasm/A mighty fountain momently was forced/Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst/It flung up momently the sacred river’). The dome itself sits inside a walled area; and marks a remarkable kind of material oxymoron in which warm, golden sunlight and freezing white ice combine:

It was a miracle of rare device,
⁠A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

That couplet is the hinge point in the poem. After those lines we move on to the Abyssinian damsel with her dulcimer singing of a magical mountain called Abora (A + B for the alphabet; ora, calling us to prayer, according to Ted Hughes), which brings us back to the poem's core oxymoron: ‘that sunny dome! those caves of ice!’

I'm talking, here, about sources for this poem. But even John Livingstone Lowes' eloquent and wide-ranging source-study The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (1927; rpt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955) can't do much more with ‘Kubla Khan’ than this, since STC lays it all out for us so thoroughly. On the other hand, Lowes is interested in the fact that Josephus crops up in another masterpiece from this era, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Josephus? The same. Bear with me.

In Mariner the oxymoron of hot sun and frozen ice is unpicked by being narrativized, with the mariner passing from the latter zone to the former. At exactly the moment of transition (‘And some in dreams assurèd were/Of the Spirit that plagued us so;/Nine fathom deep he had followed us/From the land of mist and snow’) Coleridge adds this gloss:

A Spirit had followed them; one of the invisible inhabitants of this planet, neither departed souls nor angels; concerning whom the learned Jew Josephus, and the Platonic Constantinopolitan, Michael Psellus, may be consulted. They are very numerous, and there is no climate or element without one or more.

Here's Dorothy Bilik:

In discussing the gloss to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Livingstone Lowes asks, ‘but what is the learned Jew, Josephus, doing in that galley?’ Josephus (c. C.E. 37-100), unlike the Neoplatonist Michael Psellus with whom he is coupled, is not an authority on demonology. However, Lowes points out that Josephus and others wrote about Cain; and Cain, together with the Wandering Jew, combined with Wordsworth's suggestions and other influences, culminated, because of Coleridgean magic, in the haunting figure of the ancient Mariner. Coleridge's notebook entries for 1796 include excerpts, in Greek, from Josephus' Antiquities; in an 1802 entry Coleridge refers to Josephus' The Jewish Wars. [Bilik, ‘Josephus, Mosollamus, and the Ancient Mariner’, Studies in Philology, 86:1 (1989), 87]

I don't think the reference to Josephus has anything to do with Cain, as it happens. But I do think it's significant, and not just for the Mariner.

We know Coleridge was reading Josephus at this time, because Josephus's Jewish War is the main source for our knowledge of Titus's seige and sack of Jerusalem in AD 70. For a long time, Coleridge planned an ambitious epic on that subject. In 1802 he wrote to Tom Wedgwood:

I have, since my twentieth year, meditated an heroic poem on the ‘Siege of Jerusalem’ by Titus. This is the pride and the stronghold of my hope, but I never think of it except in my best moods. The work to which I dedicate the ensuing years of my life. [20 Oct 1802; CL 2:876]

When Titus finally captured Jerusalem he destroyed the city and its temple, and the Jewish people went from being a nation centred on a temple, run by a High Priest, to a diasporic congeries of peoples, carrying their synagogues with them wherever they went, and guided not by priests but rabbis.

There's Jerusalem, at the head of this post: a territory of twice five cubits walled around, and most notable now for the golden dome of its mosque. This most holy of Judaeo-Christian cities is now the site of (what Coleridge would have regarded as) a pagan, oriental dome, a structure which, however magnificent, is built on a hidden tumult which vocalises as ancestral voices prophesying war (which ancestors? The Jews, as the precursors of Christianity. Which war? The recapture of Jerusalem).

Coleridge had been reading Josephus's account of Titus's capture of Jerusalem closely, planning and revolving the great epic he hoped to write, ostentatiously dedicating the remainder of his life as a poet to the project. It came to nothing, of course. Instead Coleridge wrote, in a kind of trance, a strange epic opening, the suggestive ruin of an epic, like a single wall of an uncomplete temple. A poem about a dome bathed in golden sunlight that is also, impossibly, a kind of concavity of ice, the dialectic of antithetical shapes and temperatures subliming into beauty (the most beautiful poem Coleridge ever composed, certainly). And here is Josephus's description the Great Temple of Jerusalem, before its destruction:

Τὸ δ' ἔξωθεν αὐτοῦ πρόσωπον οὐδὲν οὔτ' εἰς ψυχῆς οὔτ' εἰς ὀμμάτων ἔκπληξιν ἀπέλειπεν: πλαξὶ γὰρ χρυσοῦ στιβαραῖς κεκαλυμμένος πάντοθεν ὑπὸ τὰς πρώτας ἀνατολὰς πυρωδεστάτην ἀπέπαλλεν αὐγὴν καὶ τῶν βιαζομένων ἰδεῖν τὰς ὄψεις ὥσπερ ἡλιακαῖς ἀκτῖσιν ἀπέστρεφεν. τοῖς γε μὴν ἀφικνουμένοις ξένοις πόῤῥωθεν ὅμοιος ὄρει χιόνος πλήρει κατεφαίνετο: καὶ γὰρ καθὰ μὴ κεχρύσωτο λευκότατος ἦν.

Now the outward face of the temple in its front wanted nothing that was likely to surprise either men's minds or their eyes; for it was covered all over with plates of gold of great weight, and, at the first rising of the sun, reflected back a very fiery splendour, and made those who forced themselves to look upon it to turn their eyes away, just as they would have done at the sun's own rays. But this temple appeared to strangers, when they were coming to it at a distance, like a mountain covered with snow; for as to those parts of it that were not gilt, they were exceeding white. [Josephus, Jewish War, 5.5.6]

You may try and tell me that this passage wasn't in Coleridge's poetic subconscious when he wrote ‘Kubla Khan’. You may try it, but I won't believe you.

The thing is, if we see this as one of the shaping influences that went into the poem, it alters the way we read the whole work, I think. It means that, in an oblique way, Xanadu becomes a kind of convex upside-down iteration of the concavity of Titus's hollowing-out of Jerusalem; a strange symbolic reinscription of that historical drama. The river becomes the flow of Christian faith, underground during the era of the Jews, but bursting into the sunlight in sublime wonder and terror with Christ's crucifixion (at Jerusalem, of course). The subterranean cave of ice becomes the glorious snowy mountain of Abora, which is also, in Coleridge's potent concision of imagery, the golden mountain-dome of Xanadu itself.

Jerusalem; Heirusalem; Xarusalem. Enough! Or—too much?