In the Beginning was the Word ~ Apollo

Chapter Ten

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD
~ In the Court of the Crimson King ~

- chapter index -
pg. 1 - Intro: The Schizoid Man | pg. 2 - Night Sounds
pg. 3 - Welcome to the Machine | pg. 4 - The Laboratory
pg. 5 - Agamemnon | pg. 6 - Prometheus
pg. 7 - Paranoia's Poison Door | pg. 8 - Projective Identification
pg. 9 - The Promethean Rebel | pg. 10 - Aries and the Emperor
pg. 11 - Mirrors | pg. 12 - In the Beginning was the Word
pg. 13 - Death Seed | pg. 14 - I Talk to the Wind
pg. 15 - Said the Straight Man to the Late Man | pg. 16 - Epitaph
pg. 17 - Apollo | pg. 18 - The Fate of All Mankind
pg. 19 - Malkuth

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Marsyas

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"Will no one lay the laurel wreath
As silence drowns the screams."

Apollo wore a laurel wreath in memory of Daphne.

"Of Apollo's many loves, one of the best known was Daphne, who fled his embraces and was turned into his tree, the laurel. From that time on, Apollo wore a laurel wreath. Laurel wreaths became the prize awarded in athletic and musical competitions."

- Apollo

"In ancient times the laurel wreath was sacred to Apollo, the Greek god of poetry and music. The term laureate is derived from the Latin word laurea ("laurel"). In Great Britain, the poet laureate is named by the sovereign as a member of the royal household and charged with the preparation of suitable verses for court and state occasions."

- Poet Laureate

"The ancients believed that laurel communicated the spirit of prophecy and poetry. Hence the custom of crowning the pythoness and poets, and of putting laurel leaves under one's pillow to acquire inspiration."

- Brewer Dictionary of Phrase and Fable

Epitaph as prophecy (the "voice of Zeus"):

"The walls on which the prophets wrote"
"I fear tomorrow I'll be crying"
"Tomorrow and Tomorrow"

"prophecy given in poetic form, in riddles: divine wisdom is a riddling wisdom, 'higher' than our human wisdom, often hard for us to understand."

- Apollo & Dionysus: Greeks and the Irrational

Apollo was the god of light, purity, and the sun. He was the son of Zeus. As a sun god, Apollo was called "shining one".

"Upon the instruments of death
The sunlight brightly gleams."

Apollo is characterized as supremely rational (the Thinking function) as opposed to irrational Dionysos (the Feeling function).

"The god Apollo, Averter of Evil, god of purification, god of prophecy (later identified with the sun is often thought to embody the most conspicuously Greek characteristics of rationality and order. Among the inscriptions at his shrine at Delphi are the Apollonian maxims "Curb thy spirit, "Observe the limit," "Hate hybris," "Bow before the divine"-and "Keep woman under rule."

- The Great Goddess

"Apollo symbolizes, in the Greek imagery, the god of logic and reason.
A lover of beautiful forms, clearness, order and truth, Apollo teaches the value of distance and objectivity in forming a sensible and fair opinion about the world and the things.
He's the principle of consciousness, the representative of Logos, the god that stands for the rational form of thinking and, consequently, for the possibility of a civilized life.
However, every god has his or her infirmitas, and the infirmitas of this apollo is the denial of instinct life, a life inexorably related to the feminine design.
Apollo offers a model of the masculine that presents extreme difficulty in relating to the erotic and feminine aspects of the psyche.
Identified with the patriarchal order, of which he is considered the most legitimate representative, Apollo is a style of conscience that presents extreme difficulty in welcoming the anima, the feminine principle of the psyche and also the basic metaphor of Psychology.
Citing Hillman:

"Apollo certainly introduces a disastrous pattern, destructible to the psychological life, aloof from anything that has to do with the feminine ways, be it Cassandra, Dafne or Coronis (whoever he touches will end up in trouble). On that account, you end up with the feeling that Apollo does not belong to the sphere of the psyche."

- Rhetoric of the Masculine
by Marcus Quintaes

"There was no room around Frederick in which a woman could strike root. All his wives died after a few years of marriage, and, as far as we know, his mistresses shared the same fate : none of them survived him. In the rarified atmosphere of these brilliant heights no human being but himself could thrive : none even of his friends could hold out for long ; no woman could have breathed there."

- Frederick II
by Ernst Kantorowicz
(p. 408)

When like a blank idiot I put on thy wreath,

Or was I a worm---too low crawling for death?

- from Hymn to Apollo by John Keats

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In 21st Century Schizoid Man ( Mirrors ), the differentiated Thinking function is represented by the electric guitar, a stringed instrument. Apollo also played a stringed instrument, the lyre.

"Many stories were told about Apollo's skill with the lyre, in art his most common attribute. According to a story made famous by Ovid and beloved by European painters of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, the satyr Marsyas, master of the double-flute, challenged Apollo to a musical contest, the winner being allowed to do as he liked; Apollo won easily and flayed Marsyas alive."

- Apollo

"The myth of Apollo and the flute player Marsyas was sometimes interpreted as a victory for the rational part of the soul over the base appetites of the body."

- Orpheus-Christus in the Art of Late Antiquity

Note that Marsyas was a "master of the double-flute and Ian Mcdonald uses twin flutes to introduce I Talk to The Wind .

Brandenburg Concerto IV: The Musical Contest between Apollo and Marsyas

"Apollo, as patron of music and poetry and leader of the Muses, embodied the civilised and rational as opposed to the darker Dionysian aspects of Man's nature. In the legend of the musical contest between Apollo and the satyr Marsyas (enormously popular after 1500) the former played a lyre and the latter an aulos - so stringed instruments came to represent reason, harmony and order, while winds symbolised passion, drunkeness or amorous pursuits.

Marsyas' pipes had been invented by Pallas Athena and almost played themselves. For some time the Muses (competition judges) favoured Marsyas, so in order to win Apollo was forced to resort to outrageous tricks - playing his instrument upside down, singing to his own accompaniment and finally flattering the Muses with praise of Olympus and Helicon. In Renaissance and Baroque art the most frequent substitute for the Dionysian aulos (often represented in mythological scenes by instruments which were part of contemporary musical life) was the phallic recorder, sometimes depicted in pairs because the aulos was a double pipe; and the lira da braccio or violin (the latter thought to have been invented by Orpheus) usually replaced the obsolete lyre as the instrument of Apollo.

I would suggest that the locus topicus for this concerto was the musical contest between Apollo and Marsyas, symbolising the conflict between Reason and Passion. This would certainly explain the unusual choice of instruments and the occasional immoderate virtuosity of the violin writing (Apollo's tricks); and the way Bach writes for the pair of recorders strongly suggests a double pipe, with scale passages and arpeggios in one part against long notes (drone) in the other, and passages in thirds and in unison."

- The Brandenburg Concertos

And so it would seem that, by allowing the double-flute in I Talk to the Wind to prevail over the electric guitar in 21st Century Schizoid Man , King Crimson have reversed the outcome of the contest between Apollo and Marysas. In fact, after 21st Century Schizoid Man , the guitar does not play a dominant role in the album.

The question...

"Will no one lay the laurel wreath?"

....could be interpreted to mean:
1) "Will we discard intellect devoid of Eros? (symbolized by Apollo's laurel wreath) Here the blame for modern man's predicament is laid at the feet of Apollo, the Thinking function.
2) "Will we cease this Promethean over reaching?" Considering the laurel wreath was given as a prize in competition.
3) Laurel wreaths were sometimes laid at tombs in memory of the dead. As the song is an "Epitaph", this could be what Peter Sinfield had in mind - to symbolically lay the laurel wreath commemorating, "as silence drowns the screams", the repression of Eros, the anima, the voice of whom the wind could not hear. By finally acknowledging her existence a reconciliation of the divided psychological functions might be effected.

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