Friday, February 02, 2007

The Banquet

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Illustration by William Blake to Milton's Comus

showing human banqueters transformed by the magician Comus into animal-headed beings. Animals are egoless, so a human with an animal head is symbolic of the egoless state. Similarly, in Shakespeare's The Tempest, Prospero the illusionist transforms a group of self-deluded banqueters in order to reveal to them their true selves: "they shall be themselves". In a strange paradox he deludes them in order to remove the delusion of ego.

Marc Chagall

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