MOBY DICK IS THE SPARK OF DIVINE GNOSIS: blubber as those densified sheaths of matter that surround the warm interior, husks of the unseen being. If such an epic sprawling novel is said to contain within it a biblically allegorical mythos; it would only be of the true esoteric route to note that every biblical allegory has its selfsame gnostic roots, hermeneutically bubbling up from such aquatic and critical depths. The descents into cetological minutiae is that same descent of the soul into matter — as Ishmael wrestles with the duality of “docile, verdant peace of the land” and the “crazy cannibalistic chaos of the sea”; he draws his analytical rationality towards that ocean he can only know from a ship; so too Science draws its Pequodic boundary to stave off the abyssal waters of Nun, mystic night of the soul. The artifacts of the mundane realm, which Melville turns into an art of Digression (loci of contemplation), are only existent in contrast with the mysticism of the transcendent ocean, which is one with the Sky – as the archaic consciousness of Queequeg’s when he reveals his cosmology: “the stars are isles, but that far beyond all visible horizons, their own mild, uncontinented seas, interflow with the blue heavens”. Though critical readings of the ‘homoerotic’ are not correct, on the surface, since the homoerotic is revealed not as within sexuality, but outside of it, when Ishmael is purifying that divine Semen of the Whale that represents gnosis: he goes into an ecstatic trance; a frenzy in which all of mankind, not homoerotic but Homo-Eros, becomes unified — “let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness”. As for Ahab; testament to the old figure and a figure of the Old Testament, has been ‘dismembered’ — much like Osiris, where the loss of his ‘members’ is the forgetting of the Self, only to be ‘remembered’ in anamnesis of the soul. Mystical is his every word that isn’t bound to the locale of the ship: Ishmael says “the body is the lees of my better being”, “my shadow here on earth is my true substance”, Ahab says “the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy”, he gnostically laments the scandal of autogenesis: the ontological loneliness of God who so longs to know himself in the void of himself.

Thou knowest not how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun. I know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent. There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical. Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see it. Oh, thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief.

The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers.