Who could tell me means of the following words, phrases, sentences... in "Eleonora" by Edgar Allan Poe:

1.The foreword: Sub conservatione formae specificae salva anima.(Raymond Lully) ( By the way,Who is Raymond Lully?) 2.agressi sunt mare tenebrarum, quid in eo esset exploraturi ( By the way,Who is the Nubian geographer?)

3.Zephyrs

4.Aeolus

5.Helusion( a saint in Helusion)

-- Anonymous, May 07, 2004

Answers

Had to do a little googling. My latin is rusty but perhaps you can track down the texts and translations online once you know that Raymond Lully was a medieval philosopher/theologian/missionary/poet from about 1234 to 1315 when he was stoned by Muslims he was trying to convert. One of his main tenets is that reason aided by faith can know God separate from extraordinary revelation, a type of theosophy or platonism. That was typical of the classic revival of that age.

The Nubian geographer- Sherif Al Idrisi(Edrisi), Muslim scholar, lived a century before Lully. This is his nickname by mistake. You are lucky here. Poe has been known to make up fantasy references but these are real and can be researched online.

Zephyrs are little winds, probably elemental spirits which are related to King Aeolus, the keeper of the bag of winds who releases them to travel the earth and then return to the Cave of Winds.

Helusion is the Greek form of Elysian fields, a plain for blessed warriors in the afterlife. Ptolomei is an Alexandrian successor to the throne of Egypt(uniting references to Egyptian myths of the afterlife to the Greek. Elysian fields near the River Charon that leads to the underworld(all Greek). Interestingly this is in a passage of Homer's Odysseus where Menelaus is compensated for the loss of Helen after his early death with an afterlife between the underworld and heaven partly because he has some of Zeus' bloodline. It might be tempting to relate this to his poem "To Helen" where a Menelaus theory has been proposed to explain the symbolism.

-- Anonymous, May 08, 2004