Between Worlds: Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism (review)
the first place is allowed its glimmer, in the course of a philological and comparative history of pagan and mythological images and idols (textual as well as plastic) of Pan, Bacchus, Silenus, and attendant satyrs. My favorite moment comes at the end of d’Aubignac’s allegorical unfolding of the god Pan — whose name means “Tout,” and whom he connects with Jupiter Ammon, Isis, and Diana (among others) through their shared motif of horns that signify the celestial lights in Mediterranean mythologies. In his allegory, nourished by a comparatist intelligence and erudition, the image of Pan/Tout/All becomes a cosmos in which the figure’s human part represents not man but reason. As he moves into the last detail of the image in the following paragraph, the false pagan dieu becomes without comment a capitalized Dieu: “Reste la solitude que ce Dieu chérissait tant” (202) which represents “l’unité du monde,” pace those pagan philosophers (not to mention Cusanus and Bruno!) who believed in a plurality of worlds. Against that belief he brings to bear two other pagans, “le divin Platon” and “Aristote même.” The work’s final and self-reflexive paragraph presents the teaching of Aristotle on the circularity of the world as having inspired Philo, who says that “les gens de bien, aprés avoir tourné leur compas sur toutes les actions de ce monde, vont finir un cercle admirable dans le Ciel, au même lieu où ils l’avaient commencé” (213). Here — and not in any repetition of the superiority of Christian theology — d’Aubignac winds up his own “compas,” which began with an invocation of God’s creation and the “perfection of ce grand Tout” (49). Hédelin d’Aubignac’s own book has become a kind of Pan, a circular and cosmic “Tout” in which pagan, Jewish, and Christian wisdom combine with the rationalism of the new philosophy to present not only the pious and rationalist refutation of an idol, but a marvelous compendium of human and religious imagination. MARY BAINE CAMPBELL Brandeis University