Glossary entry for
rough god
It sounds a bit like opinion to me, but according to Greil Marcus's review of The
Healing Gamein the June/97 issue of "Interview" magazine (page 54), the "rough
god" is the "Angel of Death"
Van mailing list member David Di Sabatino suggests another possible interpretation,
seeing a reference to the following poem - especially the last two lines - by
W. B. Yeats:
Ê
Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot see the falconer
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere,
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert binds
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Van references in:
- "Rough God Goes Riding"
(on The Healing Game)
- "For Mr. Thomas"
(on The Philosopher's Stone)
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