The Greater Trumps: (14) The Sphinx

In the far wastelands of the world, in the white desert under the cold stars, the Sphinx sits. It is certainly large; its body is that of a titanic lion and its head is that of a noble human. Some portray it as a female form, hungry for wisdom and with a weakness for riddles; some portray it as a male form, contemplative and static, bound to a specific place. In either form, it has presence and exerts a kind of pressure on its surroundings - the pressure of its existence and the weight of years.

It is this influence which the Sphinx symbolises - the weight of Time as it moves on inexorably, or the sheer influence of Duration, of perdurability and the property of being there all the time. To invoke the image of the Sphinx is to evoke both time and timelessness, both duration and decay, both existence and entropy - for each pair is a coin with two sides.

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Yeats's peculiar magical vision in The Second Coming is often dominated in our minds by the image of the falcon "turning and turning in the widening gyre". The centripetal effect of entropy, of spiritual loss leading to things falling apart, blots out the equally compelling image in the second half of the poem:

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 birds.
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?

It is clear what Yeats had in mind when he penned these ominous words. What is troubling and less clear is whether our fragile modernity can withstand the weight of that monstrous image when it finally manifests, perdurable and insulting to our human world.