In The Brahman109 Hester Pulter draws on several sources to create a complex meditation on life, death and self-transcendence. As she explores the role of the body and materiality in human life, Pulter intertwines engagement with Eastern wisdom traditions, classical mythology, scripture, and Christian theology. Intertwining these heterogeneous sources, Pulter arrives at a distinctive understanding of the body as the source and substrate of the physical suffering that she experienced throughout her life but also as the unique core of her own personal identity.

The source for the titular “Brahman” with whom Pulter begins the poem is the Greek historian Plutarch’s description of Alexander the Great in his Parallel Lives, a first-century CE collection of moralizing biographies in which Plutarch pairs the histories of Greek historical figures with the histories of Roman historical figures. Parallel Lives was translated into English by Sir Thomas North in 1579, was one of the most popular books in Renaissance England, and was widely used as a source of information about the classical world. Plutarch’s text served as the source for Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Timon of Athens, and Julius Caesar. In fact, Plutarch pairs his telling of the life of Julius Caesar with the life of Alexander the Great.

In Plutarch’s telling, after Alexander marches into India he meets an Indian priest named Calanus who is an ascetic philosopher. Suffering from a painful illness, Calanus commits suicide by voluntarily climbing his own funeral pyre and allowing himself to be burnt to death. The word “Brahman” is not used in the Plutarch text; instead Calanus is referred to as a “gymnosophist.” Pulter also uses the word “gymnosophist” (l. 21) in her poem, but she additionally introduces the distinctively Indian notion of the “Brahman.” As British presence in India grew from the early seventeenth century with the establishment of the East India Company, English people became more familiar with Indian culture, religion, and social hierarchy beyond what Plutarch knew, and early modern contacts with India likely brought the word “Brahman” into the English lexicon. Pulter’s titular “Brahman” (also spelled “Brahmin” in English) originates from the Sanskrit word “Brahmana,” which designates a member of the priestly class in the Vedic Hindu society. One source of Pulter’s knowledge about Indian culture may have been Sir Thomas Roe who had been sent as ambassador to the Mughal court between 1615 and 1619. Roe’s unpublished journals circulated widely in intellectual circles in England, and it is possible that Pulter had access to them.

Some growing anthropological familiarity with Indian culture notwithstanding, Pulter mainly follows Plutarch’s understanding of Calanus as an avatar of the Greco-Roman stoicism which framed suicide as a way of escaping from the contingent suffering imposed by the world. She completes the story of Calanus by claiming that his suicidal self-immolation allows his soul to reassume its “pristine glory” (l. 8). Thus Pulter adopts from Plutarch a dualist notion of the human person in which the body—as the scene of decay, disease and emotional disturbances including “sorrow” (l. 24)—is imagined as nothing but a hindrance to the “glory” (l. 8) of the essentially non-bodily soul. Pulter uses the Calanus story to suggest her own temptation to suicide.

But as tempted by this vision of liberation from a suffering body as she may be, Pulter ultimately dismisses Calanus’s suicide as an example of “stoical tricks” (l. 22). For her, as a Christian, suicide is off-limits, and this is largely because as a Christian she cannot ultimately subscribe to Calanus’s Greco-Roman dualism. Indeed, it may be that Pulter associates Calanus’s dualist metaphysics with the exoticism and presumptively non-Christian East evoked by the name “Brahmin.” Like many seventeenth-century Christians, Pulter could not quite imagine life after death as a completely disembodied state, and therefore the story of the Brahman is swiftly complicated—if not outright contradicted—by a new metaphor for death: that of the mythological figure of the Phoenix, the bird that periodically burns itself to death only to regenerate from its own ashes.

The Phoenix was first described by the mid-fifth-century BCE Greek historian Herodotus who identified it as part of Egyptian culture. After Herodotus, however, the idea of the Phoenix became widely integrated into Greek and later Roman culture and from there it became a commonplace in early modern European culture. By introducing the Phoenix as a second governing metaphor for her own wish to leave her sick and pained body behind, Pulter complicates the dualism associated with the suicidal Brahman. Though Pulter introduces the Phoenix with the word “So” (l. 9), meaning “in the same way” and suggesting continuity with the previous account of Calanus, the metaphor is in fact discontinuous because it declines body/soul dualism for a more unified (and more fundamentally corporeal) picture of identity, since the Phoenix obviously does not experience the liberation of a separable soul upon the dissolution of its body but rather experiences physical regeneration from its own ashes. The death and rebirth of the Phoenix does not suggest a liberation from the physical stuff of the body so much as a transformation of that physical stuff.

One of the animating features of the poem is the tension between these two metaphors for death—one dualist, with the soul escaping from the body, the other corporealist, with the body retaining its central importance to any kind of living presence. Pulter attempts to resolve the tension by introducing a third major metaphor for death, namely the story of Moses, Aaron, and Eliezer drawn from the Book of Numbers. In that story, Aaron’s priestly status is manifested by his special priestly garment, and as his death approaches Moses removes this priestly garment and puts it on Aaron’s son, Eliezer, symbolizing the continuation of the priestly office in the son who supplants his father. Pulter’s use of the Aaron story may be suggested by George Herbert’s poem entitled “Aaron” in which the speaker hopes “That to the old man I may rest, / And be in him new drest” (ll. 19-20).1 In the long history of Christian reflection on death and the afterlife, clothing is frequently used as a metaphor for the body that is—perhaps temporarily—cast aside at death. But in Herbert’s poem clothing does not represent the discarded body but rather the new, perfected, resurrected body in which the person will be “new-drest.” Pulter seems to see a similar lesson in the source material. In Pulter’s use of the Aaron/Ebeniezer/Moses material, clothing is not incidental but essential to Eliezer’s entry into the priestly status. Now dressed in Aaron’s robes, Eliezer continues Aaron’s priestly role and thus Aaron’s symbolic life while Aaron’s physical life ends in nakedness on Mount Hor. Here the clothing is a material thing that is separable from the body and yet inseparable from the socially legible personhood that Aaron had and that is now transferred to Eliezer.

At the conclusion of this poem Pulter refers to herself as “being worn with sorrow, sin, and age” (l. 24) and therefore wishing to escape her life which is now framed again as something that, in dualist fashion, she would like to “lay by [i.e. aside]” (l. 26), as Aaron’s priestly clothing was laid by. And yet, the tension the poem has created between these three incompatible metaphors of afterlife (dualist transcendence of the soul; the physical reanimation of the body; the transplantation of some defining and unifying physical element from one body to another) leads Pulter to hope for something more complicated than simple transcendence of the body by a wholly non-physical and separable soul. As she dreams of a life after death for herself Pulter briefly hopes that her “soul shall reascend above / To God” (ll. 28-29) but then corporealizes her fantasy with the hope that the “Word” that created everything (i.e., God, as represented in The Gospel of John) will use that soul to “reinspire my dormant dust again” (l. 33) to create a new body-soul unity that will be different from the historically unique Pulter and yet also profoundly in continuity with that historically unique Pulter. “Reinspire” refers back to the Latin root of spirit or breath, so that she expects that God will infuse the dust that remains after her death with renewed vigor and life as he “from obscurity my atoms [will] raise / To sing in joy His everlasting praise” (ll. 34-35).

The philosophical work that the poem performs—its investigation of the role of the body in the life of the person—is therefore accomplished by the superposition of competing metaphors for death that are drawn from competing sources ranging from classical antiquity to Hebrew scripture to Christian theology. Working with these diverse source materials and setting these competing metaphors for life after death into play with each other is one of the engines that powers Pulter’s exceptional poem.

Footnotes