LOL!!!! That's it?!
From the (perhaps) fact that Melville was a Unitarian you say Moby Dick was a Arian Heresy tract?!
Hilarious.
There are at least a dozen more likely explanations for "Call me Ishmael." Not the least being that Ishmael was a bit of an outcast, as was the narrator of MD.
Sheesh.
There are at least a dozen more likely explanations for "Call me Ishmael." Not the least being that Ishmael was a bit of an outcast, as was the narrator of MD.
//////////
well yes this is correct. the one reference in the new testament to Ishmael is that he is an outcast. and he is the line that the moslems trace themselves from. they took the other side in the arian controversy.
MELVILLE'S USE OF DEMONOLOGY AND WITCHCRAFT IN MOBY-DICK BY HELEN P. TRUMP
Melville's interest in demonology and witchcraft as a literary sub- ject, possibly one formative in the writing of Moby-Dick, is evident in some jottings he made in his set of Shakespeare acquired in 1849.' In Volume V H he wrote. "Ego non baptisto te in nomine Paints et Filii et Spiritus Sancti-sed in nominc Diaboli," a parody of the Christian baptismal formula. He repeated the formula partially in Ahab's baptism of the harpoon in Moby-Dick (Chap. CX1II, "The Forge"), and again partially in a letter to Hawthorne while he was finishing the romance in late June 1851. In the letter to Hawthorne he wrote that the whole book was "broiled" in "hellfire" and that its secret motto is "Ego non baptisto te in nomine . . . ," suggesting that the inverted formula is the key to the hook's meaning, as a motto or epigraph was supposed to be in this period."