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family’ and ‘seat at Castlemortle’ is retained in
full.
9
Clearly Lewis considered it significant.
Castlemortle does not appear to be a real
place. But in a work titled The High History
of the Holy Graal, ‘the King of Castle Mortal’
is the enemy of the ‘King Fisherman’.
10
The High History of the Holy Graal is a
nineteenth-century translation of an anonym-
ous thirteenth-century French work. Lewis
read it in 1916, and wrote enthusiastically to
Arthur Greeves: ‘It is absolute heaven: it is
more mystic & eerie than the ‘‘Morte’’ & has
[a] more connected plot.’
11
In a letter written in
1943, he listed it among his ‘favourite
reading’.
12
O’Hara is introduced in chapter 6 of That
Hideous Strength. In the previous chapter, the
reader will have learnt, together with Jane
(Mark’s wife and the other protagonist), of a
person known as ‘Mr. Fisher-King’, described
as the chief around whom a company is gath-
ering to fight a danger threatening humanity
(ch. 5 § 3). In section 1 of chapter 7 it is
revealed that Fisher-King is the Pendragon of
Logres, and that the Pendragon is Elwin
Ransom, the protagonist of the first two
novels of Lewis’s science-fiction trilogy.
13
As That Hideous Strength develops, the
N.I.C.E. and the Company of Logres gathered
around the Pendragon are shown to be implac-
ably opposed forces for evil and good, fighting
for control of England.
14
O’Hara, ‘of ancient
family’, with ‘a seat at Castlemortle’, is an
agent of the forces that oppose the Fisher
King, just as the original ‘King of Castle
Mortal’ was the deadly enemy of the ‘King
Fisherman’. A seemingly unnecessary descrip-
tion of a peripheral character is in fact
thematically resonant. Lewis drew on many
versions of the Arthurian story for That
Hideous Strength,
15
but this single passing al-
lusion to what he called ‘a real ‘‘old french’’
romance’ is perhaps the most obscure.
16
MICHE
`
LE DU PLESSIS-HAY
North West University (Potchefstroom)
doi:10.1093/notesj/gjv095
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THE HISTORY OF ‘TRANSHUMANISM’
TRANSHUMANISM is a movement that
seeks to promote the evolution of the human
race beyond its present limitations through the
use of science and technology. The evolutionary
biologist and eugenicist Julian Huxley (1887–
1975) is usually identified as the originator of
the term ‘transhumanism’, although present
opinion differs on when he first used the expres-
sion. We suggest that Huxley did not coin the
term and that his first uses of it do not coincide
with any of the dates usually given. More inter-
estingly, perhaps, in spite of its futuristic conno-
tations ‘transhumanism’ has a long history that
dates back to Dante’s Paradiso and, ultimately,
to the Pauline epistles.
Most authorities, including the OED, trace
the earliest use of the term ‘transhumanism’ to
Huxley’s 1957 essay of the same name.
1
A
minority, including leading figures of the
transhumanist movement, have proposed the
9
Lewis, Tortured Planet, 77.
10
du Plessis-Hay, ‘That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis’,
129 n. 1; The High History of the Holy Graal, trans.
Sebastian Evans (1898; London; New York, 1903), III, viii.
11
C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis,I:
Family Letters: 1905–1931, ed. Walter Hooper (New York,
2004), 249–50; duPlessis-Hay, ‘That Hideous Strength by
C.S. Lewis’, 129 n. 1.
12
C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, II:
Books, Broadcasts, and the War: 1931–1949, ed. Walter
Hooper, (New York, [2005]), 562.
13
C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (London, 1938); C.
S. Lewis, Perelandra: A Novel (London, 1943).
14
Explicitly discussed by the Pendragon and others in ch.
17 § 4.
15
du Plessis-Hay, ‘That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis’,
cxxii–cxxvii; Hooper, C. S.Lewis: A Companion, 233–5. See
for example: Geoffrey of Monmouth, Histories of the Kings
of Britain, trans. Sebastian Evans, intro. Lucy Allen Paton
(London; New York, 1912); Thomas Malory, Le Morte
d’Arthur, ed. Ernest Rhys (London; New York, 1906);
Layamon, Selections from Layamon’s Brut, ed. G. L.
Brook, intro. C. S. Lewis (Oxford, 1963). See also, E. K.
Chambers, Arthur of Britain (London, 1927); R. G.
Collingwood and J. N. L. Myers, Roman Britain and the
English Settlements (Oxford, 1936).
16
C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters, I, 249.
1
See, e.g., OED, sv. ‘Transhumanism’; ‘Julian Huxley
and Transhumanism’, <http://www.huxley.net/transhuman
ism/>, accessed 11 April 2014; Gregory Hansell and William
Grassie (eds), Hþ/–: Transhumanism and its Critics,
(Philadelphia, 2011), 20; Ronald Cole-Turner (ed.),
Transhumanism and Transcendence (Washington, DC,
2011), Introduction, 12.
2015 NOTES AND QUERIES 465
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earlier date of 1927, when Huxley’s essay
‘Evolutionary Humanism’ was published.
2
However, both of these dates are wrong.
Huxley first used the term, as far as we can
establish, in his two-part lecture ‘Knowledge,
Morality and Destiny’. This was the third
series of William Alanson White Memorial
Lectures delivered in Washington, DC on 19
and 20 April 1951 and published in the same
year in the journal Psychiatry.
3
In the first
lecture Huxley describes his creed thus: ‘Such
a broad philosophy might perhaps be called,
not Humanism, because that has certain unsat-
isfactory connotations, but Transhumanism.
It is the idea of humanity attempting to
overcome its limitations and to arrive at
fuller fruition.’
4
The lecture was subsequently
published with light revisions in Huxley’s 1957
collection of essays New Bottles for New Wine.
5
The volume opens with a short piece bearing
the title ‘Transhumanism’, and which contains
a paraphrase of the original definition from
1951: ‘We need a name for this new belief.
Perhaps transhumanism will serve; man
remaining man, but transcending himself, by
realizing the new possibilities of and for his
human nature.’
6
This appears to be a self-
conscious coining of the expression and no
doubt explains why the term is commonly, if
mistakenly, said to originate in this source.
It is significant that the index to this
collection includes several references to ‘trans-
humanism’, including ten pages of another
essay entitled ‘Evolutionary Humanism’ in
which the term does not appear. Presumably,
the person who constructed the index thought
that significant elements of the essay concerned
the subject matter of transhumanism, even if
the term itself was not present. This would
have been an innocent enough decision had it
not been for the fact that a much earlier
version ‘Evolutionary Humanism’ appeared
in Huxley’s 1927 publication Religion without
Revelation. It seems likely that it was on the
basis of the 1957 index that James Hughes—
who proposed the earlier date—deduced that
the term was coined in 1927, mistakenly
reasoning on the basis of the New Bottles
index that the word appeared in
‘Evolutionary Humanism’ and therefore must
have appeared in the 1927 version of that
essay. In short, the most widely accepted date
for Julian Huxley’s coining of ‘transhu-
manism’—1957—is incorrect. Huxley first
used the term in a 1951 lecture that was pub-
lished in the same year. The alternative date of
1927 is the result of an erroneous deduction
from the misleading index entry in New
Bottles for New Wine. If Huxley coined the
term, he did so in 1951.
But was Huxley the first to use the term? In
a word, no. A significant earlier reference to
‘transhumanism’ comes in a paper by the
Canadian author, historian, jurist, and philoso-
pher W. D. Lighthall. Among Lighthall’s varied
accomplishments was election to Fellowship
of the Royal Society of Canada. In the 1940
Proceedings and Transactions of that body
Lighthall published a highly speculative theory
of cosmic evolution entitled ‘The Law of
Cosmic Evolutionary Adaptation: An
Interpretation of Recent Thought’.
7
The article
outlines a progressivist metaphysical philoso-
phy, similar in certain respects to that of both
Huxley and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, that
sought to connect cosmic, organic, and cultural
evolution. Lighthall here speaks of the ‘Paul’s
Transhumanism’, citing the biblical reference I
Corinthians 2:9: ‘Eye has not seen, nor ear
heard, neither has it entered the conception of
man.’
8
Given the vast gulf, both temporally and
in terms of philosophical orientation, between
2
James Hughes claims in Citizen Cyborg that
‘transhumanism’ first appears in Huxley’s Religion without
Revelation (1927) but gives no page number for the citation.
Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to
the Redesigned Human of the Future (Cambridge, MA,
2004), 158. Nick Bostrom, one of the most prominent
contemporary advocates of transhumanism, repeats the
1927 date in ‘A History of Transhumanist Thought’,
Journal of Evolution and Technology, 14 (2005), 1–25, at 2.
This date also appears, on Bostrom’s authority, in Al Gore,
The Future (New York, 2013), 239.
3
Psychiatry, xiv (1951), 127–51.
4
Ibid., 139.
5
Julian Huxley, ‘Knowledge, Morality, and Destiny’,
New Bottles for New Wine (London: Chatto and Windus,
1957), 245–78.
6
Huxley, ‘Transhumanism’, 13–17, definition on p. 17.
7
W. D. Lighthall, ‘The Law of Cosmic Evolutionary
Adaptation: An Interpretation of Recent Thought’, Royal
Society of Canada, Ottawa. Proceedings and Transactions /
Me
´
moires et Comptes Rendus de la Socie
´
te
´
Royale Du
Canada 1940. ser. 3, v. 34, section 2, 135–41.
8
I Cor. 2:9; ‘Law of Cosmic Evolutionary Adaptation’,
189.
466 NOTES AND QUERIES 2015
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St Paul and Julian Huxley, this reference may
seem puzzling. However, a link between St
Paul’s putative transhumanism and that of
Julian Huxley is provided, albeit circuitously,
by Dante and his early nineteenth-century
translator, Henry Francis Carey.
In what was to become the standard
Victorian translation of Dante’s Divine
Comedy, Carey used the term ‘transhuman’ in
1814 to render a term in the first Canto of
Dante’s Paradiso. In describing his heaven-
wards journey with Beatrice, Dante speaks of
being ‘transhumanised’, creating a new Italian
verb trasumanar:
As Glaucus, when he tasted of the herb,
That made him peer among the ocean gods;
Words may not tell of that transhuman change:
9
Here Dante makes reference to the deification
of Glaucus, recounted in Ovid.
10
But there are
also unambiguous references in this Canto to
St Paul’s description of being ‘caught up’ to the
third heaven (2 Corinthians 12). Dante’s
allusions to the biblical text are evident not
merely from the general context, but also
from his mention of the ineffability of the
experience and his questioning of whether it
had taken place in bodily form or not—both
of which are rehearsals of St Paul’s own
speculations about the experience.
11
Lighthall, then, is making an ‘ism’ of the
reference to the transhuman state familiar to
readers of Carey’s translation of the Divine
Comedy. In an added twist, Lighthall got the
biblical reference wrong. The 2 Corinthians
passage that Dante draws upon speaks of
‘things that cannot be told, which man may
not utter’ (12:4). This bears a passing
resemblance to the 1 Corinthians passage
cited by Lighthall: ‘Eye has not seen, nor ear
heard’ which no doubt led to his confusion.
Lighthall’s conflation of these passages
notwithstanding, it is clear that he is seeking
to baptize his new scientific version of transhu-
manism by invoking Dante’s trasumanar and
St Paul’s rapture.
Although we lack direct evidence of Huxley’s
familiarity with Lighthall’s paper, given the for-
mer’s deep interest in speculative theories of
cosmic evolution and the prominence of the
journal in which the paper appeared, it is
likely that he had read it. Huxley had been
searching for an alternative to ‘evolutionary hu-
manism’ to characterize his own utopian scien-
tific philosophy, and it seems that in Lighthall’s
formulation he had found one. Thus, while
there is no doubt that Huxley’s appropriation
of the term ‘transhumanism’ and his association
of it with his own brand of futurist ideology has
led to its present currency, he was not, as is
commonly thought, its originator. As for the
convoluted history of the term, its significance
goes beyond etymology. It offers additional
data for a longstanding debate about whether
Western notions of progress and modernity are
simply secularized versions of Judeo-Christian
eschatological conceptions or whether they
have an independent legitimacy.
12
PETER HARRISON
University of Queensland
J
OSEPH WOLYNIAK
University of Oxford
doi:10.1093/notesj/gjv080
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TED HUGHES AND CHARLES
TOMLINSON: AN UNLIKELY
FRIENDSHIP
TO readers of contemporary English poetry,
it may seem unlikely that anything would
9
Dante, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieiri, tr.
William Henry Carey [1814] (New York, 1970), Paradiso,
Canto 1, 68–70.
10
Ovid, Metapmorphoses, XIII, 898–968.
11
For commentary see especially Steven Botterill, Dante
and the Mystical Tradition: Bernard of Clairvaux in the
Commedia (Cambridge, 1994), 94–241. Cf. C. H.
Grandgent, Companion to the Divine Comedy (Cambridge,
MA, 1975), 215–17; James Miller, Dante and the Unorthodox
(Waterloo, Ontario, 2005), 6–7.
12
The classic statements of opposed positions on this
question were provided by Karl Lo
¨
with, Meaning in
History (Chicago, 1949) and Hans Blumenberg, The
Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, MA, 1985).
2015 NOTES AND QUERIES 467
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