The Secrets of a Fire King
by Kim Edwards

More symbolic links from “The Secrets of a Fire King” ...

JASPER ... JUBILEE ... ELI ... OGLEBY/OGELBY ... WORMWOOD

JASPER—the narrator; the Fire King

Although Jasper National Park in Alberta, Canada may be as near to Heaven as I’ve been, it doesn’t seem the appropriate reference for the narrator of “Secrets.” Nor, despite his stern online visage, does Brother Jasper (the man who brought baseball to Manhattan College and actually invented the 7th-inning stretch) seem a likely candidate.

Instead, it seems inevitable that we should seek out a Biblical reference, and, as far as I can tell, the Bible uses the word almost exclusively in its geologic sense—to mean an especially attractive kind of quartz, mentioned in the last chapters of Revelation as both a symbol of Jesus and as part of the foundation of the holy city of New Jerusalem. At least one author has found meaning in the order of its mention in the Old Testament versus the New Testament.

Most tantalizing, yet less conclusive, is the mention of JASPER in Ezekiel 28—sometimes cited as part of the story of the rebellion of Satan. The matter is under dispute, apparently, but if you accept the contention that Ezekiel’s Prince of Tyrus is Satan ... well, then, look at the way the princely devil has been characterized.

JUBILEE—the local girl; object of Jasper’s attentions

In common usage, a JUBILEE these days is any specially celebrated anniversary. But the word rightfully applies to a 50th anniversary because of its origins in the Hebrew scriptures, where it meant every 50th year—a year of rest when slaves were to be freed, lost or stolen property restored, and fields not tilled. (JUBILEE comes from the Hebrew word for the “ram’s horn” used to proclaim the year of celebration.) In the Roman Catholic tradition, however, JUBILEE refers to a year in which “plenary indulgence” may be earned by pious acts—i.e., a full pardon, or canceling, of worldly punishments due because of sins committed, erased sacramentally.

ELI—Jubilee’s younger brother; apprentice to the Fire King

Continuing the Biblical symbolism of the characters’ names, we come to Eli, last high priest of Shiloh, whose sons were at least partially responsible for losing the sacred Ark of the Covenant.

On the other hand, the story’s ELI may well be a diminutive form of Elijah, the Old Testament prophet who was to come back to presage the arrival of the Messiah. (Indeed, John the Baptist was said—by Jesus, himself—to have been Elijah returned.) This allusion is more appealing, because it was Elijah who called down fire from Heaven, once in a “burn-off” contest with the priests of Baal and again to burn up the messengers of the king of Samaria.

PHILLIPA

Finding a reference in the Bible to parallel PHILLIPA is complicated by the spelling Edwards uses for her butterfly performer. Phillip is considered only a variant of Philip (one “l”), a masculine given name from philo- + hippos meaning “lover of horses” and used by any of several kings: of Macedonia, 359-336, father of Alexander the Great; of France, 1180-1223; of Spain, 1556-1598, the man who launched the Armada against England; of France, 1285-1314; of the Wampanoag, the king who waged King Philip’s War against the New England colonists in 1675-76.

Philip also is the name of two saints in the Christian religion: one of the Apostles (Mat 10:3, Acts 1:13) and Philip the Evangelist in the first century A.D.

Philippi, named by and after Philip of Macedonia, was a town in north-central Macedonia, Greece near the Aegean Sea. It was the scene of the defeat of Brutus and Cassius by Antony and Octavian in 42 BC, and later an unfortunate stopover for the Apostle Paul (he was imprisoned there). Philippians, of course, is a book of the New Testament, representing the later epistle of St. Paul to the Christians back in Philippi.

I’m sticking with Phillipa Louvois.

OGLEBY to OGELBY

If Edwards’ spelling of Phillipa gives pause, her spelling of the name of the story’s “snake man” causes a dead stop and a double-take. When we first meet him, as he snores away in Jasper’s tent, he is called Ogleby ... OG-L-E-BY. Later in the story, just before Eli brings down the house, the snake handler is called Ogelby ... OG-E-L-BY!

The ’Net is very little help in either case.

The nearest thing to a relevant Ogleby reference on the web was an Australian site “specifically intended as a vehicle to disseminate information on rock art research throughout the world.” That’s “rock art” as in cave paintings, not album covers. The site, apparently, is administered by the aptly named Cliff Ogleby and provided by the Department of Geomatics at the University of Melbourne. But trying to make something out of “rock art” and our “jasper-stone” seems to be stretching even literary interpretation a bit too far.

Stymied, I tried using only the apparent “root” of the name-words: OGLE and OGEL. Even so, web searches proved unsatisfying—except, perhaps, for a character in The Certain Hour by James Branch Cabell; but here again, the reach exceeded my grasp.

Shaken—but not stirred—I reached for the dictionary, with surprisingly gratifying results:

ogle

an eye; a lewd and leering glance

ogel

obsolete; variant of ougle or ouggel: ugly or horrible

Certainly, the progression from OGLE-by to OGEL-by matches the movement of the story.

WORMWOOD

At the end of “Fire King,” we find Jasper-the-blacksmith lying in the dust, wracked by lust, and filled to his ouggelsome ogles with regret over the squandered Jubilee. Now, with a single reference, Kim Edwards evokes both the secular and the sacred meanings she has woven into her story.

I lay panting, breathing dust and
the bitter scent of wormwood ...

For a plant, wormwood has quite a literary tradition. For our purposes, of utmost importance is its appearance in Revelation as the name of the burning star that fell from heaven. But also of interest are its figurative meanings as 1) an emblem of something grievous to the soul and 2) used in wormwood lecture, as a “scolding” or “talking-to.” To wit:

1) In Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece, the victim wails against Opportunity itself:

Thy secret pleasure turns to open shame,
Thy private feasting to a public fast,
Thy smoothing titles to a ragged name,
Thy sugar’d tongue to bitter wormwood taste:
Thy violent vanities can never last.
How comes it then, vile Opportunity,
Being so bad, such numbers seek for thee?

2) Firing a broadside in the 17th-century “Pamphlet Wars,” the 1640 “Womens Sharpe Revenge” asserted:

And now lately one or two of the sonnes
of Ignorance have pen’d three severall ...
ill-favoured Pamphlets ... called Lectures,
as the Juniper Lecture, the Crabtree
Lecture and Wormwood Lecture, wherein
they have laid most false aspersions upon
all women generally.