“Hermes waved the rod and they followed gibbering.”—
(Homer, Odyssey, XXIV, 5-7.)
still meaning the souls as the poet shows, saying figuratively:—
“And even as bats flit gibbering in the secret recesses
Of a wondrous cave when one has fallen down out of the rock
From the cluster....”—
(Ibid., XXIV, 9 seq.)
p. 155.Out of the rock, he says, is said of Adamas. This, he says, is Adamas, “the corner-stone which has become the head of the corner.”[65] For in the head is the impressed brain of the substance from which every fatherhood is impressed.[66] “Which Adamas,” he says, “I place at the foundation of Zion.”[67] Allegorically, he says, he means the image of the Man. But that Adamas is placed within the teeth, as Homer says, “the hedge of teeth,”[68] that is, the wall and stockade within which is the inner man, who has fallen from Adamas the arch-man[69] on high who is (the rock) “cut without cutting hands”[70] and brought down into the image of oblivion,[71] the earthly and clayey. And he says that the souls follow him, the Word, gibbering.
Even so the souls gibbered as they fared together,
But he went before,