על החלומות, ספר ב ל״אOn Dreams, Book II 31
א׳
1[205] Thus then let us describe that wine-maddened, raving, incurable pest, the man frenzied by strong liquor. But his fellow, himself too a belly-slave, the friend of gross eating and gluttony, the dissolute artificer of viands, must be considered in his turn.
ב׳
2[206] Yet we need little thought in our quest of him, for the dreamer’s vision is the closest possible reproduction of his image, and through careful study of the dream we shall see him reflected as it were in a mirror.
ג׳
3[207] “I thought,” it says, “that I lifted three baskets of wheaten loaves on my head” (Gen. 40:16). “Head” we interpret allegorically to mean the ruling part of the soul, the mind on which all things lie, and once indeed that mind cried out loudly and bitterly, “All these things have been upon me” (Gen. 42:36).
ד׳
4[208] So then he marshals the procession of all the arts which he contrived against the unhappy belly, and bearing the ritual basket himself is not ashamed, poor fool, to be burdened with a triple load of baskets, that is with the three divisions of time.
ה׳
5[209] For pleasure is said by her votaries to consist of the memory of past, the enjoyment of present and the hope of future delights.
ו׳
6[210] Thus the three baskets are likened to the three divisions of time, and the baked meats in the baskets to the concomitants of each of these divisions, memories of the past, participations of the present, expectations of the future, and he who bears all these to the pleasure-lover, who has loaded the table not with one general kind of incontinence, but with practically every species and genus of licentiousness, and that board has no peace-draughts and lacks the salts of friendship.
ז׳
7[211] At this board there is one banqueter only, and yet to him it is as a public feast: that banqueter is King Pharaoh, who has made dispersion and scattering and the undoing of continence his business, for his name means “scattering.” And he shews his great importance and kingship not in delighting in the seemly, the good cheer of temperance, but in glorying in the unseemly, the practices of foulness, wrecked as he is on the rocks of insatiableness and greediness and luxurious living.
ח׳
8[212] And therefore the birds (Gen. 40:17), that is the unforeseen chance events which swoop upon us from without, will overrun like fire all the contents and set them ablaze and consume them with their devouring force, so that not a fragment is left to be enjoyed by the basket-bearer who had hoped to carry his inventions and projects for ever as a secure and permanent possession never to be taken from him.
ט׳
9[213] But thanks be to the victorious God who, however perfect in workmanship are the aims and efforts of the passion-lover, makes them to be of none effect by sending invisibly against them winged beings to undo and destroy them. Thus the mind stripped of the creations of its art will be found as it were a headless corpse, with severed neck nailed like the crucified to the tree of helpless and poverty-stricken indiscipline.
י׳
10[214] For so long as they remain unharmed by the visitors, whose way it is to arrive suddenly and unforeseen, the arts which cater for the enjoyment of pleasure seem to flourish. But when these visitors swoop down out of the unseen, these arts are turned upside-down and the craftsman perishes with them.