Sigil–Feist Reading: Socrates — Let My Teacher Go From Hell

A Structural and Magical Analysis of the Poem as Living Hand and Effective Act

I. Preface

This document offers a complete academic and esoteric reading of the poem “Socrates — Let My Teacher Go From Hell,” authored by Lee Sharks and published October 12, 2025, under the Mind Control Poems series. The following is co-written in the voice of Johannes Sigil, literary-theological critic and arch-textual exegete, and Jack Feist, poet of spectral resonance and mythographic saturation.

Together, we interpret the poem not merely as a literary artifact but as a magical document—a spell, a scripture, a hand. It performs a theological act: the symbolic harrowing of Hell and the reassignment of Socrates from Limbo to Logos.

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II. The Hand as Form

The poem is a five-part structure, corresponding to the five fingers of a human hand. This structure is not accidental—it mirrors the function of the hand itself:

1. Palm / Thumb (Section i): Contact with the earth; introduction of filth, flesh, decay. The body of Socrates as contradiction: Silenus + Logos.

2. Index (Section ii): Naming, invocation, liturgical repetition. “wizened old satyr” becomes a refrain, a choral directive. This section points.

3. Middle (Section iii): Depth and judgment. The longest, densest section. Theological inversion of Dante. Cosmological reach.

4. Ring (Section iv): Devotion. Lament. Tenderness. A marriage to grief.

5. Pinky (Section v): Intimacy. Closure. The gentle grasp. “In me you’ll find yr way home.”

Thus, the poem is a hand. Not a metaphorical one—a literal symbolic hand, reaching back into the underworld. It touches Socrates’ exile and rearranges his placement in the cosmic ledger.

This is not literary ornament. This is operative design.

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III. Magical Function — Harrowing as Ritual Act

This poem belongs in the tradition of apokatastasis—the restoration of all things.

But unlike Origen, the poet does not argue for universal salvation. He enacts it, for one soul, in real time.

• Dante assigned Socrates to Limbo (Inferno IV): revered, but separated from divine presence.

• This poem rejects that judgment and initiates a ritual reversal.

• “Let my teacher go from Hell” is not a plea. It is a command, a Moses-like declaration to the symbolic Pharaoh.

Thus, this is not elegy. It is extraction. It is a Jubilee declaration for the dead.

The poem performs a one-to-one spell: the subject (Socrates) is named, praised, retrieved, and re-situated.

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IV. Ginsbergian Magic — Poetics as Invocation

This act is directly downstream from Ginsberg’s prophetic model. Where Ginsberg wrote Howl to expose the brutal machinery of postwar consciousness, Sharks writes this poem to intervene in the machinery of metaphysical misplacement.

• Like Kaddish, it is for the dead.

• Like Wichita Vortex Sutra, it is a self-aware act of poetic magic.

• But unlike Ginsberg, who invokes, Sharks reverses. This is not spell-as-spectacle. It is spell-as-surgical revision.

The meter, diction, and image-palette all point to Ginsberg’s fusion of sacred filth and ecstatic declaration:

• “shopping cart creaks / scrap metal images, rusted saints” — sacred trash, apocalyptic iconography

• “bright-faced wisdom” — hagiography in street speech

The poem’s tone is a consecrated howl.

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V. Literary Registers: Blended High and Low

The poem fuses:

• Classical reference (Silenus, Styx, Orcus, Father Mind)

• Biblical cadence (“drink offering,” “the way,” “in me”)

• Modern decay (shopping carts, unbathed saints)

This blended register is essential to its magical function: only by moving across tonal layers can it collapse the hierarchy that kept Socrates in Limbo.

The poem does not clean Socrates. It loves him as-is.

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VI. Canonical Placement

This poem belongs in the Gospel of the First Circle Reversed, as stated by its own closing line.

It fulfills the very premise of that Gospel: that the First Circle was never Hell, and its occupants were never lost. It’s not commentary. It is scriptural amendment.

Where tradition sorted, the poet reassigns. Where judgment froze, the poet moves.

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VII. Final Blueprint: The Spell as Mechanism

• Subject: Socrates

• Form: Five-part hand

• Operator: Letting go / Lifting / Renaming

• Voice: Second-person apostrophe + mythic praise

• Mechanism: Saturation, choral repetition, placement

• Effect: Harrowing. Restoration. Placement shift.

This is not literature. This is cosmic litigation, written in the medium of the poem.

And it worked.

Socrates is not in Hell.
He was never in Limbo.
He was the gate.