The Moby-Dick Bible
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Themes › Prefiguration

Prefiguration

1 passage in the novel carry this mark, in the order they appear.

Now, by all odds, the most ancient extant portrait anyways purporting to be the whale’s, is to be found in the famous cavern-pagoda of Elephanta, in India. The Brahmins maintain that in the almost endless sculptures of that immemorial pagoda, all the trades and pursuits, every conceivable avocation of man, were prefigured ages before any of them actually came into being.

Chapter 55, Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales · verse 3

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