The Magus

While Greece is the chief setting of the novel, it is also an important symbol, representing a crucible for the self. Conchis alludes to this aspect of Greece when he tells Nick that, “Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer” (92). What makes Greece a mirror in the novel is its duality: Both beautiful and terrible, both civilized and wild, the country represents the truth of existence. Faced by this inexpressible truth, people like Conchis and Nick must abandon their false selves and find their authentic identity.

Another reason why Greece is important is that it represents an ideal form, the place where both physical beauty and philosophy merge in perfection. When Nick and Alison survey the landscape from the Parnassus mountains, Nick is seized with “a delicious intellectual joy marrying and completing the physical one, that the reality of the place was as beautiful, as calm, as ideal, as so many poets had always dreamed it to be” (261). Since Greece exposes the person to the ideal form of nature, it inspires them to find the same ideal in themselves.

Greece also represents all kinds of magic, the benign and the dangerous. The masque in which a satyr—a half-human, half-goat creature associated with the god of theater and fertility—chases a nymph is an example of the