Well, a definition first, for those (a good many people, likely) unfamiliar with the rather obscure literary term: It’s the wedding song, Greek in origin, but universal in literature. In English, its primary origin is Spenser. More broadly, it refers to the wedding, generally, or to the wedding feast. It’s the quintessential “happy ending.”We see it in metaphor in the Bible, and in parables, in both the Old and New Testaments. The wedding feast at Cana in the Gospels, the wedding banquet in the parables, and in the Old Testament, most notably, the Song of Solomon or Song of Songs. Biblically, it signifies God’s relationship with his people/with the soul, and it’s behind the roles of Bridegroom and Bride ascribed to Christ and his Church. Christianity is founded by the Incarnation, the “Word” (expression) of the unitive love between God and man, a role played by our Holy Mother and the Holy Spirit which yielded our Lord.

Epithalamium is ubiquitous in literature and mythology, both religious and secular. It therefore has some deeper archetypal meaning for us. It signifies union, a destined harmonious synthesis of opposites from which creation emerges. It’s the only means of creation possible, and it is accompanied by, or it produces, great joy. It’s life-giving. Because it’s archetypal, writers write it and readers instinctively look for it in literature and in any form of art—think of Rodin’s The Kiss, for example, or think of music.

It’s why barrenness and sterility, metaphorically and literally, are always tragic, often a “curse”, why impotence is disease/sin. Its importance transcends human will, so that even rape, if it produces good fruit, is excusable in mythology, just as it is in history. (Think of brutal imperialism that brought Christianity to the Americas.) Christians habitually attribute the good that arises from human evil to God’s will, a will that cancels lesser human will in order to turn evil into good.

In our culture of death, epithalamium has been murdered, destroyed, ignored, cast out, and we can take that allegorical significance as far as we’re inclined and the consequence will be the same: death. Conventional romance dies; in its place, we put sex, or in the more delicately handled contexts, we substitute “intimacy”. In the former context, sex is to be “protected” from giving life; we seek in this context a means of avoiding any fruit. In the latter “more delicately handled” context, its fruit is supposedly love, though the causal relationship is obscured by its reversal and rendered too vague for the fruit of meaning in all but the most accidental situations. (Does “intimacy” produce love; or does love produce intimacy? All manner of personal as well as literary tragedies hover here, a fact which inevitably defines illusion and results in personal tragedy/divorce.)

Ronald Rolheiser’s The Holy Longing explores the “fire” within that is the stuff of which spirituality is made. Desire, which means literally “of the Father” and which is insatiable until it is fulfilled by spiritual birth (Think of St. Augustine’s “Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee”) is the emotional/psychological expression of the courtship which precedes and impels epithalamium. Misunderstood, it leads to the tragic consequences mentioned above and/or drug or alcohol abuse, self-abusive behavior, etc. Misinterpreted, it leads to heresy in religion or to cataclysmic social and political horrors like communism or other secular utopian disasters.

Contraception is the contradiction of epithalamium. Its contra-life has created a “culture of death” most graphically manifest in the now widespread practice of abortion—which reverses the relationship of God’s will vis-à-vis human will. The murder of epithalamium has caused gender confusion, obliteration of the passive mode of being necessary for union, subsequent emasculation of men and defeminization of women, an explosion of homosexual and other perverse sexual behaviors, widespread impotence among men, a large variety of anxieties, including generalized angst and ennui, as well as clinical depression. It has been a boon for pharmaceutical companies, however, on all fronts—from contraceptive devices and drugs to tranquilizers and anti-depressants. Drug companies are a kind of clean-up crew, rather like vultures and other scavengers that feed on death—again, both literally and metaphorically.

One of the most complete representations of epithalamium is in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings; and its mutilation, in Peter Jackson’s film. Jackson lived unmarried with one of the scriptwriters of the film version. In the book, Frodo is struck by a scene at Rivendell in which Aragorn, the “hidden king”, stands behind Arwen’s chair at her father’s house. Such a simple act is pregnant (pun intended) for Frodo with the mysterious promise of meaning. It does not occur in the film. Instead, we get the suggestive bedroom scene in which Aragorn lounges on Arwen’s couch as she stands nearby in a diaphanous gown. In the book, not even Aragorn’s coronation makes him a king; Frodo is kept at Minas Tirith until The Wedding; it is only then that he understands the purpose of his waiting, for only then is the promise fulfilled. It is the union of male and female, human and elf, body and spirit, and in the epilogue, a new creation is formed by that union. In Jackson’s destruction of epithalamium, a child is merely prophesied in a vision by Arwen, never realized. The reader is forced to settle for the birth of petals from the white tree, when Arwen’s presence surprises Aragorn at his coronation. To avoid epithalamium, Jackson had to create an artificial sub-plot in which Arwen is “dying”, so that her preservation from that fate can be a gratifying substitute for viewers of the film. Not at all unlike his re-writing of Eowyn’s grief over the emptiness of her bridal bower: In the book, Eowyn’s engagement in battle is a logical consequence of her virginal disappointment; i.e., it is because she is denied a bridal gown that she dons armor. Jackson’s film substitutes feminist rights as the cause for her armor, denying the book’s logical cause as Aragorn’s rejection, coming as that rejection does, after a life of unrewarded service to her father-figure uncle and king.

But epithalamium is an archetype of the human psyche. That means it can’t be destroyed, and that any attempt at destruction will result only in a mutilation: literally and metaphorically, maybe, an Antichrist.