A person who combines the judicial functions of Minos, Rhadamanthus and Aeacus, but is placable with an obolus; a severely virtuous censor, but so charitable withal that he tolerates the virtues of others and the vices of himself; who flings about him the splintering lightning and sturdy thunders of admonition till he resembles a bunch of firecrackers petulantly uttering his mind at the tail of a dog; then straightway murmurs a mild, melodious lay, soft as the cooing of a donkey intoning its prayer to the evening star.

For since I saught By Prayer th' offended Deitie to appease, Kneel'd and before him humbl'd all my heart, Methought I saw him placable and mild, Bending his eare; perswasion in me grew That I was heard with favour; peace returnd Home to my brest, and to my memorie His promise, that thy Seed shall bruise our Foe; Which then not minded in dismay, yet now Assures me that the bitterness of death Is past, and we shall live.

The stakes for Caliban in his mindreading endeavor are significant, the powerful Setebos being "Placable if His mind and ways were guessed," (3) and his chief cognitive tool for engaging in this guesswork, for generating a model of the god's consciousness, is analogy, as he imagines Setebos as a version of himself, extrapolating from his own embodied experience (wherein lies, of course, the poem's well-known critique of anthropomorphic "natural theologies").

Second, it bestows on the world its historicity since the creative act of the God claims to start the temporality of the world as a concomitant of its reliance on the precariousness of will, and, as well, to unfold its story as something plotted against the placable eternity of the ancients.