Resurrecting Steve Newlin's Argument That Because Vampires Don't Respect Death They Can't Respect Life

Here’s a provocative (perhaps overly) philosophical concept.

Remember how back in Season 2 Steve Newlin challenged Nan Flanagan on TV, baiting her with the logic that because vampires don’t respect death they also can’t respect life? He was essentially implying that their undying bodies are an affront to the endless cycle of death and rebirth―of course, his vision of rebirth being one awash in His Holy Light as the immortal soul splits from the body, leaving this mortal coil behind.

Pam’s decay, while utterly horrifying to her (and us!), can be seen as a return to the natural processes of birth, death, and renewal.

Our culture worships birth and its correlates youth and beauty, but it can’t acknowledge and uplift that single phase of life alone; we need the goddess of death to chew and destroy the unneeded so new forms can emerge.

I’ve spoken about the neglected value of the death aspect of the goddess before, i.e.  Who Is She Who Munches The Dead? and Pam's Taken The Veil.

Let’s think about the process of death and rebirth in cosmic terms. A fundamental truth, the most profound property of time, is that nothing lasts forever; this plays out on earth and in the depths of space. 

A supernova burns out to a nebula with a tiny point of light at its center―the remnants of a star crushed to oblivion by its own gravity. In the nebula― a gas cloud of elements―all the elements a star produced in its life and death is pumped out across the universe yielding greater complexity, the seeds of our own existence.

supernova

Orion nebula

But eventually, all life on this planet will cease to exist.

Decay, entropy, and disintegration will rule as the universe becomes less ordered. According to the 2^nd law of thermodynamics― everything tends from more to less order.

Stars cannot shine forever.

In 6 billion years our sun will explode.

The cosmos will one day be plunged into eternal night when the stars fade and die―the end of the stelliferous era.

Only black dwarves―dark dense balls of decaying matter―will remain.

black dwarf

Then, only a sea of photons tending towards absolute zero.

Life only exists for a fleeting, bright time.

But in death to old forms once again comes the potential for new life.

Life is the cosmos made conscious, how the universe understands itself.What new life will emerge from the death of our universe?

A new big bang…

…come on, sing it with me

our whole universe was in a hot dense state…



As we've seen, True Blood alums can be reborn on CBS's The Big Bang Theory!
  
None of it’s possible without the old forms first passing away.


Now, we know vampires’ undead bodies are static and unchanging, seemingly closing them off from life's cycles.



But their minds and hearts, as we’ve seen over the course of four seasons of True Blood that that’s another story entirely.


What deaths and rebirths of the mind and heart can we expect from our undead friends in Season 5?

We’d love to hear your ideas!


~ Rachel

I don't know who you think you are, but before July is through, I wanna talk equal rights with you!

"I ought to post something about this", I remember telling my mom after she finished reading a piece on it being high time to honor our foremothers and pass the Equal Rights Amendment by Newsday opinion columnist Janus Adams to me over the phone on the Friday before the 4th of July.

By the time we got on the phone, the crickets were already humming in the grass and the sun had dipped low on the horizon. I was hurried, getting ready to take off for a trip upstate to the Lake George area to spend the long weekend with my in-laws. I knew we had to shove off in about two hours or so, and my mind was preoccupied.

Stomping around in the cramped confines of my laundry room with the phone balanced precariously on my shoulder, I was rooting through piles of folded wash for enough clean underwear to pack for the next three days and thinking about how best to avoid the crush of holiday traffic when Mom asked if I had time to hear an article she planned to tape to the fridge.

She does that, you know. A lot. Taping stuff to the fridge, that is. Her refrigerator is like a veritable billboard; gone are the scribbles and macaroni mosaics that decorated it when we were kids, replaced by political cartoons clipped from the paper, magnets that share the varied causes and ideas she supports, and lovely artwork accompanied by philosophical or spiritual mantras reminding her - and us - of who she is and what she believes. It's like a personal - or family, really, mission statement.

The apple hasn't fallen far from the tree - you should see my fridge! But I digress...

Mom wanted to read me something she planned to include as part of the rotating exhibit of refrigerator wisdom in the hopes of sparking a family conversation around the gendered politics of Independence Day that weekend, and I knew it behooved me to listen.

She had me at the first sentence, "As we celebrate our Declaration of Independence this holiday weekend, a triumph of history, let's pause to consider our herstory" [emphasis mine].

Also the author of Sister Days: 365 Inspired Moments in African-American Women's History, Adams highlighted Democratic NYS Rep. Carolyn Maloney's efforts to reintroduce the Equal Rights Amendment. It's been four decades since Congress passed this constitutional amendment enshrining the equality of rights under the law not to be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of gender - and three decades since its defeat, three states shy of the 38 needed to ratify it within 10 years.

The struggle for women's rights in the U.S. has been long and hard. Adams traced its history to March of 1776, when another female Adams - Abigail - chided her husband John to "remember the Ladies", following it through to the present day and the recent Supreme Court dismissal of a massive class-action gender discrimination suit against retail giant Walmart. In this context, she asked, "What of the rights of women?".

According to Adams, we here in 2011 are far from 1848 (the year of the Women's Rights Convention and its platform, "A Declaration of Sentiments," that exposed "a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman."). But not far enough.

Invoking the liberatory legacy of the Seneca Falls convention the Female Anti-Slavery Society, of Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and of the unsung women - black and white - who defied slavery and refused to be silenced or deterred by white abolitionist men who thought they had no place in the movement, Adams called for the passing of the ERA.

Here’s the True Blood connection: the as-yet unratified Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is the capstone for the gender-blind laws liberal feminism has historically fought for which, according to the eminent Professor of Social Work Mimi Abramovitz (1996), include the right to vote, to enter the market, the receive an education, to own property, and to control their own bodies, to earn equal wages, etc.

As we wrote on our Feminism-With-A-Twist! page, the ERA (along with other equal rights and civil rights legislation of the past) seems to serve as the model for True Blood's Vampire Rights Amendment (VRA); the campaign for which has come recently to a highly contentious and divisive head with the string of reactionary anti-vampire terrorism touched off after King Russell Edgington "went Medieval" on TV.

By ripping out the spine of a news anchor and speechifying about the evils of humanity and the "true face of Vampire" before a television audience of millions, the King of Mississippi virtually nuked the American Vampire League's, as he called it, "precious VRA".

Check out this hilarious (yet educational!) AVL "children's outreach program" video promoting the VRA:



According to the True Blood Wiki, the VRA is a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution that if approved and ratified would extend equal rights to vampires, creating parity with humans. The American Vampire League is the main supporter of the bill; there is also some support in the Senate.

Did you know there was a pro-VRA rally in D.C. in 2008?




Yes, it was part of the viral marketing campaign launched on the website BloodCopy, but it did more than generate interest for the show; it actually helps set its sociopolitical tone.

The Wiki continues that the VRA has received strong opposition from freshman "Congressman David Finch" (remember him from S1, smoking weed with Lafayette after their paid-for "date"?) and other conservative elected officials and organizations such as the Fellowship of the Sun. The main fear of the opposition is that recognizing equal rights for vampires would lead to the "vampirization" of America.

Under the law as it presently stands, vampires do have certain rights:

• Vampires are able to own not only their own homes, but open-to-the-public businesses as well; for example, Eric & Pam own Fangtasia
• They can marry IN SOME STATES ONLY, paralleling the limitations for under the Defense of Marriage Act

Vampires also have their own hotels, such as the Hotel Carmilla in Dallas, which caters to vampires, as well as their own airline, Anubis Air, equipped with specialty coffins for flight. Remember these from Season 2? While these niche busineses necessarily provide for the special needs of vampires, they also raise the spectre of "separate but equal".

Now, anti-vampire sentiment seems at an all-time high. I remember seeing some tell-tale graffiti scrawled across a brick wall in an early Season 4 episode, "Save a friend, kill a vampire". In her Newsday piece Adams recalls that in 1838, so opposed were pro-slavers to the activities of the Female Anti-Slavery Society (started by black woman and, by that time, joined by white abolitionist women) that rioters - emboldened by the blind eye of the police - torched the group's Pennsylvania Hall convention site and stoned the fleeing women. A similar fate for vampires seems possible in light of the threat posed by Marnie, possessed as she is by the spirit of a 17^th century witch who was burned at the stake and is seeking retribution against the undead for her torment at the hands of a few of their numbers centuries ago.

Would there be public outcry if she caused scores of vampires to walk into the sun? Or would the public feel that the uppity undead - audacious in their quest for equal rights with humans - had gotten what they deserved; the true death? 

True Blood's VRA plot line acknowledges the inequality and stratification of contemporary U.S. society as well as the challenges of partisan politics (hello, debt ceiling talks) and making social and political change. We’ll see if Nan Flanagan can muster a political solution or if the legislation – and the AVL - are dead in the water. 

Tears of resonance are moistening my eyes; writing this post (like gazing at Mom's refrigerator) been an exercise in remembering what really matters, what's important, and what we must continue to fight for. I feel reinvigorated in my commitment to anti-oppression work and ever grateful to my mom for sowing its seeds in me - and for being there to water, fertilize, prune, and trellis my plant of social justice as it's grown and matured, branching out in many directions.

Thanks, Mom.

And Vive la Fridge!

~ Rachel

References

Abramovitz, M. (1996). Regulating the lives of women: Social welfare policy from colonial times to the present. Boston, MA: South End Press.    

Thou Shall Not Suffer a Witch to Live

*DISCLAIMER - GRAPHIC IMAGES AHEAD*

The Burning Times & Sexual Torture

Did you happen to notice the unholy glee with which these two matter-of-factly discussed the perversely sexualized protocol for burning a witch? Rebecca and I did, and it turned our stomachs.

"You must burn a witch properly, first the calves," the bishop leeringly explained in Spanish to the aristocrat at his side, "the thighs, and the hands, then the torso and forearms"...

...and as added sick delight played across both their faces, he continued, "los senos" (the breasts). 

Marnie's dreaming mind had conjured this diabolic vision, injecting her into the spectacle as an unseen, unheard observer. "This is madness" she shouted as a hooded figure touched his lit torch to the pyre that had been built up around the condemned Antonia, and ran into the crowd. "We must stop this, we have to save her!" Her frantic cries went unnoticed, as the bishop pronounced to the wealthy noble, "She cannot be allowed to die until her face is in flames."

*This scene appears in the video clip below, preceded by some context




Thou shall not suffer a witch to live

perhaps the world's most misogynistic book

(Exodus 22:18)


This single line of scripture also appears in Part One, Question 6 of the infamous Malleus Maleficarium (Latin for “The Hammer of Witches”, or “Hexenhammer” in German).

Written in 1486 by Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger and first published in Germany in 1487, it went on to become the de facto manual for the witch-hunters and Inquisitors of the Burning Times in Europe - a brutal period spanning the four centuries preceding the Enlightenment.

Ashes and cobwebs have gathered in the dark corners of our collective memory of the time from the late Middle Ages to the early Modern Era when women [and some men] deemed heretics by the Church were ruthlessly persecuted. In her book Shakti Woman self-described radical feminist healer, independent scholar and wisdom teacher Vicki Noble sweeps them away, revealing the still smoldering embers of remembrance of "the incredible loss of nine million 'witches' (women healers)" (1991, pp. 2-3) still glowing in our psyches.

Noble writes of the Malleus Malleficarum:

This book charged women, in the lewd details that sprang from the repressed minds of the Catholic clergy, with all manner of lust and fornication. But most prominently this book declared in no uncertain terms that any woman who was successful at healing was by definition a witch and would be burned. Children were forced to watch their mothers burn at the stake, and women were routinely raped, violated, and tortured until they confessed to anything the Inquisitors accused them of. (1991, p. 192)

According to Noble, the virulence of the Church's enforced celibacy erupted in the mass acting-out of this most noxious of medieval treatises' prescriptions for identifying and dispatching witches. Women were accused of being “carnal” at the core, the source of every temptation for men, linked with evil, sin, and degradation.

THE WITCHES SABBATH German, 1510. C.E.

Brazen nakedness was a sign of witches' evil nature

Once held as sacred, female body now represented depravity

The "blaming of the flesh" (Sanchez-Grant, 2008, p. 89) - and its harsh punishment - was part of every Inquisitor's playbook as the female body (seen as naturally unstable, deficient, unruly) became a site of oppression.

In the fevered and repressed minds of the witch-hunters, if sex = evil (Stone, 1976), the punishment must fit the crime.

I hesitated to post the image below due to its graphic nature, but after consulting with Rebecca I decided to go ahead and put it up because it's actually one of the tamer representations of the interrogation by sexual torture inflicted upon accused witches. 

It comes from an excellent slideshow on About.com on the persecution of witches and witchcraft where you'll find other such period illustrations that rival today's most hard-core pornography.

*PLEASE NOTE* We believe that no matter how dark and disturbing, we can't deny our history lest we be doomed to repeat it. However, we do feel some images are just too graphic and offensive for display at the PPT. To view a woodcut depicting the true depth of the depravity of the sexual torture of accused witches (and information on the origins of witchcraft, influences on our modern perceptions of witches, etc.) see Garden of the Witch

According to Noble (1991), the late American radical feminist philosopher, academic, and theologian Mary Daly would cite a parallel between the killing and maiming of women in large numbers during that time to the modern practices of gynecology.

In this vein, Arisika Razak writes of "the cultural rape of women by the dominant health care model" - a model that has usurped the woman-centered and woman-dominated profession of midwifery and placed birthing in the hands of "an obstetric speciality that accepts the myth of the dangerous womb and the hostile vagina" (1991, pp. 165 & 171). She continues that under the Newtonian and Cartesian worldview, the body was seen as a functional machine. The male body was he perfect expression of that machine; the female most imperfect and scarcely worth study. Under this logic, which persists today, the medical profession casually removes the sexual parts of women; breasts, uteri, and ovaries - and a hundred years ago, clitorises.

Interestingly, Razak notes that since pain in labor was sen by the medieval Church as God's punishment to wisdom-seeking Eve, midwives in the Middle Ages were burned as witches for the sin of seeking herbs to reduce women's pain.

The About.com gallery covers witch hunt and Inquisition-related topics ranging from the suppression of dissent & outsiders, Church depictions of witches & witchcraft, and how misogynistic, patriarchal attitudes fed the fear of witches to the persecution of women, torture implements used, witch hunts in America, and witches as scapegoats.

If you're curious (and brave) I encourage you to check out these valuable resources to learn about this shameful time during which the Catholic church seized all property of the witches it murdered and became rich as a result of the plunder; centuries from which records tell of whole villages where all the women were wiped out (Noble, 1991).

Implications of this Barbarous History for Today's World

I hate the disagree with ya, Nan Flanagan, but what happened in Salem, MA in the terrifying year of 1692 when nineteen men and women were hanged as witches, one man was pressed to death under heavy stones for refusing to confess, and several more people died in jail can't just be chalked up to, "just a bunch of neurotic Puritanettes who needed a good lay". 

The same formula that led to the conflagrations of the Burning Times (fear + trigger = scapegoat) was at play in Salem and still operates in the modern world - as evidenced most recently by last week's terrorist attacks against multiculturalism in Norway that claimed the lives of more than 70 people.

And we are still living in a culture in which, as Razak writes, "male participation in the acts of sexuality and procreation have become so equated with the acting out of hostility, physical oppression, and fear that rape, incest, and sexual abuse and murder of children, and the battering of women have become health issues of pandemic proportions" (1991, p. 165). This is certainly not to brush all men with the broad strokes of modern-day Inquisitors, but the larger societal patterns Razak speaks of are undeniable. 

The Salem Witch Museum serves as an educational resource for the lessons of that time applied to the present day. My husband and I visited in 2005 and I still have our admission stickers glued to my wallet:

 

There we saw an exhibit asking visitors to consider the phenomenon of witch hunting in the context of contemporary examples of witch hunts: the Japanese-American internment after Pearl Harbor, the McCarthy hearings on Communism and the persecution of the gay community at the start of the AIDS epidemic - these examples of the fear + trigger = scapegoat formula bring the lessons of stereotyping and prejudice full circle.

For some people, Marnie and her circle & their alternative religious practices/lifestyle might just fit the scapegoat bill. Who are the other scapegoats, what other witch hunts are under way today?

Thoughts?

~ Rachel

Transcription credits to Fangs, Wands & Fairy Dust

References

Noble, V. (1991). Shakti woman: Feeling our fire, healing our world. The new female shamanism. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco.

Razak, A. (1991). Toward a Womanist Analysis of Birth. In Orenstein, G.F. (Eds.), Reweaving the world: The emergence of ecofeminism. (pp. 165-172). San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.

You aren't supposed to think, you're supposed to follow protocol!

So said King Compton to his [grudging] subject Pam in S4E4 I'm Alive and On Fire
This quote speaks well to a major theme I detected in that episode: hierarchical, authoritarian power & control

IN THE FAMILY

Joe Lee has a choke hold on Tommy and Melinda Mickens 

IN THE COMMUNITY

Crystal: "I'm big mama kitty now, finally. Everyone gonna do what I say"

AND IN THE NATION

the newly crowned vampire king of Louisiana

How is such autocratic rule achieved? How is it maintained? Is it legitimate? Effective? Do we have any alternatives? How can we throw it off?

If we are to organize ourselves and act to get out from under oppressive rule, we've got to be able to determine who's really in charge.

For example, Bill looks rather more presidential than kingly here, no?

In countries where there are both royalty and systems of representative government, the royals are generally seen more as figure heads than politicians; that label being reserved for those in elected office. Interestingly, Bill is being portrayed as the later. 

And he certainly seems to be more involved with matters of state than the two other vampire monarchs we have met thus far on True Blood,  Russell & Sophie-Ann, ever were. Yet, it seems someone else is really in charge.

Now, we all know that at least in this country, there is [supposed to be] balance of power. The executive branch of government is not omnipotent; the president must answer to the congress, etc.

On the surface, at least, this appears not be the case in the vampire nation.

So far this season, King Bill's power seems rather absolute and iron-fisted. Pam's telling him she wouldn't risk lying about Eric's whereabouts because word of Bill's ruthlessness as king has travelled far and wide is seemingly evidence of that. And then there's his condemning the vampire caught on YouTube feeding on a human to the true death without benefit of a trial (I want to take this case to the Authority!" Bill: "I am the Authority, you idiot !"). S4E3 If you Love Me, Why Am I Dyin'

But in this week's episode, we found out that things aren't so simple.

With Bill cast as somewhat of Nan's puppet - his distaste for power wielded unilaterally & unjustly made clear by his sarcasm when she inquird about the execution - could this be a critique of the U.S. system of government? Is True Blood suggesting that our elected officials from the school board to the Commander-In-Chief aren't really holding the reigns, the [fill in the blank - multinational corporations, shadowy interest groups, others in government, etc.] are?

Hhmmm...

Thoughts? Please share below.

~ Rachel