Allusions to the Feminine in Season 4 of True Blood, OR, Has the Season of the Witch Brought Compelling, Multidimensional Female Characters to the Screen?

And since we're talking about the Season of the Witch, I've noticed that the past five episodes have been rich with to the allusions to the Feminine.

For example:

Moon Goddess Emporium
The sacred, feminine-feeling space Marnie and her eclectic circle of Wiccans call their own.

Luna
This newly-introduced character's name is evocative of the elusive, watery moon-governed depths associated with the Feminine.

Sookie's being gone for thirteen months, the number of moon cycles in a solar year.


As The Heart of the Goddess: Art, Myth and Meditations of the World's Sacred Feminine Hallie Iglehart Austen (1990) writes, The Great Goddess of Laussel (left) points to her belly with left hand, and in her right she holds a horned crescent notched with thirteen lines, representing the ancient honoring of the mysteries of the female body. In this image is reflected the waxing and waning of the moon parallelled by the ebb and flow of menstrual blood; it embodies the wisdom of non-linear, cyclic time - spiraling eternal growth.


According to Austen, in the French limestone cave where this relief is found, "The soot of countless fires has darkened the ceilings, and the floors have been beaten down by many feet" (1990, p. 6). Indeed, She once pervaded.

On her gorgeous website The Suppressed Histories Archives, Max Dashu explains that rock murals, clay and bronze pots, and countless figurines recovered from archaeological sites worldwide show that in the earliest cultures, representations of humans were almost exclusively female.

These recurring signs reflect spiritual concerns and ritual & everyday life of the people who created them.








Commonalities recur in artifacts of diverse archaic cultures; same patterns appear in more recent indigenous societies in the Americas, Africa, parts of Asia. Austen (1990) writes that for 25,000 years the female body was revered as sacred. The hold of the Goddess may go back much farther.

According to Ward (2006) some of the earliest work of human art in existence consists of female figures dating to at least a quarter million years old.

For example, the Berekhat Ram Figurine, a small yellowish-brown pebble the size of a jellybean (left) found in the Golan Heights in 1981, is dated to approximately 233,000 B.C.E. - a time when early humans weren't even supposed to have developed symbolic thinking, or even language yet. In fact, this carving dates to 100,000 before the appearance of Homo sapiens; the race that carved it was only just evolving into "us". And yet, one of them thought to shape a woman out of a small stone.

How might living in such a culture make you feel about women? The world?

This was not art as we know it, to be displayed on a museum shelf. Though these figurines, the Goddess truly lived amongst her people; they have been caressed, danced with, sung to, had oils and ochre rubbed into them.

Acheulian Goddess
Golan Heights, 800,000 yrs. old

Great Goddess of Willendorf
Europe, 25,000 B.C.E.

Imagine holding one of these Goddesses in your hand.

Feel her roundness, the comforting security of it.

Imagine carrying her throughout your day’s work…on your travels, sleeping with her beside your bed, waking up beside her (Austen, 1990, pp. 4-5) as our Paleolithic and Neolithic ancestors did.

How might being in such close contact and communion with Her form change your relationship to the female body?

Austen implores us to imagine a world in which images like the Great Goddess of Laussel were carved over the entrances to our houses of worship, or over our supermarkets and schools. She seems to be asking how a cityscape covered with (positive, representative) female images might shift our collective ways of being.

Do you agree that there is a dearth of such female images in our society?

Season 4 of True Blood  may offer a remedy, at least according to writers like John Kubicek of BuddyTv who in his June 24th piece describes it as the Season of the Witch and the Women.

With the addition of "a number of new strong women to the show" via two new female main characters (the powerful witch Marnie & shapeshifter Luna) and the promotion of Nan Flanagan (vampire spokeswoman) and Holly (witchy Merlotte's waitress) to series regulars joining Sookie, Jessica, Tara, Arlene & Pam, Kubicek feels the women really get their chance to shine.

Besides Marnie and Luna, we've also met three new female supporting characters, including the lawyer Portia, Wiccan-cum-vampire security woman Katerina, and Naomi, a cage fighter with an unlikely romantic connection to Tara.

Plus, the credits are now more evenly disbursed in terms of gender, with nine female and ten male primary cast members.

Clearly, Kubicek isn't just talking about quantity, he's also talking about quality.

When he talks about "strong women" on the show I get the impression that he means well-written female characters as opposed to ones who are invulnerable to pain and strife, etc. And goodness knows we need more of those; the lack of good writing for women in Hollywood - not to mention in literature - is what drove Tanya Wright (Deputy Kenya Jones) to pen the script for her film Butterfly Rising, which she later adapted into a novel of the same name. If you can't find solidly written female characters, you've gotta develop them yourself, right?

Here's an archetypal model for such a "strong woman"...

...Look familiar? Yup, this painted terracotta female figure circa 3,500-3,400 B.C.E. was the model for the artifact the maenad Maryann struck the pose of while summoning and channeling her considerable power.

All the other images in this post came from books or websites, but I took the picture above myself; when I visited this pre-dynastic Egyptian figure in person with Rebecca and our mom at its current home in the Brooklyn Museum I was awestruck.

So taken was I by this statuette that I took photos from several angles.


A plaque near its display case reads:


This female figure, shown in a long white skirt, was found in a tomb. Does she represent a goddess, a priestess, or a mourner? Is she grieving, dancing, or manifesting her power?


So striking is this statuette - one of the most famous pre-dynastic works in the world - that all of the museum's educational and PR materials are anointed with its image.

Another similar, "triumphantly female" (Austen, 1990, p. 8) terracotta piece also comes to us from pre-dynastic Egypt:

  

As Austen writes, she emphasizes her breasts and buttocks with a dignity and strength that reminds us of women's power and beauty.

These are compelling, multidimensional female images.

So what do you think, has True Blood stepped up to the plate in terms of writing women characters that bring such strong presence to the screen?

Let us know below!

~ Rachel

References

Austen, H. I. (1990). The heart of the goddess: Art, myth and meditations of the world’s sacred feminine. Berkeley: Wingbow Press.

Dashu, M. Icons of the Matrix. Retrieved March 15, 2011 from: http://www.suppressedhistories.net/articles/icons.html

Ward, T. (2006). Savage breast: One man’s search for the goddess. New York: O Books.

And is he dark enough? Enough to see your light? IMAGES OF HOLISM IN TRUE BLOOD

And is he dark enough? Enough to see your light?

~ Accidental Babies by Damien Rice

Rebecca will be so proud of me, quoting her beloved Damien. But really, I couldn't resist. I've been plotting and scheming for a way to best to use these lyrics for quite a while in relation to Sookie and Bill, and since it's last call for this idea around holism I brewed up during Season 3, I figure it's now or never!

Here's my thought process. Much ado has been made about how they are just far too different for their love to ever work; she's mortal, he's vampire; she's of this era, he's of one long bygone. And perhaps, most importantly...

SHE IS

  OF THE

                                                   LIGHT

AND HE IS

  OF THE

                         DARK

Remember when Sookie first met Claudine? How during an out of body experience Sookie's soul, or consciousness arose from the hospital bed where her body lay hooked up to life support and followed a trail of flower petals out the door and into an alternate, liminal plane where fairies romped amidst the tombstones of Bon Temps Cemetery?

Recall how, as a shadow swiftly enveloped the heretofore sunny scene, Claudine fearfully declared, "The dark approaches"? Next came her hasty retreat - remember how she paused to warn Sookie, "He (Bill) will steal your light" and, in response to her protestations that Bill is not like that, to admonish Sookie, "Don’t let him take it from you, promise me!” before slipping below the surface of her light pool escape hatch?

Can you feel Descartes' influence?

I know, I know, it's a silly reference to glamouring (you know how Bill generally says, "can you feel my influence?" when he's working his powers of persuasion) and perhaps an even sillier insinuation that a 17th century French philosopher would have anything at all to do with True Blood.



 René Descartes (1596-1650)

Or, maybe this Descartes thing isn't so silly after all; let's unpack it a little, shall we?

We are living in a time of profound disconnection and extraordinary dissonance; a time in which the vestiges of what Professor Emeritas of Rutgers University Bruce Wilshire points out as a Baroque era (particularly Cartesian) conception of reality and our place in it still holds sway. This framework highlights “self as scientific knower, self as self-sufficient individual and as ego, self as master manipulator of objects” (p. 37). It is connected to the famous mechanistic theory of nature that requires us to perform an immense abstraction from our own bodies and the world. 

Cartesian science believed that in any complex system the behavior of the whole could be analyzed in terms of the properties of the parts. Remnants of Caresian dualism remain in contemporary consciousness: self cut off from other, mind from body or matter, human from animal, present from past and future (Wilshire, 1990). Some examples of other heirarchical dualisms (the first-stated member of the pair is considered as superior, the second-stated as inferior Other) that trickle down to us today include Hegel and Rousseau's public/private, male female, eason/nature; Plato's reason/body, reason/emotion, and universal/particular.

These dualisms are seen as totalizing, meaning that they are thought to exhaust the alternatives within the parameters in question (Wilshire, 1990). What does this mean? According to theoretical physicist Basarab Nicolescu (p. 26, 2002), classical logic is founded on three axioms:

1. The axiom of identity: A is A
2. The axiom of noncontradiction: A is not non-A
3. The axiom of the excluded middle: There exists no third term (3rd term = "T"); T is at the same time A and non-A

In other words, something is what it is - absolutely. Classical logic renders it impossible to consider day as night, black as white, life as death...

...feminine as masculine (Nelsan Ellis told the crowd at Dragon * Con 2010 that Alan Ball's vision for Lafayette to embody both the feminine and the masculine originally threw him for a loop; even Eric's metrosexual vibe may appear suspect to some)  

    or dark as light...

No, no, no...that would be repugnant to the prescribed order! That's why Bill entering the land of fairie is seen by Claudine as such an aberation...dark simply cannot be light!

According to dualistic thinking the two obviously must cancel one another out - they cannot occupy the same space.

We've got to let old Descartes off the hook at least a little bit for this schismatic, fractious worldview; even Wilshire (1990) prudently avoids holding him wholly culpable for the pervasiviness of dualistic  influences which have given rise to the divisive and isolating trends that have dominated much of modernity: xenophobia, racism, sexism, etc. He implies that the genesis of the patriarchal period around 2500 B.C.E. set the movement towards rigid, rationalistic thought in motion and that definition as negation (if it's this it can't be that) has its roots in Aristotelian philosophy. 

Wilshire (1990) cites the great circles and mounds of Neolithic Europe as evidence of the integral thought patterns that were alive in our dim past, long before the shift to the dualistic modes that dominate today.

Stone Age Orkney Island neolithic womb-tomb earthen structure

These earthen structures were temple observatories constructed around 3000 B.C.E. They anticipate field and relativity theory in the sense that space and time were seen as interdependent. Human reality was experienced as being interdependent with space-time; the human life cycle nested within the Cosmic. Within the vast, pregnant-seeming bellies of the mounds people reawakened to their own possibilities as they observed the regenerative course of Nature through the deaths and rebirths of the seasons and the movements of astrological bodies (Wilshire, 1990). "Human birth and death were just two ritual acts in the great sprial of life" (Ward, p. 88, 2006).

Newgrange spirals

Hypogeum spirals

   

Another vision of our realty has been set forth in the last century through systems thinking; a “new” way of thinking in terms of connectedness, relationships, and context that recalls the worldviews of these indigenous and ancient goddess oriented civilizations. Quantum physics in which subatomic particles are not seen as “things” but as interconnections among things; Gestalt psychology which is characterized by its “hunger for wholeness” that sees the existence of irreducible wholes as a key component of perception (Capra, 1997), and deep ecology which seeks to expand the notion of self beyond the confines of the ego and personal history, and to extend concepts of self-interest to include the welfare of all beings (Macy, 1991) are part of the systems thinking zeitgeist. 

According to activist, systems scholar and progenitor of The Work that Reconnects Joanna Macy (1991), a dramatic shift is occurring in our time from notions of linear, unidirectional causality to perceptions of dynamic interdependence where phenomena affect each other in a reciprocal or mutual fashion. This new-old picture, or likeness of reality that is emerging in our times - which was the prevailing metaphor for the Cosmos and human’s place in it in Neolithic civilization - is the ideal that Wilshire (1990) says might be embodied in contemporary life, if we are inventive and resolute enough.  

Returning now to True Blood, might the scene below in which Sookie and Bill join forces to help Tara throw off Maryann's possession be an expression of the integral - the light and dark, female and male unified - a vision that can help synthesize the fragmentary aspects of the self and culture into a meaningful whole?

On their own, neither Sookie nor Bill were able to break Maryann's hold on Tara. Only together were they able to help her return to reality.

Scholar and midwife Arisika Razak (1990) proposes that birth is our major metaphor for life and coming into being, a universal and central aspect of human experience that can serve as the nucleus around which we can build a paradigm of positive interaction and functioning - and a model for physical, emotional, an dspiritual transcendence.


Transdisciplinary theorists' calls for a non-dual vision of reality are pregnant with allusions to birthing. Nicolescu offers, "In my view, the 'death of man' is after all a necessary stage in history, one that anticipates our second birth (p. 74, 2002). He links the evolution of humanity with the evolution of he universe, and suggests that a new type of human (remember the idea of the eco-individual in my last post?) homo sui transcendentalis is in the process of being born. Of this new type of human, Nicolescu says, "He is not some new man but man reborn (p. 74, 2002). Also on p. 74, Nicolescu states that the process of his (new man's) birth involves transgression, originally meaning "to pass to the other side, to cross" - "crossing from one level of Reality to another, or from one level of perception to another". Morin and Kern (p. 18, 1992) hypothesize, "It, starting from a paradigm of complexity, a new method can be born, can take flesh, can advance, make progress, then it would be able perhaps to start a revolution everywhere.


Let's apply this birthing imagery to the scene above.     

When I rewatched it recently I noticed how, as Sookie stared into Tara's "dark, empty" saucer eyes trying to make a connection, she said to a desperate Lafayette, "it's not her, she's gone". Unable to penetrate Maryann's control over Tara, Sookie turned to Bill for help. He counseled, "you have to go further into her mind than you ever have before". Sookie tried again, and was only able to grasp quick flashes of Tara's experiences with Maryann. Bill decided glamouring Tara may help, suggesting, "if we leave her like this who knows what harm may come to her...or to us".


Crouching in front of Tara as Sookie cradled her from behind, Bill's attempts at glamouring began as gentle cajoling but became a labored affort. At first, it seemed to me like Bill was taking the role of a priest performing an exocrism but the more I thought about it, I see this scene as a birthing. Together, Sookie and Bill - Sookie in the position of mother, Bill as midwife, bringing Tara across the "something I can't cross - an abyss" (Sookie to Bill)  - the chasm neither of them could span alone.

Duality working in concert. The spell is broken. Tara is whole again.

What do you think?

Have you noticed any other images of holism in True Blood  - anything that for you communicates the truth of the Tejo-Bindu Upanishad: To direct the mind towards the basic unity of all things and to divert it from the seizing of differences; therein lies bliss? 

Please use the comments section below to share your thoughts!

~ Rachel

References

Capra, F. (1996). The web of life: A new scientific understanding of living systems. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.

Macy, J. (1991). Mutual causality in Buddhism and general systems theory: The dharma of natural systems. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Morin, E., & Kern, A. B. (1999). Homeland earth: A manifesto for the new millennium.  Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Nicolescu, B. (2002). Manifesto of transdisciplinarity. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Plumwood, V. (1993). Feminism and the mastery of nature. London, UK: Routledge.

Razak, A. (1990). “Toward a Womanist Analysis of Birth”. (pp. 165-172). In Reweaving the world: The emergence of ecofeminism”. Diamond, I. & Orenstein, G.F. (Eds.) San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books.

Ward, T. (2006). Savage breast: One man’s search for the goddess. New York, NY: O Books

Wilshire, B. (1990). The moral collapse of the university: Professionalism, purity, and alienation. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.       

FIRST TASTE: GUEST BARTENDING AT THE SIREN'S CONFERENCE

Here's your first taste of the GUEST BARTENDING feature that will be on the PPT's menu for season 4's analysis and commentary...


...LORENA FANS TAKE NOTE...


The Pierced Pomegranate Tavern will be setting up shop from October 6–9, 2011, at the Vail Cascade Resort and Spa in Vail, Colorado!


Rachel will be giving a talk at the Sirens conference; a networking retreat and academic conference dedicated to women in fantasy literature, providing perspectives on fantasy books by women, female characters in fantasy works, and how to support women in fantasy literature.


Within its focus on fantastic women, each year Sirens features a fantasy-related theme—and in 2011, the theme is "monsters"! Conference programming will examine and dissect monstrous characters and themes of monstrousness. As the Sirens site points out, women have too often been decried as "monsters," and examples of monsters and questions of monstrousness pervade fantasy literature. Sirens honored guests for 2011 are Justine Larbalestier, Nnedi Okorafor, and Laini Taylor, each of whom has written of female characters who may—or may not—be monsters.


Here's an overview of Rachel's presentation:

Title: Annihilating HER Again: How Eroticized Rage Against True Blood’s Vampire Lorena―Avatar of the Monstrous Feminine―Resurrects the Forgotten History of Goddess Culture's Suppression

 

 300-500 word abstract for 50 minute talk

This visual, multimodal and experiential talk revolves around the now infamous final scene of True Blood Season 3, Episode 3 entitled "It Hurts Me Too" which drew the ire of the National Organization for Women for what NOW called a “messed up depiction of women, men, violence, and sex”, prompting its call for feminists to deliver a “thanks but no thanks” message to HBO. 

When it aired on June 27, 2010 I watched—eyes wide and jaws agape—as during what some call an act of “hate sex,” vampire Bill Compton hurled his maker Lorena to the bed, tore off her clothes, and twisted her neck, turning her face to the floor as he forcefully thrust into her. Despite his contempt and brutality—and with blood dripping from her mouth—Lorena told Bill that she still loves him. This explicit rendering of eroticized rage shocked me at a gut level akin to the way feminist scholar Vicki Noble describes women’s response to the obscene prevalence of rape: “We experience our collective annihilation repeatedly, psychically and physically as a woman is raped every thirteen seconds in North America…”.¹

And yet, I can’t condemn or denounce this deliberately unsettling scene; in my view it raises vital issues that are better addressed through thoughtful dialogue than censure and several questions ripe for discourse spring immediately to mind: 

o    If Lorena is as NOW suggests the classic “bitch” archetype; the monstrous Feminine—a characterization that reduces her to a monolith—how might this comment on our culture which has long fragmented and demonized the Feminine? What kind of cultural context would need to exist for us to think differently?

o    Why does this scene disturb us so? Is it too hard to reconcile the genteel and romantic Bill Compton with his willful despoiling of Lorena; his determination to utterly ruin her—and harder still for us to place such a rapacious mindset not at the margins of dominant culture, but at its center?

o    Could Bill's pillage and defilement of Lorena be seen as a visceral rearticulation for a contemporary audience of mythologies depicting the slaying of the Great Goddess by the warrior god as peaceful, egalitarian society was supplanted by patriarchy some five millennia ago―the collective memory of which still pulses in our modern psyches?

Drawing upon 800,000 years of art, myth, histories and poetry and amplifying leading voices in feminist thought, archaeomythology, women's studies, and Goddess scholarship not often heard in mainstream discourse, we will explore these charged concepts and more. Tracing the intriguing parallels between the difficult-to-digest imagery “It Hurts Me Too” confronts us with and the mythologies of Goddesses dismembered, slain or made subordinate to male gods which represent the rupture from a Goddess-centered world to “dominator” world of today, we will open a discourse on contemporary issues like gender relations, sex and sexuality, attitudes towards autonomous women, and rape as a dominant social and cultural metaphor for behavior. We will identify new models for a “partnership” social structure. 

1.      Vicki Noble, Shakti Woman: Feeling Our Fire, Healing Our World (New York: HarperOne, 1991), p. 3.

Any thoughts?


I hear the host resort, which combines the conveniences of a modern hotel with the laid-back, friendly atmosphere of a mountain retreat, is amazing, and with its great room rates during the beautiful fall season in the Rocky Mountains, as well as a discount on most services at their acclaimed spa, maybe that's enough to lure you to Vail to join us?


~ Rachel  

Sexual Consciousness - The Forbidden Fruit - Sookie's Orgasmic Awakening

(the following is excerpted from the presentation embedded in the post below)

“The power of the erotic is acknowledged in many cultures” (p. 110); Shakti is the Sanskrit term for the erotic as female life force (Austen, 1991). Audre Lorde (1989) poetically describes the erotic as a kernel within herself that, when released from its intense and constrained pellet, flows through and colors her life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all her experience.

Regrettably, in our culture the erotic has been misnamed, made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation (Lorde, 1989); perverted by ideas associated with pornography (Martin, 1995). In euro-Western culture, the erotic has been denigrated and relegated to so few areas of life that its remaining expressions are overloaded and distorted (Austen, 1991).

We are taught to separate the erotic from most vital areas of our lives other than sex - and to take the true erotic out of our sex; "to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings" (Lorde, 1989, p. 211).

Women empowered with the erotic are seen as dangerous (Lorde, 1989); the Hebrew Lilith's exile for her sexual independence is emblematic of the Judeo-Christian suppression of women (Austen, 1991). 

How would our society differ for women and men if the erotic's true psychic and emotional components were fully integrated into our lives?

Let's look back to mythology for such a model...

Persephone's pre-Olympian initiation would have been fertile in that it was a complex, transformative experience of the erotic.

^{Death, life, male, female and, above all, the irrepressible power of reproduction—all are found in the image of the pomegranate seed. It is this seed that Persephone takes within her body—literally incorporating it into her own being. With this seed, she becomes a new person: whole, mature, fertile, and infinitely more complex than before. Having tasted it, she has crossed a barrier from which there can be no turning back. (Gadon, 1989, p. 159).}

Sookie’s emergent erotic life has been cited as a central theme of True Blood. Vampire fiction often reflects the fear that such strong, independent, sexual  women will disrupt the fabric of society (Parlour, 2009). For McCabe, Dracula’s worst sin may have been not only rendering women capable of enjoying sex, but transforming them into sexual aggressors.

The legends of the Sumerian Innana contain some of the most erotic, female, and eros-positive literature known (Austen, 1990); she takes an aggressive role in the sacred marriage. Like Innana—and certainly no Virgin Mary, Sookie initiated with Bill, encouraged him along when he faltered, offering her neck, asked him to bite her, signals Bill with her eyes when she was ready to be penetrated – on HER terms. As Brace & Arp (2010) write, when Bill and Sookie consummate their relationship, he penetrates her simultaneously with both penis and fangs, heightening the pleasure for both of them.

HERE YOU'LL SEE THE BRIEF YET POTENT VIDEO - BEST EXPERIENCED WITH SPEAKERS ON - THAT SHOULD APPEAR ON SLIDE 125 OF THE PRESENTATION BELOW (it was part of the original conference presentation but didn't translate in the conversion from PowerPoint to Blogger): 

The ancient initiates to Persephone’s mysteries experienced a special seeing, an “opening of the eyes” (Gadon, 1989); might Sookie’s eyes snapping open in her moment of orgasmic awakening depict “the disturbingly powerful potential of women” (Amador, 2003, p. 1, ¶5) in touch with Eros, sexually sovereign?

Thirsty for more? View the whole presentation posted below!

(citations correspond to reference list posted here)

~ Rachel

Here's a sneak peek BEHIND THE SCENES: True Blood Reenacts the Goddess Persephone's Ordeal of Abduction and Rape...or Self-Directed Sexual Initiation? Opening a Vein on Woman-Centered Sexuality

It's 4:23AM. Rachel sits alone on the couch. The house is quiet except for the furious clacking of her fingers on her laptop keyboard. Her eyes are blurry and close involuntarily from time to time, but she is determined...

So how'd you like my spoof of the True Blood S4 teasers HBO has been releasing? So far we've had brief scenes of amnesia Eric, Eric & Bill, Jason & Crystal, Sam & new female character (sorry, don't recall her name) and Pam, Tara, Jesus & company introduced by the disembodied voice over orienting us to the action I tried to mime above. Did I miss any?

So what's my teaser all about? I mentioned a while back, I'll be presenting a visual talk exploring issues of sexuality and representation through the lens of True Blood at the PCA/ACA & Southwest/Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Associations joint conference, in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Area: Special Area: True Blood track in just a few weeks...(wipes sweat from brow, assures self presentation will be ready in time...steels self for 2 more weeks of living the vamp life by default, working on prepping my talk all night, in bed with the sunrise).

Now, this may seem like a pretty cool rock-star lifestyle and all, except for the fact that I don't have the luxury of going underground or hunkering down in a coffin all day...so the whole sleep deprivation thing is rather bothersome and the bleeds are sort of difficult to explain when working 9-5...


we were 1st introduced to the phenomenon of the bleeds during this scene, S2

...But anyway, I digress...the real point of this post is to pull the veil back a bit and give you a sneak peek of what is to come at the conference next month.

You may have noticed that we put out a teaser of sorts via Twitter with some shots of Neolithic goddess replicas I've been sucking up for the presentation.

My talk is entitled: True Blood Reenacts the Goddess Persephone's Ordeal of Abduction and Rape...or Self-Directed Sexual Initiation? Opening a Vein on Woman-Centered Sexuality. What do you think these images may have to do with it?



Persephone's return



Willendorf



Green Gulch Tara

 Oh well, you'll just have to stay tuned to find out, won't you?

;-0

And please do stay tuned for the frothy confection on groupies & fangbangers that Rebecca's mixing up, to be served here at the PPT soon!


~ Rachel 

WHO IS SHE WHO MUNCHES THE DEAD?

O nether and nocturnal, and infernal
Goddess of the dark, grimly, silently
Munching the dead,
Night, Darkness, broad Chaos, Necessity
Hard to escape are you...you're Moira and
Erinys, torment, Justice and Destroyer,
And you keep Kerberos in chains, with scales
Of serpents are you dark, O you with hair
Of serpents, serpent girded, who drink blood
Who bring death and destruction, and who feast
On hearts, flesh eater who devour the dead
Untimely, and you who make grief resound...

~ Papyri Graecae Magicae, a 2nd century C.E.
Hymn to Hekate

I found this darkly intriguing verse in a fascinating book titled, "Savage Breast: One Man's Search for the Goddess". Author Tim Ward opens his chapter on Hekate - a primal torch-bearing Goddess of transitions who, by the time of Classical Greece, had degenerated into a vessel for the terrible, destructive aspect of the feminine divine - with this hymn.

Not unlike the Goddess Kali in India, to the ancient Greeks Hekate was a drinker of blood, a muncher of the dead...she was, as Ward writes, The Rotting Goddess.



Kali




Hekate

For Tim Ward, writing his chapter on Hekate was part of his way of processing his admitted :"fear of the feminine" (pg. 149). Let's stay with this theme for a moment...

The images you see above of Kali and Hekate above are probably NOT the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Goddesses, right? The word "goddess" probably conjures mostly positive vibes; images  connected to life, love, maybe sex, fertility, the earth, children and childbirth, etc. Goddesses are lovers, mothers, virginal maidens with flowers in their hair...but reapers? Bringers of darkness and death? No...

But here's the thing - death is part of life. It's not the opposite of life - and our most distant ancestors in dimmest history knew that. We need Kali, Hecate, and other dark Goddesses to re-inject the reality of the cycle of life, death, and regeneration - we can't have everlasting youth and life without chopping down and composting the old and decaying back into this ever repeating cycle. But in our society we deny death. We are viscerally repelled by death and aging; we fight them kicking and screaming. We demonize the death aspect because we reject and fear it.

We've splintered the feminine principle into myriad diminished forms. Where once She embodied the cycle of life, death, and regeneration - she's now scattered, her aspects most terrifying to our modern sensibilities relegated to a remote, lower place where her sharp blades and tearing teeth can't touch us.

It wasn't always so, but this mindset has been deeply ingrained in our collective psyche for such a long time that it seems the dark Goddess, the horrific feminine, still skulks in the shadows to menace us because we are not fully ready to accept her particular kind magic as part of our world.

Only now her wardrobe is a bit more fabulous...



Lorena

 

Maryann

 



Sophie-Ann



Diane

Richard Rudgley, author of "Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age" wrote that Ward's deeply personal encounters with the goddesses' statues, frescos, temples and sacred sites he visited while researching "Savage Breast" remind us that "these artifacts are not sterile stones but the touchstones to a still living world of human experience".

Honestly, I am blown away by how a few of the darkest-of-the-dark ladies of True Blood do the same; at least for me, they exhume and reanimate Hekate in our contemporary culture. Sure, they may not look like Hekate 1.0; the hideous hag or flesh-eating ghoul of the later Greek imagination - her skin pallid and decaying, her robes a shroud (Ward, 2006) - but they certainly do resemble her in ways that run more than skin deep...

...if you're wondering how just take a look at the bolded words in the poem above for some hints!

I intentionally chose images representing some of the darkest-of-the-dark ladies of True Blood at their very darkest, so to speak, because while there are other female vampires (Pam, Jessica) and assorted supes who have had their menacing moments (Debbie, Daphne)...
Lorena,

Maryann,

Diane,

          
and Sophie-Ann seem to really project the "fearsome forces of the feminine divine" (Ward, 2006, p. 152) that Hekate became the repository of millenia ago.

What psychological need do these ultimate bad girls fulfill for us today?

Tim Ward writes that he gets "a flicker of something vile" when he contemplates the image of the Rotting Goddess. "She viscerally repels me, yet draws me, as if she holds a secret for me inside her fetid mouth, a flicker of truth about men's revulsion towards feminine flesh" (p. 155). In this vein, he recalls when, in his 20's, during his his travels through Thailand and India he learned Buddhist techniques for eliminating sexual desire. He was instructed to imagine a woman's body split up into heaps of skin, nails, hair, teeth, and internal organs, or to...

..."visualize a woman as nothing but sacks of blood and pus and shit" (p. 155).

  
"Feel desire for that"? Ward writes; "Thus men learn what it is to treat women like dirt (as matter, not Mater) and break their spell over us" (p. 155).

Unlike the Hekate of Classical Greece our True Blood dark ladies are beautiful to be sure, but look at what they're reduced to - burned or boiled down to quite literally - in death. Violent death. Sophie-Ann hasn't met her end yet, but we'll see what fate has in store for her, possibly at the hands of Bill Compton. Of course, male vampires and weres have met similarly erupting, oozing and bloody deaths on TB. Still, there's something about the glee with which many watched the demise of two of these ladies in particular - Lorena and Maryann - that feels quite telling.

Did they - do they - play Hekate's role as death aspects of the Goddess for whom our culture collectively feels a fusion of need and fear?

For some insight, let's briefly consider a motif from a crucible of civilization of the the deepest past that might help us understand the strange push-and-pull the deathly and deadly feminine exerts upon us: Catal Huyuk.

Between 7500 and 5500 B.C.E. about seven thousand or so people lived together in an unprecedented massing of humans the world would not see again until the city-states of Mesopotamia 3,000 years later. Wall paintings and other art work have been unearthed at this site that open a window on the ritual life and belief systems of the people of Catal Huyuk; for instance:



vultures feeding on human corpse and head atop elaborate burial platforms

 Ward writes that vultures - carrion eaters that were well suited for the excarnation mode of burial they likely practiced at Catal Huyuk - seemed intimately connected with birth.


vultures, mother and child



Look at the peculiar symbolic pattern in the wall painting to the right that hints at the meaning of their rites - double rows of vultures face each other wingtip to wingtip; inside each diamond is the body of a woman, and inside the belly of the woman is the dark outline of a child.

In this art the people of Catal Huyuk expressed their belief not in a gruesome death cult, but in a cycle of regeneration in which the vulture would munch the bodies of the dead back into the circle of life, to be re-birthed by the mothers of the community.

Ward describes aspects of the shrines discovered at Catal Huyuk that some experts (I would add, experts looking at relics of a bygone worldview through the lens of today) find sinister and disturbing: molded breast-like shapes protruding from the walls. Some resemble anatomically correct breasts, others contain the skull of a vulture with the beak sticking out in place of the nipple, or the jaws of a jackal (another scavenger). 

Whereas Michael Rice, author of "The Power of the Bull" views these breast-shaped protrusions as evidence that, for the people of Catal Huyuk, "the Mother's breasts do not deliver life sustaining milk but are rather agents of death..." (Ward, 2006, p. 161) archaeologist Marija Gimbutas saw in these artifacts symbols of regeneration.

Lorena and Maryann are, in many ways, cast as what Ward calls the "cannibal mother". Lorena is Bill's maker/lover/mother and Maryann took in/seduced the much younger Sam; in the act of drinking his blood and giving him hers Lorena birthed Bill into his vampire life thereby ending his human one, and Maryann sought to sacrifice Sam to reap his heart for her God Who Comes.

Here's a striking excerpt from "Savage Breast"; Ward is imagining what it would have been like to enter the ancient world of Catal Huyuk within which people experienced death not in the abstract, but as viscera, exposed and eaten.

Picturing himself going down a ladder into a dark shrine with painted black vulture wings spanning the walls, he writes:

I search for the clay breast, take it in both my hands and out the vulture-beak nipple to my lips. As I suck I feel the beak in it tear at my tongue, the flesh inside my cheeks. White milk gushes into my mouth and my red blood flows back into the beak. No way to escape the longing I have for that breast. Though it wounds me I go to her as a child, my cannibal mother, bleeding into her and clinging to her. It's little comfort that she eats back the living when I'm the one that she's gnawing on. It's too real, this fusion of need and fear. (p. 162) 

Do parts of Ward's imagining evoke a "turning" for you?

Will we in the 21st century be able to embrace the cannibal mother; she who gives us life, nurtures us, and - at the time of our death - welcomes us back into the cocoon of her womb-tomb as the 2nd century Greeks did: Night, Darkness, broad Chaos, Necessity?

Lot's of questions, huh?

What do you think?

Don't be shy, please let us know!

Until next time...

~ Rachel