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

Pam's Taken the Veil

So Pam's taken the veil.

And last night, she was hiding under a blanket to evade Eric's gaze when they were thrown in King Bill's subterranean slammer together.

Did she really have much of a choice?

Ever the style maven, last week's Pam—dressed in funerary black lace with a heavy veil covering her decaying face (“Even when her face is putrefying, she comes up with an outfit for putrefying,” Kristen Bauer van Straten remarked in an interview posted to The Vault)—had to deal with the aftermath of a spell cast on her by possessed witch Marnie that has caused her immortal vampire body to rot.

And this week, it's only gotten worse!

I found it interesting that HBO on Demand's description of last Sunday's episode, Me and the Devil, makes mention of this fact with the phrase, "Pam takes the veil".

What's so intriguing about this verbiage?

Thefreedictionary.com defines this term as the life or vows of a nun.

And when I think of  becoming a nun, one of the first mental pictures that comes to mind is that of a woman retreating from the world and hiding (or being confined) behind the imposing walls of the convent.

Let's take a look at thefreedictionary.com's definition of veil:

veil

n.

1. A length of cloth worn by women over the head, shoulders, and often the face.

2. A length of netting attached to a woman's hat or habit, worn for decoration or to protect the head and face.

3. The part of a nun's headdress that frames the face and falls over the shoulders.

4.

a. A piece of light fabric hung to separate or conceal what is behind it; a curtain.

b. Something that conceals, separates, or screens like a curtain: a veil of secrecy.

v. veiled, veil·ing, veils

v.tr.

1. To cover with or as if with a veil: Dense fog veiled the bridge.

2. To conceal or disguise.

One word in particular is repeated over and over: conceal.

This is significant because it speaks to what a woman must do when her beauty is marred. She must hide, separate, screen herself off. As The Vault interview "Kristin Bauer talks about her 'face-off' states, "Having her skin peel off in ribbons of goo is a massive blow for Pam"; an affront to her vanity.

And for a woman whose priorities include Eric and her appearance (not always in that order), this presents quite the predicament.

Pam: "I can put up with a lot, but fuck with my face and it's time to die!" S4E5 Me and the Devil

To understand why this fate is worse for Pam than, say, her maker's would be, let's take a moment to consider the core difference between the spells the possessed Marnie cast on both vampires.

The spell cast on Eric wiped clean his mind, that part of the self envisaged in Cartesian dualism as being characteristically male. The one cast on Pam disfigured her body, that which is associated with the female; the second-mentioned and therefore lesser valued of the male/female pair of lhierarchical dualisms.

Applying this framework of gendered hierarchical dualisms, the biblical Adam is revealed as a soul type, while Eve is of the flesh (Stone, 1976). In Christian theology, it was asserted that women must become more "like a man" (more "rational" and "spiritual" than is her "nature") to come into relationship with God, who was envisaged as masculine.

Feminist scholar Carol Christ writes that according to poet, essayist and feminist Adrienne Rich, such views have made the body "so problematic for women that it often seemed easier to shrug if off and travel as a disembodied spirit" (1997, p. 148). If only it were so easy for Pam; if only she could escape the prison of her rotting flesh like her ghostly harasser Antonia has. But there can be no such simple solution for Pam. As a woman, she is, as Rich writes, controlled by being lashed to her body - "the carnal flesh to which the elevated mind is shackled" (Sanchez-Grant, 2008, p. 78).

As Sanchez-Grant writes, if the mind is allied with culture and reason, it follows that the body is associated with all that is "other"; if woman is inextricably associated with the body, and the body is regarded as inferior to the mind - then surely woman is the inferior Other.

This theme has run through several of my last posts.

That's why the curse Marnie (under Antonia's influence) uttered, "Corrupt unsanctified corpse who walks behold your true self" is so torturous for Pam; for woman, dualism insists that the body is the true self, the essentialized ground of our being.

Under this logic, had the spell beset Pam's mind as the one cast on Eric did, it wouldn't be so bad.

This sexist construction of gender holds that the [feminine] body is entirely separate from the true inner self.

Intriguingly, under the witch's magic, amnesia Eric has become more endearing - he's playful, gentle, contrite for past offenses; he openly displays emotion and seems perhaps more his authentic self.

You know something? The more I think about it, maybe in his current state amnesia Eric is even more than his authentic self. He seems transcendent, self-sacrificing. Godric-like, even.

And he gets the girl, since he is more attractive to Sookie than when he is cold, cruel and calculating, swaggering "real" Eric.

While it's true that he must hide in Sookie's house for fear his vulnerable state may make him an easy target for anyone gunning for him (i.e. the witches, Bill, etc.) Pam must truly hide behind a mourning shroud - lamenting the death of her "true" self since the face a woman shows the world is how she is judged.

This connects to Sam Trammell's uneasiness at his character's yelling "damn, you're ugly" at a female bar patron as he crashed into Merlotte's fresh off his bender; hung over, agitated, and over-the-top belligerent. In my post on Dragon * Con 2010 I noted that it seemed Mr. Trammell sensed the egregiousness of assailing a woman's appearance, since aside from impugning her sexuality (i.e. labelling her as promiscuous, a whore, a "dyke", etc.) it's is one of the most cutting attacks someone can level at a female in our culture.

And here's a (depressing) dose of reality: Nearly half of men questioned in a recent poll of 70,000 people said they would ditch a partner who gained weight, compared to only 20 percent of women. Talk about how the body "feeds" identity, how a woman's "corporeal experience" influences her overall experience (Sanchez-Grant, 2008)!

Pam's own maker has made constant reference to how he could never harm Sookie because she is so beautiful. Where you suprised that in last night's I Wish I Was the Moon Eric recoiled only slightly from Pam, that he didn't all-out reject her ruined visage?

She has become the dreaded Rotting Goddess.

Hecate, She who repels. "A hideous hag and flesh-eating ghoul, her skin pallid and decaying, her robes a shroud...the repository for all the dark and fearsome forces of the feminine divine" (Ward, 2006, pp. 152-153).

She is Rot. Ooze and decay may have no place in the life of the disembodied [rational, male] mind, yet the messiness of birth, sex, and death - the cycle of embodied life - refuses to disappear. This is Hecate's realm. To exhume Her is to face the death aspect of the Goddess and the fusion of need and fear She arouses.

According to Ward (2006), the fear we projected of the Rotting Goddess onto witches long ago we now put onto ordinary women. He writes:

I get a flicker of something vile when I contemplate 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. I remember a friend of mine - he was only in high school at the time, and yet he understood this all too well - he told me he had found an easy way to break up with a girlfriend after he no longer wanted to be with her. When they started making out he said he would keep his eyes open, and he would just examine her, as if through a microscope. He would stare at the glistening pores, pimples, blackheads, the creases, hairs, erupting moles and folded skin. He would feel nauseated, and that would be the end of his attraction for her. In my 20s, in India and Thailand, I learned Buddhist techniques for eliminating sexual desire that followed much the same course. I was instructed to imagine a woman's body split up into five heaps of skin, nails, hair, teeth and internal organs, or to visualize a woman as nothing but sacks of blood and pus and shit. Feel sexual desire for that? Thus men learn that it is to treat women like dirt (as matter, not Mater) and break their spell over us.

WOW.

Perhaps, in her current spellbound state, Pam can teach us about how men at large have been socialized to see women.

References

Christ, C.(1997) Rebirth of the goddess.  New York: Routledge.

Sanchez-Grant (2008).  The Female Body in Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 9, #2, 77-92

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

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