I really wanted to write a blog about the mother goddess and her place in Modernity (said in a really pretentious, smelly fart way). I was on the verge of doing it on Monday, then on Tuesday, then on Wednesday after class, then Today, and now I appear to be trying to do it. What I really wanted to say in so many words is that people are too caught up in the minutia of daily life, of numbers, words, and essentially, that they are an individual.
In the West, we are cut off from holistic world. And this is what the Mother Goddess really represents, a wholeness of the cosmos--we are cells making up a wider body, sand on a beach, drops of water in the ocean. The focus of our life is the single point, the head lights of our eyes, the male orgasm (now I am getting new age-y, damn). The Mother Goddess, on the other hand, is the subconscious mind (the super conscious as Alan Watts likes to put it). It's the sense of knowing something that we shouldn't, how we drive a car when we are talking to somebody, how we breath, how we beat our hearts, how we grow our hair--things we do without knowing how we do it...
The Mother Goddess is matter--the word eventually deriving to mother. She is everything and impossible to describe except through myth. William Blake wrote in his The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, "The ancient poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive." The mother Goddess does and does not fit into this role. Whereas the other "more male" gods started deviding the universe amongst themselves, the Mother Goddess and her son (the eternal dying-and-rising god) were the universe. She is the undivided universe, a sense that Modern Man has such a hard time perceiving. The cycles, the interconnectedness, are lost in our grand cities supplied by Walmart, ConocoPhillips, and lubricated with ersatz fiat money. It's the vapid world of modernity, where nothing really makes sense. The need to reconnect with a spiritual "wholeness" is overpowering. Everyone longs to die, to return to a non-chaotic state. I read an article that said low income families are less likely to be depressed if they have a window that looks out on greenery. Another article that explores similar healing properties of nature is this one. The researchers discovered that people, "who watched the nature images scored significantly lower on extrinsic life aspirations, and significantly higher on intrinsic life aspirations, [...] like deep and enduring relationships, or working toward the betterment of society." Any sort of natural setting seems to help stressed minds. Why is this? It is nature's ability to remind us that we can just exist, that some day we will leave this chaotic condition, that we we were once in the Garden of Eden, that we were once whole. It is much easier to be a rock than a human... The Mother Goddess reminds us that we are not individuals, that we are all playing willfully in a grand illusion. Her dying son-husband (Osiris, the Green Man, Dionysus-Bacchus, Adonis) is an analogy for the seasons...
This is what myth does so well--it shows how all of it is connected in a mass framework. Shakespeare was also making his own, which Dr. Sexson was talking of in class. I think I get it.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Women, Giants, and Venus
The image that is broadcasted in Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis" is the ancient tale of the Mother Goddess. Women represent the undefined, unmeasured nature--a wholeness that permeates the universe. The grand illusion of the divided, measured, ordered cosmos is eternally threatened by the fairer sex. They are matter, where man is spirit. We find this tale in the mythological founding of England told by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Regum Britanniae. His record detailed a made-up "Trojan settlement of the land under Brutus that culminates in the glorious reign of Arthur" (xviii). The English giants were said to be descendents of the Greek king Diocletian's daughters, according to the Prose Brut. In this Norman-manufactured mythic custom, his 33 daughters refused to become docile housewives, after Diocletian ordained them to be married off. Alba and her sisters instead cut their husbands throats and were banished, set adrift on the open sea. They reached England (named Albion after Alba). There, it is said, they bred with demons and created a race of giants. When Brutus landed there, the islands were populated by the exogamic offspring, who, "according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, were the only inhabitants" (Mostly Medieval). Brutus was the great-grandson of Æneas and would come to be the eponymous founder of Britain. He destroys the uncontrollable peoples of the land and takes control so he can install law and order. To the Normans, the Celts and Anglo-Saxons were lawless barbarians who needed to be brought into the advanced society of France (however, at a very diminished serf level).
The mixture of matter-women and dark spirit is a tradition passed on to the Anglo-Normans. It was a tale told by the Hebrews and gives credence to the story of Albina and her sisters founding a new country. The Greek woman says, “‘because my name is Albina, this land shall be called Albion; by this our eternal memory shall live in this country’” (Cohen 58). Cohen claims that the essence of this manufactured history is male versus female. The feminine kingdom leads to demons, giants, and incest—a lecherous backwater that can only be solved by male ‘civilization’ and ‘language’. The giant in this tale is tied to the lawless female body which only leads to corruption and demoralization. When Brutus, his best man Cornieus, and the rest of the Trojans arrive, they track down all the giants and kill them save for one: Gogmagog. His name “is lifted either from the Hebrew Bible, where it has no connection to giants, indicating a leader and his people; or, more likely, from the Book of Revelation” (35). The giant wrestles Cornieus (also often depicted as being quite large) and is thrown off a cliff onto the sea stones below—“the place of his death now called Gogmagog’s Leap” (35). Again, the giant is excluded from society for being different, but his name is used as a foundational element for a structured language. The tale of Gogmagog is similar to the fall of Lucifer (who also suffered from the sin of pride as in many giant stories). The creation of a “new heaven and earth” echoed the new kingdom Brutus was founding—a land of paradise and plenty. Brutus “orders, divides, and peoples it, until nature is rebuffed by human architecture and its superabundance tamed into tidy fields” (34). He depopulates the giants, representing chaos, and Albina’s kingdom is left in ruins. Like Brutus, when the Normans landed on the British Isles, they found them populated by peoples with equal female rights. They took these away, returning Albina’s people to their rightful, preordained place. Denying their master husbands was not in the vein of a good Norman wife. The Normans established a new set of rules, laws, and regulations, just like eponymous Brutus. And they legitimized their rule by using the culture of the people they dominated.
There is something timeless about giants. They represent the brute in us all, the primordial being who wants to abandon society and make war on everything for which it stands. This idea is displayed elegantly by Tyler Durden in David Fincher's Fight Club, "God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need." Freud would see it as wanting to kill the father and return to the mother. The mother represents a sense of wholeness with the world (the metaphorical womb)--to meld into the earth or the sky, become one with the mountains, the plains, the alcoves, valleys, and oceans. Giants are the masculine form of nature, and in almost all the ancient and medieval stories--throughout hundreds of cultures separated by land, sea, and time: the Sumerians, the Greeks, the Hebrews, the Norse, the Hindus, the Aztecs, and the Mayans--they are agents of chaos and destruction. In this paper, I will cover the origin of giants in English mythology and literature--a topic that will stretch back thousands of years. The chief giant Ysbaddaden in the Mabinogian, Grendel, Grendel's mother, The Green Knight, and a plethera of other mythological giants will be discussed from other cultures. We often find these great men emerge when men start to see their masculinity encroached upon. Paradoxically, a small "giant" exists in us all, wanting to burst forth like a Xenomorph, wage war on the rules of civilization, and bring about its collapse. It is the desire of the return to "peace"--to escape from this hollow, plastic world and be free from fetters which society places on the individual. I return to the words of Tyler Durden, "In the world I see - you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forest around the ruins of Rockefeller Center" (Fight Club). The giant is an agent of destruction--a symbol for the idea Durden represents, a dead Father of Enjoyment "who commited every sin" (Cohen 19).
The hazard of giants compels as it repels. In his book Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen describes "this duality of the giant, this sublime dread crossed with an enjoyment that plants itself deep in the body is mainly a medieval inheritance" (Cohen xii). This is made evident in modern depiction of the Paul Bunyon as "a corporate mascot of a logging company who was manufactured as an 'authentic' legend of the lumberjacks to increase paper sales", and the jolly green giant who assures "consumers that a certain brand of frozen vegtables is fresh and enticing" (xii). The giant is both of and opposed to us. Cohen claims he becomes the most relevant to a society when the body is being "demarcated", when the masculine is being mixed with the feminine, and when the flesh's place becomes confused. Lacanian calls this extimite or "external intimacy" or "intimate alterity" (xii). The giant is an unstoppable, anarchic force existing outside, but he is also inside, an "external intimacy". "In the England of the Middle Ages," claims Cohen, "he signifies those dangerous excesses of the flesh that the process of masculine embodiment produces in order to forbid", but paradoxically, the giant also represents the pleasures and joy of the body, "to indulge in wine and food and sex" (xiii). He is the force inside all of us that kicks strays rocks, breaks ice under our boots, and burns shit for the hell of it. The giant inside wants out of this separated, measured, rule-filled society; he wants to break free and roam across the towns, prairies, fields, destroying everything he comes across. He is the Tyler Durden inside us all--we do not always know he's there, but he is working to undermine the culture in which we live. He wants to be free of being "merely human in a world that demands the austere discipline of minute self-regulation" (xiv) and "is a nostalgic figure who embodies the abandoned pleasures of the presocial, what Louise Olga Fradenburg calls the 'mourned body of freedom'" (xv). During the period of Anglo-Saxon dominance, the community in England was besieged with what seemed like a never-ending set of challenges to its "integrity and self-definition" (xvii). Monsters became a way for the fragile culture to address their anxieties about the fragile body's identity. He is a way of setting a dichotomy: "them" and "us". The "us" is the idealized Mead Hall of warrior thanes. "Them" is the daunting wilderness, the foreign terrain, and the fractured warring kingdoms. The giant is an emblem of the danger outside the door.
The Green Knight and Dionsysus, the God of Wine
The Green Man is a ubiquitous figure in many cultures. He represents the spirit of nature—the shooting of buds, the twirling of vines, the blooming of flowers, and that feeling we get as we dip our feet into a stream as a canopy of trees covers our heads in dappled shade. He is peace and seclusion from the wretched world of sin. A man completely made of leaves, shrubbery, and branches. To the different cultures that ended up inhabiting the British Isles, he represented many things. To the Celts, he was iconoclastic, a pillar to be held up in the face of growing Norman control. He represented everything that had been lost with the arrival of the French: the beauty of nature, their own vast mythology, the freedom from feudalism and patriarchal suppression. To the Anglo-Saxons, he was masculine and heroic, everything the Normans were not. To the Normans, he was a representation of life and death, echoing their allegiance with Christianity. In fact, the Green Man held characteristics similar to both Satan and Jesus. He is of the earth and “the air” (Ephesians 2:2), polluted and corrupt like the world in which we are forced to live. He is chaotic, morphing into many forms like in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”—turning from a green giant to a red-bearded king (also similar to Dionysus, the god of masks, which I will cover in more detail later). How are his demonic qualities reconciled with his Christian ones? Is there any way he can be fully appropriated into a Christian, Norman culture?
For the Celts and many early cultures, trees were sacred. They saw gods and goddesses inhabiting the forests, living their eternal lives amongst the hawthorn, holly, and yew. The Green Man is another one of these immortals; personifying spring and summer, he disappears year after year, time after time, like the seasons he represents. His foliate face is often depicted as a bush of greenery with fruits and vegetables blooming along its crevices, his visage being popular on churches during the Middle-Ages. Because of his universal appeal as a vegetation god, the Green Man appears independently throughout many lands and peoples: Tammuz to the Sumerians, Osiris to the Egyptians, and Dionysus and Bacchus to the Greco-Romans. In “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, translated by Burton Raffel, the Green Man is described as “ghastly”. He is a truly massive creature, with a thick neck, burly legs, and so tall that he seems “half an ogre, a giant” (Fit 1, Line 140); however, his most striking character is not his size, but his color. He is green, and not just on a single part of him, but all of him: his armor and shirt, are “green, all green” (Fit 1, Line 152), the bands on his belt, the jewels in his clothes, his saddle which his horse wears, his feet, his stallion, his face, his hands, and even his beard are green. He is a spirit from the Otherworld, and forbiddingly, he carries with him a big ax and a branch of holly. Holly is a sacred tree to the Celts. Its fruit flourishes in winter, symbolizing death and rebirth. Much like Jesus, the Green Man dies and resurrects. His path follows the seasons—he is born in the spring and dies in the winter, only to be revived each year. This is cyclical and made a great deal of sense to the Celts. The sun rises every day and then sets. Flowers bloom then pass away. Maidens become mothers. Mothers become crones. We return to the image of the never ending line, a very popular theme in Celtic art.
The “dying-and-rising” myths are symbolic of the cycles of life. The ancients would see the seasons change--winter to spring, spring to summer, summer to fall, and fall back to winter--just as they would see a young boy transform to a man, to a geriatric and then die. His birth is just as the sun rises in the East, no different than that of spring blossom, and his later years, his twilight, winter, and death. Dying-and-rising gods are simply a vessel for this. They resurrect, just like the world after winter, and the day after night. Jesus is entangled with them. He is born close to the winter solstice like many other dying gods (correction: Horus, Attis, Dionysus, Mithra, claims the movie Zietgiest, were all born around this date, though I have found this information unverifiable). And he dies and is born again. Oddly though, there is something which separates Jesus from these other myths: Jesus’ affiliation with nature, sex, intoxication, masks, and vegetation. Gyrus, in his essay, “Dionysus Risen”, says, “When we look at the traditional associations of Satan with carnality, death and the Earth, we can see a pattern emerging. Simply put: Christianity has taken the dying-and-rising godform and split it in two” (Gyrus). Jesus is a dying god, a never-ending line, but essentially, he has lost his balls; instead, Satan picks them up and wears them, displaying the characteristics of a hedonistic dying god—he represents “wizards, darkness, the flesh, women, beasts, indulgence, sensuality and death!” (Gyrus). In Dionysus (the Greek Green Man), a syncretic reconciliation takes place. Gyrus claims that John M. Allegro “traced the etymology of Jesus and Dionysus—words still sharing the same final three letters—back to a shared root-word in Sumerian." Both entities share an association with vines—Jesus as the “true vine” (John 15:1), Dionysus being “credited with the introduction of vine cultivation” (Gyrus). Jesus turned water to wine, something for which Dionysus is also famous. The god carried with him a thyris which he would strike into the ground. Roger Lancelyn Green describes the transformation as such, “at once it took root, sent out leaves, and grew great clusters of grapes. ‘The vine is my best beloved!’ [Dionysus] exclaimed in triumph” (Green 84).
Terri Windling, in her book, Tales of the Mythic Forest, describes Dionysus as the forerunner to Green Man motif. His face was also often depicted as a mass of vines and ivy leaves, and “this compelling but dangerous deity was the lord of the wilderness; he was the god of wine [...], ecstasy, and sexual abandon” (Windling). He was worshipped by women known as maenads, who would be induced into hysteria. This activity is described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where the king of Thebes is torn apart (sparagmos) in a bacchic frenzy by a group of women which included his own mother. These maenads would roam “ecstatically through the forest, wearing the skins of deer and fox, suckling wolf cubs from their own breasts” (Windling), but would tear apart any older animal that dared to flee, feasting on their raw flesh (omaphagia). Dionysus was also associated with satyrs—arcane beings inhabiting the wilds, and specifically the Arcadian Pan. Many scholars believe that Satan’s appearance was influenced by this lord of the Satyrs and his horns. Dionysus was born “horned, and crowned with serpents” (Gyrus).
Dionysus, like both the Green Man and Jesus, is a dying god. When his mother, Semele, is killed after witnessing Zeus’ visage while Dionysus is still inside of her, the great god places the unborn child on his thigh, where he later is granted a “second birth”. Later in life, Dionysus is again killed, but this time by Perseus. He descends to Hades and saves his mother and rises from the dead yet again. Because of these incidents and several others, Dionysus is associated with resurrection. Many similarities have been found between the Greek god and the Celtic horned god, Cernunnos. Cernunnos was the “lord of the forest in Britain and Gaul”, according to Windling. Both are associated with the consumption of mushrooms. In Robert Graves’ essay, “Mushrooms and Religion”, Graves delves deeper in mushroom’s relation with the dying-and-rising gods. Dionysus’ festival, Ambrosia, took place during October, the mushroom season. Amanita muscaria, the red mushroom speckled with little white dots famous for being associated with modern garden gnomes, would be eaten, driving the revelers “mad” with its hallucinogenic properties. Amanita muscaria occurs throughout the European continent—including England. Gyrus, in “Dionysus Risen”, makes the claim that “the whole Christ story is a fungal allegory”. Before the invention of microscopes, spores were a mystery to humans, and mushrooms would “simply appear”, miraculously—“a virgin birth indeed” (Gyrus). He continues, saying, “there was a widespread belief amongst the ancients regarding mushroom genesis: that they were born of lightning” (Gyrus). The mushroom was a “perfect symbol” for the “miraculous regeneration of the biosphere after the cold death of winter” (Gyrus).
Dionysus was also the god of masks and the theater—essential to a god that at his foundation is a symbol for insanity. His morphing appearances—“a girl, a man, a woman, a lion, a bull, and a panther” (Gyrus)—plays into his psychedelic aspect and also his wholeness of being. All of us are wearing personalities, as believed by Judith Butler, and delving even deeper, we are all manifestations of nature; however, we are slowly losing knowledge of this. Before man was cut off from the natural world around him, “the divine and the mundane were one and the same, embodied in nature” (Gyrus). Like many ancient cities, Rome itself was “born in the forest, according to its mythic origin tales” (Windling). Romulus and Remus were abandoned in the forest where they were suckled by a wolf and raised by a brigand. When Romulus emerged from the trees, he cleared a hill and founded Rome. However, as the great empire expanded, slowly the forests were destroyed. Windling quotes Robert Pogue Harrison’s book, Forests: the Shadow of Civilization, and says, “‘the forests were literally everywhere: Italy, Gaul, Spain, Britain, the ancient Mediterranean basin as a whole’” (Windling). Modern lament of forest clearing is nothing new. Plato “wrote with grief [...] of the barren hills surrounding Athens as grove after grove fell before the plough of the ship-builder's axe” (Windling). Here we see the tension between the ordered and the structured universe described by Nietzsche as “Apollonian” and “Dionysian”. Apollonian is described as thinking, self-controlled, rational, and logical, human order and culture—essentially, it represents civilization. Dionysian, on the other hand, represents feeling, passion, intoxication, wholeness of existence, and chaos. The closer you get to nature, the closer you are to Dionysus, the Green Man, and Satan. The culture of the Celts is intimately linked to nature and Dionysus, while the Normans and Romans were approaching the culture of Apollo. As mankind’s civilization encroaches on the spirits, the faeries, and the dryads, it transforms the unordered to structure. Just like Wallace Stevens’ jar takes “dominion everywhere”, so do imperial highways, aqueducts, and bridges divide up the forest. To the Celts, the Apollonian system of the Normans was against the order of the universe, and we see this tension playing itself out in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”.
When we first see Camelot, it is a place entirely cut off from nature, engaged in a game of charades. There is nothing real here, only man-children who “jousted gallant and well, then galloped to court, and sang and danced” (Fit 1, Lines 42-43), and women who would ebulliently giggle and kiss men. These are all mockeries of what the Green Man and Dionysus represent. Like Dionysus’ bacchic revelers tearing a man limb from limb, the Green Man’s Celts accepted death and hedonism as a part of life. The Celts would not play in a facsimile version of sex or death like these Normans participated in—they instead took this ersatz mimicry as an insult. Thus enters The Green Man as described above. He challenges these “beardless infants” to cut off his head. The man who was brave enough to step forward would receive his mighty ax. But there was a catch, in a year and a day’s time, the Green Knight would get his one clean swipe at the neck of the challenger. The crowd went into a hush. No one was brave enough to step forward save only Arthur, but Sir Gawain intervened, taking his place. After delivering a fateful blow, the Green Man’s head is severed, but the great green man still stood. Lifting his decapitated cranium, mounting his horse, he told Gawain, “be ready to ride as you promised” (Fit 1, Line 448). The next we see of The Green Man, he has switched forms and identities—similar to Dionysus, the lord of masks, theater, and illusion—for he and Morgan Le Fay play one hell of a trick on Sir Gawain, robbing him of every he stands for. The Green Man is thus directly linked to the Celtic mother goddess. Gyrus says, “Dionysus himself was extremely effeminate. [...] He was the god most favoured by woman, who formed the greater part of his cultic following. And his rites [...] were closely associated with the veneration of the mother” (Gyrus). He continues, saying that Demeter (the goddess of the harvest) or her daughter, Persephone, were sometimes said to be Dionysus’ mother. The conquered people of “the isles of the mighty”, thus made their comment on Norman culture. Christianity sees “women, sex, matter, and, of course, the Earth” as evil, and “intimately linked with Satan” (Gyrus). Gawain gets tricked by two women, teaching him a very Celtic lesson: do not underestimate the power of women—be it maiden, mother, or crone. They are closer to nature and matter than man—even the word ‘matter’ eventually derives to mater, or mother (Gyrus). This is paralleled by Gawain wearing Mary on his shield.
Finally, Gawain meets The Green Man for a final time in his “green chapel”. Instead of a church, it is a mound—specific to the Celts who believed hills are gateways to the Otherworld. Gawain comments that it is “a good place for a green knight, he could serve the devil properly, here. By Christ, it’s Satan who struck me with this meeting” (Fit 4, Lines 2191-3). Again, the Norman ties between Satan and nature are reiterated. After the Green Man reveals the horrible trick which has been played upon him, Gawain says, “in women winning men to sin, for Adam our father was deceived" (Fit 4, Lines 2415-6). He then lists through Solomon, Samson, and David as being ruined by fairer sex. Both women and the wild are now described in contempt, because the Celtic system has won—their god has humiliated the Norman’s God; women have defeated men; real men with gnarly beards have destroyed clean-shaven boys; nature has overcome civilization. In many ways, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is pointing out the conflictions in Norman society. They decorate their churches with leafy, pagan gods. They betray their own faith by participating in courtly love. They deny Jesus his vegetation elements. They even deny themselves the Earth’s cycles, shutting themselves off from the world. Dale Pendell, in his essay Green Flames: Thoughts on Burning Man, writes, “The Greeks were wise enough to recognize that although Dionysus meant trouble, the suppression of Dionysus was even worse—that trying to suppress Dionysian spirit entirely, to end all licentiousness, all blasphemy, all risk, led to false madness, and the sacrifice of children” (Pendell 5). Pendell relates this to the modern Burning Man festival held in northern Nevada desert every year. The universe is a duality. William Blake, in his “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” wrote in his Proverbs of Hell, “He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence”. By denying the oceans of lust, needs, and hunger inside, these desires will only manifest later as corrupt sickness. There is insanity inside society, a Dionysus, a Green Man, and by denying him, we “breed pestilence”. The Celts saw the Normans as a mockery, unable to understand the basic principles of being a man or woman. They were lost to internal strife, not knowing how to properly deal with it. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” ends sadly, with only Gawain learning this lesson, the rest of Camelot remaining willfully ignorant. They will remain separated from nature, from their own bodies. But by seeing the confliction play out in their god, Jesus, we have a little microcosm of the struggle inside the society as a whole. As Gyrus says in the opening sentence of his essay, “A split exists in us all, and we nurse it” (Gyrus).
Conclusion
In the case of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, the giant is there to reinforce maleness. He tells Gawain that the Courtly Love system in which he participates is just a sham—“a kissing game”. Real relationships mean more than chasing a virginal maid; they require love, respect, and sex. The Norman form of love is deeply troubling. It makes men into yearning, foolish man-children, never knowing the hunt or nature. It makes women into objects who can never live up to the ideal. Of course, no real person is good enough to follow such a system, and both sexes break under the pressure of Courtly Love—besides that, it is deeply hypocritical of the state religion, Christianity—“thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife”. It also falls back to the story of Albina and her offspring. Their Albion was a world without masculine rules, where women were equal to men. It is odd that the giant, so closely linked with female empowerment, represents unrestrained masculinity; but to put the Christian view of women in context with the giant, that women are flesh gone mad and the devil incarnate, perhaps it is not so hard to see why. Giants are uncontrollable storms, earthquakes, lightning, and the end of world, the place where the forces of chaos defeat the forces of order. They are the destruction of the old world order—Nimrod, Frost Giants, Titans, and dangerous Aztec building makers. They are also deeply installed in a medieval tradition of unorganized flesh, the horror of the body, and the outside wilderness.
The mixture of matter-women and dark spirit is a tradition passed on to the Anglo-Normans. It was a tale told by the Hebrews and gives credence to the story of Albina and her sisters founding a new country. The Greek woman says, “‘because my name is Albina, this land shall be called Albion; by this our eternal memory shall live in this country’” (Cohen 58). Cohen claims that the essence of this manufactured history is male versus female. The feminine kingdom leads to demons, giants, and incest—a lecherous backwater that can only be solved by male ‘civilization’ and ‘language’. The giant in this tale is tied to the lawless female body which only leads to corruption and demoralization. When Brutus, his best man Cornieus, and the rest of the Trojans arrive, they track down all the giants and kill them save for one: Gogmagog. His name “is lifted either from the Hebrew Bible, where it has no connection to giants, indicating a leader and his people; or, more likely, from the Book of Revelation” (35). The giant wrestles Cornieus (also often depicted as being quite large) and is thrown off a cliff onto the sea stones below—“the place of his death now called Gogmagog’s Leap” (35). Again, the giant is excluded from society for being different, but his name is used as a foundational element for a structured language. The tale of Gogmagog is similar to the fall of Lucifer (who also suffered from the sin of pride as in many giant stories). The creation of a “new heaven and earth” echoed the new kingdom Brutus was founding—a land of paradise and plenty. Brutus “orders, divides, and peoples it, until nature is rebuffed by human architecture and its superabundance tamed into tidy fields” (34). He depopulates the giants, representing chaos, and Albina’s kingdom is left in ruins. Like Brutus, when the Normans landed on the British Isles, they found them populated by peoples with equal female rights. They took these away, returning Albina’s people to their rightful, preordained place. Denying their master husbands was not in the vein of a good Norman wife. The Normans established a new set of rules, laws, and regulations, just like eponymous Brutus. And they legitimized their rule by using the culture of the people they dominated.
There is something timeless about giants. They represent the brute in us all, the primordial being who wants to abandon society and make war on everything for which it stands. This idea is displayed elegantly by Tyler Durden in David Fincher's Fight Club, "God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need." Freud would see it as wanting to kill the father and return to the mother. The mother represents a sense of wholeness with the world (the metaphorical womb)--to meld into the earth or the sky, become one with the mountains, the plains, the alcoves, valleys, and oceans. Giants are the masculine form of nature, and in almost all the ancient and medieval stories--throughout hundreds of cultures separated by land, sea, and time: the Sumerians, the Greeks, the Hebrews, the Norse, the Hindus, the Aztecs, and the Mayans--they are agents of chaos and destruction. In this paper, I will cover the origin of giants in English mythology and literature--a topic that will stretch back thousands of years. The chief giant Ysbaddaden in the Mabinogian, Grendel, Grendel's mother, The Green Knight, and a plethera of other mythological giants will be discussed from other cultures. We often find these great men emerge when men start to see their masculinity encroached upon. Paradoxically, a small "giant" exists in us all, wanting to burst forth like a Xenomorph, wage war on the rules of civilization, and bring about its collapse. It is the desire of the return to "peace"--to escape from this hollow, plastic world and be free from fetters which society places on the individual. I return to the words of Tyler Durden, "In the world I see - you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forest around the ruins of Rockefeller Center" (Fight Club). The giant is an agent of destruction--a symbol for the idea Durden represents, a dead Father of Enjoyment "who commited every sin" (Cohen 19).
The hazard of giants compels as it repels. In his book Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen describes "this duality of the giant, this sublime dread crossed with an enjoyment that plants itself deep in the body is mainly a medieval inheritance" (Cohen xii). This is made evident in modern depiction of the Paul Bunyon as "a corporate mascot of a logging company who was manufactured as an 'authentic' legend of the lumberjacks to increase paper sales", and the jolly green giant who assures "consumers that a certain brand of frozen vegtables is fresh and enticing" (xii). The giant is both of and opposed to us. Cohen claims he becomes the most relevant to a society when the body is being "demarcated", when the masculine is being mixed with the feminine, and when the flesh's place becomes confused. Lacanian calls this extimite or "external intimacy" or "intimate alterity" (xii). The giant is an unstoppable, anarchic force existing outside, but he is also inside, an "external intimacy". "In the England of the Middle Ages," claims Cohen, "he signifies those dangerous excesses of the flesh that the process of masculine embodiment produces in order to forbid", but paradoxically, the giant also represents the pleasures and joy of the body, "to indulge in wine and food and sex" (xiii). He is the force inside all of us that kicks strays rocks, breaks ice under our boots, and burns shit for the hell of it. The giant inside wants out of this separated, measured, rule-filled society; he wants to break free and roam across the towns, prairies, fields, destroying everything he comes across. He is the Tyler Durden inside us all--we do not always know he's there, but he is working to undermine the culture in which we live. He wants to be free of being "merely human in a world that demands the austere discipline of minute self-regulation" (xiv) and "is a nostalgic figure who embodies the abandoned pleasures of the presocial, what Louise Olga Fradenburg calls the 'mourned body of freedom'" (xv). During the period of Anglo-Saxon dominance, the community in England was besieged with what seemed like a never-ending set of challenges to its "integrity and self-definition" (xvii). Monsters became a way for the fragile culture to address their anxieties about the fragile body's identity. He is a way of setting a dichotomy: "them" and "us". The "us" is the idealized Mead Hall of warrior thanes. "Them" is the daunting wilderness, the foreign terrain, and the fractured warring kingdoms. The giant is an emblem of the danger outside the door.
The Green Knight and Dionsysus, the God of Wine
The Green Man is a ubiquitous figure in many cultures. He represents the spirit of nature—the shooting of buds, the twirling of vines, the blooming of flowers, and that feeling we get as we dip our feet into a stream as a canopy of trees covers our heads in dappled shade. He is peace and seclusion from the wretched world of sin. A man completely made of leaves, shrubbery, and branches. To the different cultures that ended up inhabiting the British Isles, he represented many things. To the Celts, he was iconoclastic, a pillar to be held up in the face of growing Norman control. He represented everything that had been lost with the arrival of the French: the beauty of nature, their own vast mythology, the freedom from feudalism and patriarchal suppression. To the Anglo-Saxons, he was masculine and heroic, everything the Normans were not. To the Normans, he was a representation of life and death, echoing their allegiance with Christianity. In fact, the Green Man held characteristics similar to both Satan and Jesus. He is of the earth and “the air” (Ephesians 2:2), polluted and corrupt like the world in which we are forced to live. He is chaotic, morphing into many forms like in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”—turning from a green giant to a red-bearded king (also similar to Dionysus, the god of masks, which I will cover in more detail later). How are his demonic qualities reconciled with his Christian ones? Is there any way he can be fully appropriated into a Christian, Norman culture?
For the Celts and many early cultures, trees were sacred. They saw gods and goddesses inhabiting the forests, living their eternal lives amongst the hawthorn, holly, and yew. The Green Man is another one of these immortals; personifying spring and summer, he disappears year after year, time after time, like the seasons he represents. His foliate face is often depicted as a bush of greenery with fruits and vegetables blooming along its crevices, his visage being popular on churches during the Middle-Ages. Because of his universal appeal as a vegetation god, the Green Man appears independently throughout many lands and peoples: Tammuz to the Sumerians, Osiris to the Egyptians, and Dionysus and Bacchus to the Greco-Romans. In “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, translated by Burton Raffel, the Green Man is described as “ghastly”. He is a truly massive creature, with a thick neck, burly legs, and so tall that he seems “half an ogre, a giant” (Fit 1, Line 140); however, his most striking character is not his size, but his color. He is green, and not just on a single part of him, but all of him: his armor and shirt, are “green, all green” (Fit 1, Line 152), the bands on his belt, the jewels in his clothes, his saddle which his horse wears, his feet, his stallion, his face, his hands, and even his beard are green. He is a spirit from the Otherworld, and forbiddingly, he carries with him a big ax and a branch of holly. Holly is a sacred tree to the Celts. Its fruit flourishes in winter, symbolizing death and rebirth. Much like Jesus, the Green Man dies and resurrects. His path follows the seasons—he is born in the spring and dies in the winter, only to be revived each year. This is cyclical and made a great deal of sense to the Celts. The sun rises every day and then sets. Flowers bloom then pass away. Maidens become mothers. Mothers become crones. We return to the image of the never ending line, a very popular theme in Celtic art.
The “dying-and-rising” myths are symbolic of the cycles of life. The ancients would see the seasons change--winter to spring, spring to summer, summer to fall, and fall back to winter--just as they would see a young boy transform to a man, to a geriatric and then die. His birth is just as the sun rises in the East, no different than that of spring blossom, and his later years, his twilight, winter, and death. Dying-and-rising gods are simply a vessel for this. They resurrect, just like the world after winter, and the day after night. Jesus is entangled with them. He is born close to the winter solstice like many other dying gods (correction: Horus, Attis, Dionysus, Mithra, claims the movie Zietgiest, were all born around this date, though I have found this information unverifiable). And he dies and is born again. Oddly though, there is something which separates Jesus from these other myths: Jesus’ affiliation with nature, sex, intoxication, masks, and vegetation. Gyrus, in his essay, “Dionysus Risen”, says, “When we look at the traditional associations of Satan with carnality, death and the Earth, we can see a pattern emerging. Simply put: Christianity has taken the dying-and-rising godform and split it in two” (Gyrus). Jesus is a dying god, a never-ending line, but essentially, he has lost his balls; instead, Satan picks them up and wears them, displaying the characteristics of a hedonistic dying god—he represents “wizards, darkness, the flesh, women, beasts, indulgence, sensuality and death!” (Gyrus). In Dionysus (the Greek Green Man), a syncretic reconciliation takes place. Gyrus claims that John M. Allegro “traced the etymology of Jesus and Dionysus—words still sharing the same final three letters—back to a shared root-word in Sumerian." Both entities share an association with vines—Jesus as the “true vine” (John 15:1), Dionysus being “credited with the introduction of vine cultivation” (Gyrus). Jesus turned water to wine, something for which Dionysus is also famous. The god carried with him a thyris which he would strike into the ground. Roger Lancelyn Green describes the transformation as such, “at once it took root, sent out leaves, and grew great clusters of grapes. ‘The vine is my best beloved!’ [Dionysus] exclaimed in triumph” (Green 84).
Terri Windling, in her book, Tales of the Mythic Forest, describes Dionysus as the forerunner to Green Man motif. His face was also often depicted as a mass of vines and ivy leaves, and “this compelling but dangerous deity was the lord of the wilderness; he was the god of wine [...], ecstasy, and sexual abandon” (Windling). He was worshipped by women known as maenads, who would be induced into hysteria. This activity is described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where the king of Thebes is torn apart (sparagmos) in a bacchic frenzy by a group of women which included his own mother. These maenads would roam “ecstatically through the forest, wearing the skins of deer and fox, suckling wolf cubs from their own breasts” (Windling), but would tear apart any older animal that dared to flee, feasting on their raw flesh (omaphagia). Dionysus was also associated with satyrs—arcane beings inhabiting the wilds, and specifically the Arcadian Pan. Many scholars believe that Satan’s appearance was influenced by this lord of the Satyrs and his horns. Dionysus was born “horned, and crowned with serpents” (Gyrus).
Dionysus, like both the Green Man and Jesus, is a dying god. When his mother, Semele, is killed after witnessing Zeus’ visage while Dionysus is still inside of her, the great god places the unborn child on his thigh, where he later is granted a “second birth”. Later in life, Dionysus is again killed, but this time by Perseus. He descends to Hades and saves his mother and rises from the dead yet again. Because of these incidents and several others, Dionysus is associated with resurrection. Many similarities have been found between the Greek god and the Celtic horned god, Cernunnos. Cernunnos was the “lord of the forest in Britain and Gaul”, according to Windling. Both are associated with the consumption of mushrooms. In Robert Graves’ essay, “Mushrooms and Religion”, Graves delves deeper in mushroom’s relation with the dying-and-rising gods. Dionysus’ festival, Ambrosia, took place during October, the mushroom season. Amanita muscaria, the red mushroom speckled with little white dots famous for being associated with modern garden gnomes, would be eaten, driving the revelers “mad” with its hallucinogenic properties. Amanita muscaria occurs throughout the European continent—including England. Gyrus, in “Dionysus Risen”, makes the claim that “the whole Christ story is a fungal allegory”. Before the invention of microscopes, spores were a mystery to humans, and mushrooms would “simply appear”, miraculously—“a virgin birth indeed” (Gyrus). He continues, saying, “there was a widespread belief amongst the ancients regarding mushroom genesis: that they were born of lightning” (Gyrus). The mushroom was a “perfect symbol” for the “miraculous regeneration of the biosphere after the cold death of winter” (Gyrus).
Dionysus was also the god of masks and the theater—essential to a god that at his foundation is a symbol for insanity. His morphing appearances—“a girl, a man, a woman, a lion, a bull, and a panther” (Gyrus)—plays into his psychedelic aspect and also his wholeness of being. All of us are wearing personalities, as believed by Judith Butler, and delving even deeper, we are all manifestations of nature; however, we are slowly losing knowledge of this. Before man was cut off from the natural world around him, “the divine and the mundane were one and the same, embodied in nature” (Gyrus). Like many ancient cities, Rome itself was “born in the forest, according to its mythic origin tales” (Windling). Romulus and Remus were abandoned in the forest where they were suckled by a wolf and raised by a brigand. When Romulus emerged from the trees, he cleared a hill and founded Rome. However, as the great empire expanded, slowly the forests were destroyed. Windling quotes Robert Pogue Harrison’s book, Forests: the Shadow of Civilization, and says, “‘the forests were literally everywhere: Italy, Gaul, Spain, Britain, the ancient Mediterranean basin as a whole’” (Windling). Modern lament of forest clearing is nothing new. Plato “wrote with grief [...] of the barren hills surrounding Athens as grove after grove fell before the plough of the ship-builder's axe” (Windling). Here we see the tension between the ordered and the structured universe described by Nietzsche as “Apollonian” and “Dionysian”. Apollonian is described as thinking, self-controlled, rational, and logical, human order and culture—essentially, it represents civilization. Dionysian, on the other hand, represents feeling, passion, intoxication, wholeness of existence, and chaos. The closer you get to nature, the closer you are to Dionysus, the Green Man, and Satan. The culture of the Celts is intimately linked to nature and Dionysus, while the Normans and Romans were approaching the culture of Apollo. As mankind’s civilization encroaches on the spirits, the faeries, and the dryads, it transforms the unordered to structure. Just like Wallace Stevens’ jar takes “dominion everywhere”, so do imperial highways, aqueducts, and bridges divide up the forest. To the Celts, the Apollonian system of the Normans was against the order of the universe, and we see this tension playing itself out in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”.
When we first see Camelot, it is a place entirely cut off from nature, engaged in a game of charades. There is nothing real here, only man-children who “jousted gallant and well, then galloped to court, and sang and danced” (Fit 1, Lines 42-43), and women who would ebulliently giggle and kiss men. These are all mockeries of what the Green Man and Dionysus represent. Like Dionysus’ bacchic revelers tearing a man limb from limb, the Green Man’s Celts accepted death and hedonism as a part of life. The Celts would not play in a facsimile version of sex or death like these Normans participated in—they instead took this ersatz mimicry as an insult. Thus enters The Green Man as described above. He challenges these “beardless infants” to cut off his head. The man who was brave enough to step forward would receive his mighty ax. But there was a catch, in a year and a day’s time, the Green Knight would get his one clean swipe at the neck of the challenger. The crowd went into a hush. No one was brave enough to step forward save only Arthur, but Sir Gawain intervened, taking his place. After delivering a fateful blow, the Green Man’s head is severed, but the great green man still stood. Lifting his decapitated cranium, mounting his horse, he told Gawain, “be ready to ride as you promised” (Fit 1, Line 448). The next we see of The Green Man, he has switched forms and identities—similar to Dionysus, the lord of masks, theater, and illusion—for he and Morgan Le Fay play one hell of a trick on Sir Gawain, robbing him of every he stands for. The Green Man is thus directly linked to the Celtic mother goddess. Gyrus says, “Dionysus himself was extremely effeminate. [...] He was the god most favoured by woman, who formed the greater part of his cultic following. And his rites [...] were closely associated with the veneration of the mother” (Gyrus). He continues, saying that Demeter (the goddess of the harvest) or her daughter, Persephone, were sometimes said to be Dionysus’ mother. The conquered people of “the isles of the mighty”, thus made their comment on Norman culture. Christianity sees “women, sex, matter, and, of course, the Earth” as evil, and “intimately linked with Satan” (Gyrus). Gawain gets tricked by two women, teaching him a very Celtic lesson: do not underestimate the power of women—be it maiden, mother, or crone. They are closer to nature and matter than man—even the word ‘matter’ eventually derives to mater, or mother (Gyrus). This is paralleled by Gawain wearing Mary on his shield.
Finally, Gawain meets The Green Man for a final time in his “green chapel”. Instead of a church, it is a mound—specific to the Celts who believed hills are gateways to the Otherworld. Gawain comments that it is “a good place for a green knight, he could serve the devil properly, here. By Christ, it’s Satan who struck me with this meeting” (Fit 4, Lines 2191-3). Again, the Norman ties between Satan and nature are reiterated. After the Green Man reveals the horrible trick which has been played upon him, Gawain says, “in women winning men to sin, for Adam our father was deceived" (Fit 4, Lines 2415-6). He then lists through Solomon, Samson, and David as being ruined by fairer sex. Both women and the wild are now described in contempt, because the Celtic system has won—their god has humiliated the Norman’s God; women have defeated men; real men with gnarly beards have destroyed clean-shaven boys; nature has overcome civilization. In many ways, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is pointing out the conflictions in Norman society. They decorate their churches with leafy, pagan gods. They betray their own faith by participating in courtly love. They deny Jesus his vegetation elements. They even deny themselves the Earth’s cycles, shutting themselves off from the world. Dale Pendell, in his essay Green Flames: Thoughts on Burning Man, writes, “The Greeks were wise enough to recognize that although Dionysus meant trouble, the suppression of Dionysus was even worse—that trying to suppress Dionysian spirit entirely, to end all licentiousness, all blasphemy, all risk, led to false madness, and the sacrifice of children” (Pendell 5). Pendell relates this to the modern Burning Man festival held in northern Nevada desert every year. The universe is a duality. William Blake, in his “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” wrote in his Proverbs of Hell, “He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence”. By denying the oceans of lust, needs, and hunger inside, these desires will only manifest later as corrupt sickness. There is insanity inside society, a Dionysus, a Green Man, and by denying him, we “breed pestilence”. The Celts saw the Normans as a mockery, unable to understand the basic principles of being a man or woman. They were lost to internal strife, not knowing how to properly deal with it. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” ends sadly, with only Gawain learning this lesson, the rest of Camelot remaining willfully ignorant. They will remain separated from nature, from their own bodies. But by seeing the confliction play out in their god, Jesus, we have a little microcosm of the struggle inside the society as a whole. As Gyrus says in the opening sentence of his essay, “A split exists in us all, and we nurse it” (Gyrus).
Conclusion
In the case of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, the giant is there to reinforce maleness. He tells Gawain that the Courtly Love system in which he participates is just a sham—“a kissing game”. Real relationships mean more than chasing a virginal maid; they require love, respect, and sex. The Norman form of love is deeply troubling. It makes men into yearning, foolish man-children, never knowing the hunt or nature. It makes women into objects who can never live up to the ideal. Of course, no real person is good enough to follow such a system, and both sexes break under the pressure of Courtly Love—besides that, it is deeply hypocritical of the state religion, Christianity—“thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife”. It also falls back to the story of Albina and her offspring. Their Albion was a world without masculine rules, where women were equal to men. It is odd that the giant, so closely linked with female empowerment, represents unrestrained masculinity; but to put the Christian view of women in context with the giant, that women are flesh gone mad and the devil incarnate, perhaps it is not so hard to see why. Giants are uncontrollable storms, earthquakes, lightning, and the end of world, the place where the forces of chaos defeat the forces of order. They are the destruction of the old world order—Nimrod, Frost Giants, Titans, and dangerous Aztec building makers. They are also deeply installed in a medieval tradition of unorganized flesh, the horror of the body, and the outside wilderness.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Late and a sonnet, please don't read this in class
It's getting pretty late at night and for the hell of me I can't write a sonnet that isn't about moldy peanut butter or atomic wedgies, so I will just ramble on for awhile I suppose. I have had a lot of deep conversations with drunk people lately, and no, I am not one of those annoying types that think they can preach. Okay, I guess I actually am. Faith. Why do people who have such strong faith in something have no ability to question it? What is the point of their devout devotion to something if they cannot leave its embrace for awhile just to see if it's correct or not. I really wanted to write something fascinating or interesting or even worth sneezing snot at tonight, but I really don't think it's going to happen. Shakespeare. Who is he? Shouldn't I be writing about him? I suppose so.
Finally, after sometime, I came up with this sonnet...
I sat on the toilet, thinking about life
And decided life was good as I
squeezed out a poop
I said, blah blah blah
Hallelujah! And then I sat up and
Pulled up my pants.
It decided it was truly great
to be alive and be a glorified tube
Whoopee and all that, said I
As I walked out of the toilet room
and decided it was a good life
being a tube.
Finally, after sometime, I came up with this sonnet...
I sat on the toilet, thinking about life
And decided life was good as I
squeezed out a poop
I said, blah blah blah
Hallelujah! And then I sat up and
Pulled up my pants.
It decided it was truly great
to be alive and be a glorified tube
Whoopee and all that, said I
As I walked out of the toilet room
and decided it was a good life
being a tube.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Myth and Stories -- run through
Right now I am sitting at my computer as my girlfriend reads her awful and disgustingly fascinating book about Fluid Mechanics. Her text reads in a didactic, pedantic, pretentious manner: "We must begin by responding to the question, 'What is a fluid?' Broadly speaking, a fluid is a substance that will deform continuously when it is subjected to a tangential or shear force, much as a similar type of force is exerted when a water-skier skims over the surface of a lake or butter is spread on a slice of bread" (Wilkes 3, Fluid Mechanics for Chemical Engineers). She looks at me disdainfully as I write this, but I tell her I love her and everything is okay. Then she slaps me across the face with her strong pimp hand. Though my face is red and pounding with blood barely under the surface, I do arrive at an interesting conclusion: even science needs myth to get its point across.
Myth is a road map to life. Where science looks deeper and deeper, never finding the answer, myth is life through story. Alan Watts describes it as such: "Myth doesn't mean something untrue, but it means an image. In terms of which make sense of life and the world. Supposing for example you don't understand the technicalities of electricity, and somebody wants to explain them to you, he wants to explain about the flow of currents, well to do that he compares electricity to water, and because you understand water you get some idea about the behavior of electricity. Or if an astronomer wants to explain to you what he means by expanding space, he'll use the metaphor of a balloon, a black balloon with white spots on it. The white spots represent the galaxies, and if you blow up the balloon they all get further away from each other at the same speed as the balloon blows up. In neither case are we saying that electricity is water or that the universe is a balloon with white spots on it, we are saying it's something like it. So in the same way the human being has always used images to represent his deepest of ideas about how the universe works and what man's place in it is." Dr. Sexson has said that by finding what story you are in, what myth, you can find the true meaning of it all. The universe is living through each and everyone of us, and by tracking down each motif, arch, beginning, middle, and end, we can discover it all. The story of Adonis and Venus is a classic of example of this--it is a story that echoes across the world, as if caught in the wind. Enkidu and the whore. Adam and Eve. Mowgli. The wild man, the hunter, who is tamed and deposited to civilization. Venus is just another Isis rearing her head--
Manly P. Hall, an hierophant to the ancient mysteries, cites Apuleius account from the Golden Ass in his Secret Teaching of All Ages: "Behold, I moved by thy prayers, am present with thee; I, who am Nature, the parent of things, the queen of all the elements, the primordial progeny of ages, the supreme of Divinities, the sovereign of the spirits of the head, the first of the celestials, and the uniform resemblance of Gods and Goddesses. I, who rule by my nod the luminous summits of the heavens, the salubrious breezes of the sea, and the deplorable silences of the realms beneath, and whose one divinity the whole orb of the earth venerates under a manifold form, by different rites and a variety of appellations. Hence the primogenial Phrygians call me Pessinuntica, the mother of the Gods, the Attic Aborigines, Cecropian Miverva; the floating Cyprians, Paphian Venus, the arrow-bearing Cretans, Diana Dictynna; the three-tongued Sicilians, Stygian Proserpine; and teh Eleusinians, the ancient Goddess Ceres. Some also call me Juno, others Bellona, others Hecate, and others Rhamnusia. And those who are illuminated by incipient rays of that divinity the Sun, when he rises, viz. the Ethiopians, the Arii, and the Egyptians silled in ancient learning, worshipping me by ceremonies perfectly appropriate, call me by my true name, Queen Isis" (Hall 105). The mother Goddess reoccurs across cultures--Queen Moo in Central America and even the Virgin Mary for the Christians. In Shakespeare's version, Venus (the earth mother) tells the dude to have sex with her and become a good cultured man. Willy could have never read the tale of Enkidu from the Epic of Gilgamesh, but the connections couldn't be clearer...
This is a rough draft and just a series of thoughts with typos and the ilk. I will update it and make connections tomorrow, but for the time being, here's a series of thoughts. heh. As for my girlfriend and myself, we are doing well, though she is slightly upset with me for posting this.
Myth is a road map to life. Where science looks deeper and deeper, never finding the answer, myth is life through story. Alan Watts describes it as such: "Myth doesn't mean something untrue, but it means an image. In terms of which make sense of life and the world. Supposing for example you don't understand the technicalities of electricity, and somebody wants to explain them to you, he wants to explain about the flow of currents, well to do that he compares electricity to water, and because you understand water you get some idea about the behavior of electricity. Or if an astronomer wants to explain to you what he means by expanding space, he'll use the metaphor of a balloon, a black balloon with white spots on it. The white spots represent the galaxies, and if you blow up the balloon they all get further away from each other at the same speed as the balloon blows up. In neither case are we saying that electricity is water or that the universe is a balloon with white spots on it, we are saying it's something like it. So in the same way the human being has always used images to represent his deepest of ideas about how the universe works and what man's place in it is." Dr. Sexson has said that by finding what story you are in, what myth, you can find the true meaning of it all. The universe is living through each and everyone of us, and by tracking down each motif, arch, beginning, middle, and end, we can discover it all. The story of Adonis and Venus is a classic of example of this--it is a story that echoes across the world, as if caught in the wind. Enkidu and the whore. Adam and Eve. Mowgli. The wild man, the hunter, who is tamed and deposited to civilization. Venus is just another Isis rearing her head--
Manly P. Hall, an hierophant to the ancient mysteries, cites Apuleius account from the Golden Ass in his Secret Teaching of All Ages: "Behold, I moved by thy prayers, am present with thee; I, who am Nature, the parent of things, the queen of all the elements, the primordial progeny of ages, the supreme of Divinities, the sovereign of the spirits of the head, the first of the celestials, and the uniform resemblance of Gods and Goddesses. I, who rule by my nod the luminous summits of the heavens, the salubrious breezes of the sea, and the deplorable silences of the realms beneath, and whose one divinity the whole orb of the earth venerates under a manifold form, by different rites and a variety of appellations. Hence the primogenial Phrygians call me Pessinuntica, the mother of the Gods, the Attic Aborigines, Cecropian Miverva; the floating Cyprians, Paphian Venus, the arrow-bearing Cretans, Diana Dictynna; the three-tongued Sicilians, Stygian Proserpine; and teh Eleusinians, the ancient Goddess Ceres. Some also call me Juno, others Bellona, others Hecate, and others Rhamnusia. And those who are illuminated by incipient rays of that divinity the Sun, when he rises, viz. the Ethiopians, the Arii, and the Egyptians silled in ancient learning, worshipping me by ceremonies perfectly appropriate, call me by my true name, Queen Isis" (Hall 105). The mother Goddess reoccurs across cultures--Queen Moo in Central America and even the Virgin Mary for the Christians. In Shakespeare's version, Venus (the earth mother) tells the dude to have sex with her and become a good cultured man. Willy could have never read the tale of Enkidu from the Epic of Gilgamesh, but the connections couldn't be clearer...
This is a rough draft and just a series of thoughts with typos and the ilk. I will update it and make connections tomorrow, but for the time being, here's a series of thoughts. heh. As for my girlfriend and myself, we are doing well, though she is slightly upset with me for posting this.
Friday, January 14, 2011
Shakespeare, what I know
I don't know much about Shakespeare. He appears to be a white male living in Great Britain before I was born. Lately I have been really into Doctor Who, ramming through four seasons over spring break. The television show (which is British) is in an accurate portrayal of the man's life. He is hansome, bisexual, and a wizard with words. However, he also has a penchant for getting possessed by aliens. The extraterrestrial witches encode his best play "Loves Labours Won" with a secret series of words for the invasion of earth. At any rate, take the man for what you will, but he terrifies me.
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