Common Tree Boa - Yellow Morph.  

Persephone the Wanderer (I)

by Louise Glück

In the first version, Persephone is taken from her mother and the goddess of the earth punishes the earth—this is consistent with what we know of human behavior,

that human beings take profound satisfaction in doing harm, particularly unconscious harm:

we may call this negative creation.

Persephone’s initial sojourn in hell continues to be pawed over by scholars who dispute the sensations of the virgin:

did she cooperate in her rape, or was she drugged, violated against her will, as happens so often now to modern girls.

As is well known, the return of the beloved does not correct the loss of the beloved: Persephone

returns home stained with red juice like a character in Hawthorne—

I am not certain I will keep this word: is earth “home” to Persephone? Is she at home, conceivably, in the bed of the god? Is she at home nowhere? Is she a born wanderer, in other words an existential replica of her own mother, less hamstrung by ideas of causality?

You are allowed to like no one, you know. The characters are not people. They are aspects of a dilemma or conflict.

Three parts: just as the soul is divided, ego, superego, id. Likewise

the three levels of the known world, a kind of diagram that separates heaven from earth from hell.

You must ask yourself: where is it snowing?

White of forgetfulness, of desecration—

It is snowing on earth; the cold wind says

Persephone is having sex in hell. Unlike the rest of us, she doesn’t know what winter is, only that she is what causes it.

She is lying in the bed of Hades. What is in her mind? Is she afraid? Has something blotted out the idea of mind?

She does know the earth is run by mothers, this much is certain. She also knows she is not what is called a girl any longer. Regarding incarceration, she believes

she has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter.

The terrible reunions in store for her will take up the rest of her life. When the passion for expiation is chronic, fierce, you do not choose the way you live. You do not live; you are not allowed to die.

You drift between earth and death which seem, finally, strangely alike. Scholars tell us

that there is no point in knowing what you want when the forces contending over you could kill you.

White of forgetfulness, white of safety—

They say there is a rift in the human soul which was not constructed to belong entirely to life. Earth

asks us to deny this rift, a threat disguised as suggestion— as we have seen in the tale of Persephone which should be read

as an argument between the mother and the lover— the daughter is just meat.

When death confronts her, she has never seen the meadow without the daisies. Suddenly she is no longer singing her maidenly songs about her mother’s beauty and fecundity. Where the rift is, the break is.

Song of the earth, song of the mythic vision of eternal life—

My soul shattered with the strain of trying to belong to earth—

What will you do, when it is your turn in the field with the god?

“The so-called ‘mystery cults’ were a handful of marginal Eastern Mediterranean cults which achieved popularity throughout the Roman empire and were distinguished as a unique religious phenomenon by the Belgian archaeologist and philologist Franz Cumont in his 1906 book Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism. This modern label of ‘mystery cults’ has now long been used as a blanket designation to cover the cults held in honour of Mithra, Attis and Cybele, Isis and Osiris, Demeter and Persephone, Orpheus and Bacchus/ Dionysus, and the Samothracian Kabeiroi, among countless other minor and local groups who will never be remembered. Each of these cults (with perhaps the exception of Mithraism) revolved around the dramatic and ecstatic veneration of “dying-and-rising-gods,” a title formulated by the founding father of comparative religion, James G. Frazer, and subsequently developed by British and Scandinavian members of the Myth-and-Ritual School. These so-called “Cambridge Ritualists,” held to the notion that myths do not stand on their own, but are born out of ritual. This theory, of course, is heavily disputed; but the alternative view is equally enlightening: that myth and ritual evolve along parallel lines, without one developing strictly out from the other. The ‘Divine Bridegroom’ is similarly a name I use for these dying mystery gods. For the most part, the mystery religions were sanctuary based, taking place in a telestrion (initiation chambers), caves, or mountain groves, and their members were organized by a structure of hierarchical degrees of initiation. The “mysteries” themselves generally entailed dramatic experiences conveyed via esoteric initiation ceremonies that were reflections of annual agricultural and astrological cycles. Already the mainstream view of old-school ethnologists believed in the notion that the mysteries were survivals of ancient “rites of passage,” especially by Mircea Eliade and Angelo Brelich. Many believed that the origin of the mysteries should be sought in some stage of primitive agricultural development, and it is in illo tempore - into that mythic dream time - to which I wish to return throughout this book.”

— Dan Attrell -  Shamanism and the Mysteries: A Brief History of the Cult of Ecstasy

“Medea is very much concerned with the problem of woman’s place in human society […] Euripides is concerned in this play not with progress or reform but (as in the Hippolytus and the Bacchae) with the eruption in tragic violence of forces in human nature which have been repressed and scorned, which in their long-delayed breakout exact a monstrous revenge. The Medea is not about woman’s rights; it is about woman’s wrongs, those done to her and by her.”

— Knox, B. (1979). The Medea of Euripides, from Word and action: essays on the ancient theater. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp.295-322.

“The story of Hades and Persephone, frequently retold and referenced, became a motif for marrying death… In addition, wedding and funeral rites, in which women played a crucial role, had many similarities. The bride and corpse were washed, dressed, anointed, and either veiled (bride) or shrouded (corpse). Both journeyed to a new home, led by a procession of family and friends carrying torches, with song and dance, blessings, gifts, and a feast. Antigone makes those connections explicit in marrying Antigone to death in her last scene instead of to Kreon’s son, her betrothed.”

— Diane J. Rayor, excerpt from the “Introduction” to Antigone

Trying to ignore or erase things like racism, patriarchal attitudes towards sexuality, antisemitism, xenophobia, ableism, etc renders a reading experience a lot less meaningful (and less interesting) than actually talking about it and confronting it. If you go into denial the moment you realize that Dracula is loaded with Victorian ethnic and sexual anxieties, what’s even the point? There isn’t much else to the book.

If you’re reading Dracula for the first time and you’re not acquainted with Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s book Monster Theory: Reading Culture, try reading this excerpt and seeing how it impacts your reading of Dracula: Monster Culture (Seven Theses)

Persephone and the Springtime was written by Margaret Hodges with illustrations by Arvis Stewart.

Part 2

Indian Gateways🪷~

@onpyre asked if I knew any books about monster theory, and I decided to share my list with everyone. I haven’t read all of these, so please let me know if any of them is absolute crap.

Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (particularly his ‘Seven Theses’)

The Monster Theory Reader, ed. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (great introduction to a lot of different texts and ways of approaching this kind of study, so big rec!)

Ten Theses on Monsters and Monstrosity, Allen S. Weiss + this lecture

The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. Asa Simon Mittman and Peter Dendle (particularly the introduction)

Monsters, John Michael Greer

Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors, David D. Gilmore

Horror and the Holy: Wisdom-Teachings of the Monster Tale, Kirk J. Schneider

On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, Stephen T. Asma

Other related resources:

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, Edmund Burke (here)

The Uncanny, Sigmund Freud (here)

Abnormal, Michel Foucault (here)

Powers of Horror: Essays on Abjection, Julia Kristeva

The Monstrous-Feminine, Barbara Creed

Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques: Monstrosity and Religion in Europe and the United States, ed. Michael E. Heyes

The Monster Show. A Cultural History of Horror, David J. Skal

Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness, Richard Kearney

Our Vampires, Ourselves, Nina Auerbach

Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, And The Middle Ages, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

Frankenstein and the Language of Monstrosity, Fred Botting (here)

Theses on Monsters, China Miéville (here)

The Epic of Gilgamesh illustrated by Wael Tarabieh (½)

Proserpine, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley