"Have you ever seen blood in the moonlight, Will? It appears quite black." [Harris, Red Dragon]
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Jung wrote:
"Grey and black [nigredo] correspond to Saturn and the evil world; they symbolize the beginning in darkness, in the melancholy, fear, wickedness, and wretchedness of ordinary human life. The darkness and blackness can be interpreted psychologically as man’s confusion and lostness... The situation is now gradually illuminated as is a dark night by the rising moon. The illumination comes to a certain extent from the unconscious, since it is mainly dreams that put us on the track of enlightenment This dawning light corresponds to the albedo, the moonlight which in the opinion of some alchemists heralds the rising sun. The growing redness (rubedo) which now follows denotes an increase in warmth and light coming from the sun, consciousness." [[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]]
With consciousness, we become aware of our presence in relationships, we become aware of our body and its sensations, we become aware of the dance of contradictions that often find their expression in good versus evil.
Jung wrote:
"This corresponds to the increasing participation of consciousness, which now begins to react emotionally to the contents produced by the unconscious. At first the process of integration is a “fiery” conflict, but gradually it leads over to the “melting” or synthesis of the opposites. The alchemists termed this the rubedo, in which the marriage of the red man and the white woman, Sol and Luna, is consummated. Although the opposites flee from one another they nevertheless strive for balance, since a state of conflict is too inimical to life to be endured indefinitely." [CW vol. 14, para. 307]
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.] The woman clothed in the sun
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Hannibal: "If it weren't for the power of your Becoming, if it weren't for the Dragon, you could never have had her."
The Red Dragon: "I put my hand on her beating heart. Heard the sound of her living voice. A living woman. How bizarre."
Hannibal:"I don't want to give her to the Dragon. The Dragon is in your belly now You can choose to have her alive. You don't have to worry about feeling love for her." [Hannibal, 3.11]
"When you see your matter going black, rejoice, you are at the beginning of the work." [Rosarium Philosophorum]
"Nigredo is the dark state, and is considered the most difficult and negative operation of the alchemical process. It is the shadow of the sun. Putrefactio, and Mortificatio are two different aspects of the Nigredo. Putreficatio means rotting, and Mortificatio means killing, hence it is associated with death. In dreams figures like the dismembered Osiris usher in a rebirth. In all religions associated with agricultural renewal, the rotting and death comes first. The dead king may be buried in the fields to promote furtility.
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Psychotherapy and Alchemy VI. Mortificatio — Edward F. Edinger
"...the alchemical opus has three stages: nigredo, albedo, and rubedo: the blackening, the whitening, and the reddening. This paper is concerned with the first of these, the nigredo, or blackening, which belongs to the operation called mortificatio.
The two terms, “mortificatio” and “putrefactio,” are overlapping ones and refer to different aspects of the same operation. Mortificatio has no chemical reference at all. Literally it means “killing” and hence will refer to the experience of death. As used in religious asceticism it means “subjection of the passions and appetites by penance, abstinence, or painful severities inflicted on the body.” (Webster) To describe a chemical process as mortificatio is a complete projection of a psychological image."
"Right at the beginning you meet the dragon, the chthonic spirit, the devil or, as the alchemists called it, the blackness, the nigredo, and this encounter produces suffering..." ~ Carl Jung
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"I am an infirm and weak old man, surnamed the dragon; therefore am I shut up in a cave, that I may become ransomed by the kingly crown...A fiery sword inflicts great torments on me; death makes weak my flesh and bones...My soul and my spirit depart; a terrible poison, I am likened to the black raven, for that is the wages of sin; in dust and earth I lie, that out of Three may come One. O soul and spirit leave me not, that I may see again the light of day, and the hero of peace whom the whole world shall behold may arise from me..." ~ Aurelia Occulta Philosophorum
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Experiencing the Mortificatio: Jung on Grief, Grieving and Mourning
No new life can arise, say the alchemists, without the death of the old. They liken the art to the work of the sower, who buries the grain in the earth: it dies only to waken to new life. -- Jung (1946)
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Mortificatiois experienced as defeat and failure. Needless to say, one rarely chooses such an experience. It is usually imposed by life, either from within or from without…. -- Edinger (1985)
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Decapitation, another form of separation, is a mortificatio which signals that the ego must be separated from the archetypal psyche in order to transcend. We must separate the ego from the collective unconscious, from the energies that initially gave it form, and learn to discriminate within non-duality, without projecting or choosing one side over another.
Edward F. Edinger describes mortificatio of the king or sun at the archetypal level as “the death and transformation of a collective dominant or ruling principle.” Here is where we must slay our dragons and look for what can redeem us.
You yourself are a conflict that rages in itself and against itself, in order to melt its incompatible substances, the male and the female, in the fire of suffering, and thus create that fixed and unalterable form which is the goal of life. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 375.
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What do you think of the essence of Hell? Hell is when the depths come to you with all that you no longer are or are not yet capable of. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244
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"The first state is the hidden state, but by art and the grace of God it can be transmuted into a second, manifest state. That is why “the prima materia sometimes coincides with the idea of the initial stage of the process, the nigredo. It is then the black earth in which the gold or the lapis is shown like the grain of wheat. It is the black...~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy. Page 312.
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My soul leads me into the desert, into the desert of my own self. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 235.
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My own understanding is the sole treasure I possess, and the greatest. Though infinitely small and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a light, my only light. Carl Jung, MDR, Page 88.
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Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking. The one is but the shadow of the other. ~Carl Jung; CW 7; Page 53; Para 78.
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In the process of individuation, too, new contents can announce themselves in this devouring form and darken consciousness; this is experienced as a depression, that is to say, as being pulled downward. ~Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 373.
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To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing red-hot iron: it burns into you and that is very painful. Therefore, to love somebody else in the first place is always an escape which we all hope for, and we all enjoy it when we are capable of it. But in the long run, it comes back on us. You cannot stay away from yourself forever, you have to return, have to come to that experiment, to know whether you really can love. That is the question-whether you can love yourself, and that will be the test. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminars, Pages 1473-1474.
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"Real liberation comes not from glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling, but only from experiencing them to the full." -Carl Jung.
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The secret is that only that which can destroy itself is truly alive. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 81.
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"The ancient Greek vision of Hades was that of a dark, cold, windy, dry realm. This is a good metaphor of all our early traumas of abandonment, hunger, loss, sorrow and shame that are frozen in the labyrinthine halls of psyche. We cannot meet or accept life's legitimate suffering. We can't grieve these ominous shadows so they pile up on us creating blind spots, despair, denial, and wrongful assumptions. The trouble they cause is their demand to be seen for what they are.
This glacial ice cave houses unresolved issues that continue to affect our relationships with self, others and world. It drives our compulsions for achievement and the pain of loneliness. We all carry the burdens of self-doubt and loneliness. We simply remove ourselves from whatever we cannot or will not process, but they remain alive and powerful though buried or frozen, multiplying in scope and weight as we grow older.
Though lack of unconditional acceptance is a natural part of human experience, these unhealing wounds are the hidden focus of our conscious lives. These early losses hang around frozen in time, as if they are still happening. Simply changing their apparent expression, they obstruct the flow of our lives until we recognize and acknowledge them.
The unhealing wounds of unrealized suffering, self-delusion, addiction, chronic depression, compulsivity, failed relationships and some physical illness present opportunities throughout life to reconcile and resolve what we couldn't heal earlier. The word 'resolve' echoes the alchemical maxim of 'Solve et Cogaula," the liquification and reintegration of essentially frozen psychic energy."
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.] Hades and Persephone seated in the underworld on a throne in the form of an eagle's head with Cerebus before them. Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, France
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.] "Homo Melancholicus" by Agostino Arrivabene (2013 oil on brass)
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"The transit from black to white via blue implies that blue always brings black with it. Blue bears traces of the mortificatio into the whitening. What before was the stickiness of the black, like pitch or tar, unable to be rid of, turns into the traditionally blue virtues of constancy and fidelity. The same dark events feel different. The tortured and symptomatic aspect of mortification—flaying oneself, pulverizing old structures, decapitation of the headstrong will, the rat and rot in one’s personal cellar—give way to depression. As even the darkest blue is not black, so even the deepest depression is not the mortificatio which means death of soul. The mortificatio is more driven, images locked compulsively in behavior, visibility zero, psyche trapped in the inertia and extension of matter. A mortificatio is a time of symptoms. These inexplicable, utterly materialized tortures of psyche in physis are relieved, according to the procession of olors, by a movement toward depression, which can commence as a mournful regret even over the lost symptom: “It was better when it hurt physically—now I only cry.” Blue misery. So, with the appearance of blue, feeling becomes more paramount and the paramount feeling is the mournful plaint (Rimbaud[i] equates blue with vowel “0”; Kandinsky[ii] with the sounds of the flute, cello, double bass and organ). These laments hint of soul, of reflecting and distancing by imaginational expression. Here we can see more why archetypal psychology has stressed depression as the via regia in soulmaking.[iii] The ascetic exercises that we call “symptoms” (and their “treatments”), the guilty despairs and remorse as the nigredo decays, reduce the old ego-personality, but this necessary reduction is only preparatory to the sense of soul which appears first in the blued imagination of depression.
Thus blue is the retarding factor in the whitening. It is the element of depression, that raises deep doubts and high principles, wanting to settle things fundamentally and get them right in order to clarify them. This effect of blue on white can appear as feelings of service, labor, and disciplined observance of the rules, civil conformities like the blue cross, blue collar and blue uniforms, which figures of these feelings might carry. The effect can also appear in feelings of guilt and conscience.
Once the black turns blue, darkness can be penetrated (unlike the nigredo which absorbs all insights back into itself, compounding the darkness with negative introspections). The shift to blue allows air so that the nigredo can meditate itself, imagine itself, recognize that this very shadow state expresses “the essence of things and their abiding, inherent permanence.” Here is imaginal consciousness affirming its ground." --James Hillman, Alchemical Blue and the Unio Mentalis
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"Constructive discontent can drive our best thoughts, emotions, and actions. But to get to its root you must enter a tomblike passageway, making a journey to “the center of the Earth,” to the center of yourself to gain the treasure, the cure, the grace. This is engagement with power within.
When old defenses no longer work, you must develop new coping skills for developmental challenges. But this initiatory way includes many deaths and rebirths. Nigredo, the blackening, isn’t always the first stage, but may be one of relapse, eclipse or another incubation stage.
Nigredo is a recurrent cycle of desire and frustration with no real beginning. Your energies are sucked from the outer world and turned in on themselves. Normal life is radically disrupted. When you are paralyzed by life there is nothing to do but let go of your control fantasies. An eclipse of the ego offers a way into the deeper energies of the unconscious.
After involuntary or voluntary symbolic death, reborn spirit eventually emerges from the rotting corpse of the old self with its limiting worldview. This death is equivalent to the conception of the legendary Philosopher’s Stone. Death becomes your ally and advisor. Meditators are advised to “die daily” in their practice. The ego is eclipsed but the Stone is born. These trials nourish the Self. Vision expands, wisdom deepens, self matures.
Conscious alchemy offers a direction, an operational roadmap for realizing your highest potential. It is a psychospiritual path, approached experimentally and spiritually. You make the experiment on yourself. It is a whole brain, whole self process, involving both rational and irrational forces."
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"The old self must dissolve, the neurosis must be liquified and reduced to the primal condition.
Only a purging fire will turn this darkness white. It might be the slow heat of a rotting corpse or fetid compost pile but the inner fire is lit. Like a struck flint, flashes of insight ignite the inner fire which leads to searing visions of the truth of your reality and channel your burning desire toward further transformation that brings clarity.
“Something” in you has already died and it’s beginning to stink. This blackening phase of the alchemical process describes a gloomy time of depression. All the signs seem inauspicious. You feel unlucky, caught in a black mood whose origin may be difficult to pinpoint.
MELANCHOLIA
Faust was given power by the Devil on condition that he would never be satisfied with what he has. The advertising myth of the “American Dream” did the same thing to us all. Happiness and satisfaction with life depend on how small a gap you perceives between what you wish for and what you possess. Traditional social shields such as religion, ethnic traditions, patriotism, etc. no longer are effective for many disrupted by the harsh winds of chaos."
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"The head of the Raven" is another traditional name for the nigredo. It corresponds to the encounter with the shadow. Your ego and the shadow must eventually be reconciled. Your restlessness and disorientation come from your conscious experience of conflict between conscious and unconscious drives. The unconscious must be transformed. The Self devours itself and dies, only to rise again when the work is perfected. But feelings of guilt, worthlessness and powerlessness must be suffered and worked through patiently."
"A robin red-breast in a cage, puts all of Heaven in a rage. Think to yourself that every day is your last. The hour to which you do not look forward will come as a welcome surprise. As for me, when you want a good laugh, you will find me in fine state... fat and sleek, a true hog of Epicurus's herd." [Harris, Silence of the Lambs]
Goethe wrote:
"Wild dreams torment me as I lie. And though a god lives in my heart, though all my power waken at his word, though he can move my every inmost part - yet nothing in the outer world is stirred. thus by existence tortured and oppressed I crave for death, I long for rest." [Faust, I]
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"The wise man is not surprised by death he is always ready to leave. - La Fontaine
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This melancholic state is so powerful that, according to scientists and doctors, it can attract demons to the body, even to such an extent that one can get into mental confusion or get visions. - Agrippa
"Nigredo, or blackness, in the alchemical sense, means putrefaction, decomposition. By the penetration of the external fire, the inner fire is activated and the matter starts to putrefy. The body is reduced to its primal matter from which it originally arose. This process is also called ‘cooking’. The black earth is closed up in a vessel or flask, and heated.
The Body is to be decomposed, that is one shifts one's awareness to the inner self.
On the mythological level, nigredo signifies the difficulties man has to overcome on his journey through the underworld. Nigredo is sometimes called ‘blacker than the blackest black’. Hercules had to accomplish twelve, almost impossible, tasks. The pilgrim traditionally encounters shadows, monsters, demons. In the ancient mysteries the candidates had to undergo difficult, sometimes painful and even dangerous initiation tests.
In alchemy, one of the symbols of nigredo is the ‘decapitation’, and also the ‘raven’s head’ (caput corvi). Those symbols refer to the dying of the common man, the dying of his inner chaos and doubt because he is unable to find the truth in himself. In one of his works, Hercules cleanses the Augias stables. It is the cleansing of all the impurities in oneself. (Johann Daniel Mylius, Philosophia reformata, Frankfurt, 1622)
Psychologically, nigredo is a process of directing oneself to find self-knowledge. A problem is given full attention and reduced to its core. This is not done so much in an intellectual way, but especially by feeling the emotions. By really going into to it, one causes putrefaction, the decomposition of that in which one had been stuck. The confrontation with the inner reality is often painful, and can lead to depression. But once in the depth of the darkness, with the discovery of the seed of the problem, the seed in the ‘prima materia’, the white light is born (=albedo, whiteness, the next phase). A state of rest arises. Insight into the problem has been gained, it has been worked out emotionally, and knowledge arises on how to handle it in a more positive way and to build a more pure attitude. Alchemists talked about unraveling ‘the mixture’(=man with all his complexities) in order to return to the germ. "That from which a thing has been made in a natural way, by that same thing it must return to a dissolved state into its own nature. Everything has to be dissolved and reduced into that form from which is arose." (Anton Joseph Kirchweger, 1728)
‘Matter’ has to be stripped of its superfluities in order to arrive at the center, which contains all the power of ‘the mixture’. The seed is the essence and contains all the essential powers of the body. One has to go to the center of his problems, to the center of his emotions, to the center of himself. There is the power of transformation."
To the ancients, and as per Jaynes, the spirit resided in the undifferentiated self, the stomach - where man felt his soul, his thumos. Emotions resided and were felt at and in the pit of the stomach.
Dante placed Satan right at the centre, at the navel of the earth, as much as the omphalos at Delphi which was the therapon of Zeus that Kronos swallowed, marked the centre of the world.
"The belly of the beast" is thus an interesting phrase.
Bedelia wrote:
"Before Dante, we spoke not of the Gates of Hell, but of the Mouth of Hell. My journey to damnation began when I was swallowed by the beast." [Hannibal, 3.10]
Hannibal wrote:
"The Dragon is in your belly now." [Hannibal, 3.11]
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"Ben Jonson from "Batholomew Fair" (1614): "What do you say to a drum, sir? It is the broken belly of the beast, and thy bellows there are his lungs, and these pipes are his throat, those feathers are of his tail, and thy rattles the gnashing of his teeth".
Have not the drums been called the Devil's music... rock n'roll, black metal...
"I do admire your courage. I think I'll eat your heart." [Harris, The Red Dragon]
The heart beats like a drum.
The restless curiosity of the Faustian spirit may be traced back to Pandora opening the box. As the all-gifted, adorned by the gifts of all the gods, she is a glorious idol - like the "woman clothed in the sun"... Pandora, te "Beautiful-Evil" - Gk. Kalon-kakon. The link with the box also identifies her as Psyche who was given the task to safeguard a jar. Panofsky's book 'Pandora's box' shows via art, the transition from depicting Hope as the only one that remains to not even Hope remains...
In art, Pandora was also metaphorized as Rome - the Eternal City; that was both beautiful as well as evil. As cultured, as much a debauchery. She was adopted into the figure of Eve and represented with one hand on Death's head, and the other on the jar of hope. Pandora symbolized the liminal "hinge" between two eras [the golden age and thereafter], [immortality and mortality], and two worlds [god and beast]... Goethe's "the two souls in my breast..."
As seen before, the liminal junction is the site of the berserkers and their "mad ravening". The raven was the shadow side, and in alchemy, the act of decapitation of the rotting self. In the representation of Pandora, the crow came to stand for Hope... Perhaps because of its connection to saturn and lead being the heaviest, Hope was the "last" to leave the jar. Perhaps because the "cras cras" of the crow signified procrastination of a tomorrow... "all will be well"...
The important note to note however is Pandora marks the first concreteness of Phenomena via visuality.
Phenomena as Visuality begins with Pandora.
Hannibal refers to The Red Dragon as the "Great Becoming" in line with Faust rendering, "In the Beginning was the Word" to "In the Beginning was the Action".
Pandora as a sculpted object, eidolon - Noumenon transforms to eros - Phenomenon.
Kenaan wrote:
"Pandora is the first work of art, the first product of manufacture, and the first manifestation of techne, as opposed to phusis. Even more importantly, Theogony introduces through the making of Pandora the very experience of objectification.The presentation of Pandora as an object of art results in an ekphrasis, which, by virtue of its rhetorical quality, creates two portraits: that of the object (the creation of Pandora), and that of the act of gazing at the object (the responses to Pandora). Hesiod delineates the object’s visibility and thereby allows us to encounter a phenomenon in its pur e essence, through its appearance.
Theogony allows us to see the destructive image of Pandora as simult aneously the source of humanity’s transformation from indistinguishable beings into self-reflecting individuals." [Pandora's Senses]
Mirrors and self-reflection.
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"He didn't murder those families? He "changed" them?" [Hannibal, 3.11]
And what is the Daemonic, if not the "hinge" that dimensionates?
Widening irises of the eye that capture more and more of the world; visuality is a tactility to the Greeks, seeing a grasping...
To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing red-hot iron: it burns into you and that is very painful. Therefore, to love somebody else in the first place is always an escape which we all hope for, and we all enjoy it when we are capable of it. But in the long run, it comes back on us. You cannot stay away from yourself forever, you have to return, have to come to that experiment, to know whether you really can love. That is the question-whether you can love yourself, and that will be the test. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminars, Pages 1473-1474.
"I do admire your courage. I think I'll eat your heart." [Harris, The Red Dragon]
The heart beats like a drum.
The restless curiosity of the Faustian spirit may be traced back to Pandora opening the box. As the all-gifted, adorned by the gifts of all the gods, she is a glorious idol - like the "woman clothed in the sun"... Pandora, te "Beautiful-Evil" - Gk. Kalon-kakon. The link with the box also identifies her as Psyche who was given the task to safeguard a jar. Panofsky's book 'Pandora's box' shows via art, the transition from depicting Hope as the only one that remains to not even Hope remains...
In art, Pandora was also metaphorized as Rome - the Eternal City; that was both beautiful as well as evil. As cultured, as much a debauchery. She was adopted into the figure of Eve and represented with one hand on Death's head, and the other on the jar of hope. Pandora symbolized the liminal "hinge" between two eras [the golden age and thereafter], [immortality and mortality], and two worlds [god and beast]... Goethe's "the two souls in my breast..."
As seen before, the liminal junction is the site of the berserkers and their "mad ravening". The raven was the shadow side, and in alchemy, the act of decapitation of the rotting self. In the representation of Pandora, the crow came to stand for Hope... Perhaps because of its connection to saturn and lead being the heaviest, Hope was the "last" to leave the jar. Perhaps because the "cras cras" of the crow signified procrastination of a tomorrow... "all will be well"...
The important note to note however is Pandora marks the first concreteness of Phenomena via visuality.
Phenomena as Visuality begins with Pandora.
Hannibal refers to The Red Dragon as the "Great Becoming" in line with Faust rendering, "In the Beginning was the Word" to "In the Beginning was the Action".
Pandora as a sculpted object, eidolon - Noumenon transforms to eros - Phenomenon.
Kenaan wrote:
"Pandora is the first work of art, the first product of manufacture, and the first manifestation of techne, as opposed to phusis. Even more importantly, Theogony introduces through the making of Pandora the very experience of objectification.The presentation of Pandora as an object of art results in an ekphrasis, which, by virtue of its rhetorical quality, creates two portraits: that of the object (the creation of Pandora), and that of the act of gazing at the object (the responses to Pandora). Hesiod delineates the object’s visibility and thereby allows us to encounter a phenomenon in its pur e essence, through its appearance.
Theogony allows us to see the destructive image of Pandora as simult aneously the source of humanity’s transformation from indistinguishable beings into self-reflecting individuals." [Pandora's Senses]
Mirrors and self-reflection.
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"He didn't murder those families? He "changed" them?" [Hannibal, 3.11]
And what is the Daemonic, if not the "hinge" that dimensionates?
Widening irises of the eye that capture more and more of the world; visuality is a tactility to the Greeks, seeing a grasping...
"One mind is enough for a thousand hands." [Faust, I]
Hannibal wrote:
"A sophisticated intelligence can forecast many things. I suppose mine is sophisticated enough." [Hannibal, 3.11]
"If you play, you pay." [Hannibal, 3.11]
I was speaking of Pandora... and Hannibal 3.12 referred to Hannibal as a Blue Beard...
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"Bluebeard" (French: La Barbe bleue) is a French folktale, the most famous surviving version of which was written by Charles Perrault and first published by Barbin in Paris in 1697 in Histoires ou contes du temps passé. The tale tells the story of a violent nobleman in the habit of murdering his wives and the attempts of one wife to avoid the fate of her predecessors.
Bluebeard is a wealthy aristocrat, feared and shunned because of his ugly, blue beard. He has been married several times, but no one knows what became of his wives. He is therefore avoided by the local girls. When Bluebeard visits one of his neighbours and asks to marry one of his two daughters, the girls were terrified, and each tries to pass him on to the other. Eventually he talks the younger daughter into visiting him, and after hosting a wonderful banquet, he persuades her to marry him. After the ceremony, she goes to live with him in his castle.
Very shortly after, Bluebeard announces that he must leave the country for a while; he gives all the keys of the château to his new wife, telling her they open the doors to rooms which contain his treasures. He tells her to use the keys freely and enjoy herself whilst he is away. However, he also gives her the key to one small room beneath the castle, stressing to her that she must not enter this room under any circumstances. She vows she will never enter the room. He then goes away and leaves the house in her hands. Immediately, she is overcome with the desire to see what the forbidden room holds; and, despite warnings from her visiting sister, Anne, the girl abandons her guests during a house party and takes the key to the room.
The wife immediately discovers the room's horrible secret: its floor is awash with blood and the murdered bodies of her husband's former wives hang from hooks on the walls. Horrified, she drops the key into the pool of blood. She flees the room, but the blood staining the key will not wash off. She reveals her murderous husband's secret to her sister Anne, and both plan to flee the castle the next day; but, Bluebeard returns home unexpectedly the next morning and, noticing the blood on the key, immediately knows his wife has broken her vow. In a blind rage, he threatens to behead her on the spot, but she implores him to give her a quarter of an hour to say her prayers. He consents, so she locks herself in the highest tower with Anne. While Bluebeard, sword in hand, tries to break down the door, the sisters wait for their two brothers to arrive. At the last moment, as Bluebeard is about to deliver the fatal blow, the brothers break into the castle; and, as he attempts to flee, they kill him. He leaves no heirs but his wife, who inherits all his great fortune. All of Bluebeard's dead wives are buried and she uses part of his fortune for a dowry to marry off her sister, another part for her brothers' captains' commissions, and the rest to marry a worthy gentleman who makes her forget her horrible encounter with Bluebeard.
Another possible source stems from the story of the early Breton king Conomor the Accursed and his wife Tryphine. This is recorded in a biography of St. Gildas, written five centuries after his death in the sixth century. It describes how after Conomor married Tryphine, she was warned by the ghosts of his previous wives that he murders them when they become pregnant. Pregnant, she flees; he catches and beheads her, but St. Gildas miraculously restores her to life, and when he brings her to Conomor, the walls of his castle crumble and kill him. Conomor is a historical figure, known locally as a werewolf, and various local churches are dedicated to Saint Tryphine and her son, Saint Tremeur.
The character's blue beard is regarded as a symbol of his otherworldly origins.
Story is full of symbols: color blue stands for his cold nature and alienation, castle is full of mirrors as symbols of wealth and search for the truth, the most powerful is of course a key representing the power and a trap.
In the original 1812 Kinder und Hausmärchen by the Brothers Grimm, Wilhelm Grimm makes a very interesting handwritten comment in the book on pg XLI of the annotations: “It seems in all Märchen of Blubeard, wherein his Blutrunst [flowing of blood] has not rightly explained, the idea to be the basis of himself through bathing in blood to cure of the blue beard; as the lepers. That is also why it is written that the blood is collected in basins.”
The fatal effects of feminine curiosity have long been the subject of story and legend. Lot's wife, Pandora, and Psyche are all examples of mythic stories where women's curiosity is punished by dire consequences. In an illustrated account of the Bluebeard story by Walter Crane, when the wife is shown making her way towards the forbidden room, there is behind her a tapestry of the serpent enticing Eve into eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden..."
Ex Machina, a 2015 film by writer/director Alex Garland, adapts the Bluebeard character as the reclusive CEO of a fictional tech company called "Bluebook" (a seeming amalgam of Google and Facebook described as having been named for Wittgenstein's Blue Book), dividing the role of Bluebeard's wife between a female-bodied AI and an unsuspecting Bluebook programmer summoned to evaluate it."
"Blue beard" and the "Werewolf" might be related to the I.E. Mannerbunde... the "leprosy" and "deformity" relating to berserker skin perhaps... Cuchulain's skin peeling... and doesn't Hannibal quite often take on and off his "body-suit"?
The leper was an "Exile"... like the "fallen angel", like lucifer...
Bluebeard had many wives... In the series... Bedelia and Will... that he marks out in his version of the Boticelli painting...
And in that sense,
Bedelia wrote:
"Could he daily feel a stab of hunger for you (Will) and find nourishment at the very sight of you? Yes. But do you ache for him?" [Hannibal, 3.11]
Will wrote:
"If you play, you pay." [Hannibal, 3.11]
Quote :
"Contrapasso (or, in modern Italian, contrappasso), from the Latin contra and patior, "suffer the opposite": refers to the punishment of souls in Dante's Inferno, "by a process either resembling or contrasting with the sin itself." A similar process, though a penitential one, occurs in the Purgatorio.
One of many examples of contrapasso occurs in the 4th Bolgia of the 8th circle of Hell (Inferno, Canto XX), where the sorcerers, astrologers, and false prophets have their heads twisted around on their bodies backward, so that they "found it necessary to walk backward, / because they could not see ahead of them."[3] While referring primarily to attempts to see into the future by forbidden means, this also symbolises the twisted nature of magic in general.[4] Such a contrapasso "functions not merely as a form of divine revenge, but rather as the fulfilment of a destiny freely chosen by each soul during his or her life."
The word contrapasso can be found in Canto XXVIII of the Inferno, in which the decapitated Bertran de Born declares: "Così s'osserva in me lo contrapasso" (XXVIII, 142) which Longfellow translates: "Thus is observed in me the counterpoise" De Born is in the 9th Bolgia of schismatics, for (Dante believes) causing the rebellion of Henry the Young King against his father, Henry II of England. He is decapitated there as a contrapasso for his (supposed) act of political decapitation in undermining a rightful head of state.
Dante inherited the idea and the name of contrapasso from theological (Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica) and literary (Medieval "visions", such as Visio Pauli, Visio Alberici, and Visio Tungdali) sources."
Like bluebeard's wife who opened the forbidden door, and Pandora who opened the forbidden box,,, Bedelia characterizes Will as the "curious one"... who subconsciously wanted to see another harmed by the Red Dragon...
"Prison" becomes irrelevant, obsolete, when one can trans-fer (carry-across, *metaphor*) and "throw across" [dia-bolical] the red dragon from one belly to another as Hannibal persuades... and pass on Agency...
Foucault described the modern prison-without-bars...
Foucault wrote:
"He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection." [Discipline and Punish]
Bogard wrote:
"The figure of the Panopticon is already haunted by a parallel figure of simulation. Surveillance, we are told, is discreet, unobtrusive, camouflaged, unverifiable – all elements of artifice designed into an architectural arrangement of spaces to produce real effects of discipline. Eventually this will lead, by its means of perfection, to the elimination of the Panopticon itself . . . surveillance as its own simulation. Now it is no longer a matter of the speed at which information is gained to defeat an enemy. . . . Now, one can simulate a space of control, project an indefinite number of courses of action, train for each possibility, and react immediately with pre-programmed responses to the actual course of events . . . with simulation, sight and foresight, actual and virtual begin to merge. . . . Increasingly the technological enlargement of the field of perceptual control, the erasure of distance in the speed of electronic information has pushed surveillance beyond the very limits of speed toward the purest forms of anticipation." [The Simulation of Surveillance]
Foucault wrote:
"Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society."
Foucault wrote:
"In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating."
Foucault wrote:
"Tamed, madness preserves all the appearances of its reign. It now takes part in the measures of reason and in the labor of truth. It plays on the surface of things and in the glitter of daylight, over all the workings of appearances, over the ambiguity of reality and illusion, over all that indeterminate web, ever rewoven and broken, which both unites and separates truth and appearance." [Madness and Civilization]
Foucault wrote:
"Sovereignty is exercised within the borders of a territory, discipline is exercised on the bodies of individuals, and security is exercised over a whole population." [Security, Territory, Population]
Could it be that David Lynch was making a reference to the Bluebeard story? My recollection of this fairy tale is that a woman marries a man with a blue beard, despite the fact that her intuition is telling her that there is something not quite right about him (as symbolized by his blue beard). Bluebeard tells his young bride that she can have access to all the rooms in the castle with the exception of one room. The young bride ultimately gets the key to this room and finds it to be full of corpses (of dead wives, presumably). Bluebeard represents the natural predator who inhabits all women's psyches - a force that can take over when women let go of their intuitive powers. It seems that like the bride in Bluebeard, many of the MD characters let go of intuition to engage in fantasy. Diane continues to engage in fantasy with Camilla, despite all the messages that Camilla gives her suggesting that she does not care about maintaining the integrity of their relationship. Similarly, Camilla seems to not attend to the predatory dangers that exist within Diane. When Rita unlocks the box with the blue key, the more predatory nature of both women unfolds and the fantasy falls away. Similarly, as the bride of Bluebeard unlocks the forbidden room in the castle, the predatory nature of Bluebeard is revealed and her fantasy of their marriage disintegrates. Finally, the woman with the blue hair in the end may also be be a reference to Bluebeard in that she has blue hair and is calling for silence. Perhaps she is commenting on the silencing of intuition. Certainly, the whole club scene seems to be commenting on our eager willingness to disengage for instinct and information regarding deceit because we naturally want to engage in the fantasy.
_________________ And here we always meet, at the station of our heart / Looking at each other as if we were in a dream /Seeing for the first time different eyes so supreme / That bright flames burst into vision, keeping us apart.
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
Hannibal says after sending the Dragon to kill Will's family, "They're not my family."
One could then see the interesting parallel between Hannibal and Mulholland Drive - the same love/hate rage that makes her hire the hitman... except, in Hannibal, it is the stronger type that orders it and in MD, it is the weaker type that orders the kill... and that makes all the difference in the motive and emotion.
In the tradition of courtly love, the discretion of the lover for his beloved was everything.
For the "vulgar" is the opposite of the "gentle," and, as Dante has everywhere argued, that which makes the heart "gentle" is love.
"Amore e'l cor gentil sono una cosa."
Beyond the Xt. perversion, what was Rude and vulgar was this lack of intimacy, of spontaneous inti-Mating, of that "greeting" which instantly grasps the other and initiates his long pondering remembrance. Everything hinged on this shared understanding and a careless word could become a wound. In shared glances, hearts were exchanged and everything was intimated with (pre)caution, sensitivity and watchfulness.
Hannibal in this sense subtly shifts the Xt. focus from the Lady being both a virgin and whore, to himself.
He is at once, a Lord and a Lover.
Noble and Knight.
He is the Punisher of betrayers as well as the Participant of the secret love.
He is at once a Sear of the heart, as well as a Seer of the heart.
Hannibal links Troubador poetry with psychoanalysis. One can as easily analyze the other without dissecting them, "stopping at the surface as the Greeks knew" [N.].
This is Participation with the other, flowing with the poetry,,, as opposed to Observation and dissection.
Hannibal is both a connoisseur and cannibal in this metaphorical sense too. His observant, cold-blooded dissecting cannibalism Is a participation.
Likewise, Bluebeard is at once *both* lord and lover; the patriarch as well as the serpent that entices into forbidden knwoledge, the punisher as well as the participant of the secret love...
Continuing on about this ambiguous quality of the *both*,
Quote :
"Beards were also the mark of the goat, and given the goat's lustful and diabolical character, its kinship with satyrs and other classical embodiments of lubriciousness, like the god Pan, beards came increasingly to define the male in a priapic mode.
The very word in French - barbe - looks as if it is related to "barbare", "barbarian", though this isn't etymologically so. The color blue, the color of ambiguous depth, of the heavens and of the abyss at once, encodes the frightening character of Bluebeard, his house and his deeds… The chamber he forbids his new wife becomes a blue chamber in some retellings: blue is the color of the shadow side, the tint of the marvelous and the inexplicable, of desire, of knowledge, of the blue movie, of blue talk, of raw meat and rare steak, of melancholy and the unexpected (once in a blue moon, out of the blue).
After Perrault, the story often comes with a subtitle, "The Effect of Female Curiosity." Or - in case we miss the point - "The Fatal Effects of Curiosity", to bring it in line with cautionary tales about women's innate wickedness: with Pandora, who opened the forbidden casket, as well as Eve, who ate of the forbidden fruit.
Bluebeard plays two parts at least in his own story: the patriarch whose orders must be obeyed on the one hand, and on the other the serpent who seduces by exciting curiosity and desire and so brings death. His beard is emblematic of this ambiguity, a patriarchal ornament, a devilish goatee."
In Balazs' rendition of the opera, it is not only the wife who stands to lose her life, but also Bluebeard, who grows *blue*, desolate and melancholic with the loss of yet another as she joins the other wives [the three graces of the day] as the muse of the night...
Both play Russian Roulette.
In the older Acropolis, a temple called the Bluebeard temple was dedicated to Athena...
Quote :
Quote :
"The Acropolis became a sacred place in the 6th century BC when a temple dedicated 'Athenia Polias' was built in the northeastern side of the hill. The 'Athenia Polias' temple is made up of limestone and many artifacts and documents were found from this area. The temple is also known as 'Bluebeard temple' after the 3-headed serpent whose beard was blue. In the late 6th century BC another temple was built known as the 'Archaios Naos' or the Old Temple, which was built by the Peisistratos. The Acropolis flourished during the Peisistratos rule when many religious festivals and memorials were recognized. Many artifacts and works of art bear inscription describing the splendor of Athens during the archaic period. The 'Bluebeard temple' was destroyed when the Athenians defeated the Persians at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC. A much larger and grander building was built which is known to be the "Older Parthenon"."
"This temple was built in the Archaic period (800 BCE to 480 BCE) and was sacred to Athena Polieas, (Protectress of the City). It is refered to as the Bluebeard Temple because of the pedimental three-bodied man-serpant sculpture whose beards were painted a dark blue (other pediments of the temple may also have included snakes, lions and even a Gorgan) . It is not entirely certain exactly where the temple stood; the building was dismantled in the early 5th century BCE. None the less, there is enough evidence to signify that it played a significant part in Athenian religious and civil life.
In my novel, old, aristocratic families are known derisively as "Bluebeards." They resent change and look upon anyone outside of their elite group as upstarts. The "Bluebeards" especially resent younger, richer and more powerful families, namely the Peisistratid, the Alcmaeonid, and the Kiomoneioi. These three families will prove to be both beneficial and detrimental to the people of Athens during the early 5th century BCE, even after the tyranny of the Peisistratid is toppled. Beneficial because they create new laws and freedoms for the average citizens of Attica, detrimental because many in these families consider democracy temporary and no more than a means to an end. It will be up to Themistocles to ensure that Athens' fledgling democracy is not crushed under the boot of a new tyranny. It will prove to be a difficult battle, one Themistocles must win before the mighty Persian empire reaches the gates of the city..."
This is perhaps reminiscent of the I.E. myths of the triple dragon or the Lares/Genii usually venerated in the form of snakes that guard the sanctity and vitality of a place, of a past, of a home. They debar invasion into the subconscious, slithering and sitting coiled around buried treasure.
Blue is abysmal, in depth and expanse.
Our solitude and where we paint and hold our dreamscapes... a memory palace with endless rooms...
Quote :
"Where will Will Graham be looking for you next? Someplace I can never go. Home.
It's not healing to see your childhood home but it helps you measure whether you are broken how and why, assuming you want to know. I want to know. Is this where construction began? On my memory palace? Its door at the center of my mind. And here you are, feeling for the latch. The spaces in your mind devoted to your earliest years... are they different than the other rooms? Are they different than this room? This room holds sound and motion, great snakes wrestling and heaving in the dark. Other rooms are static scenes, fragmentary like painted shards of glass. Everything keyed to memories leading to other memories. Rooms you can't bring yourself to go. Nothing escapes from them that causes you any comfort. Screams fill some of those places, but the corridors do not echo screaming because I hear music..." [Hannibal, 3.3]
Blue is also of the cold and the chilling, of terror, of nightmares... Painful memories and a feeling of homelessness intensifies a search for purity, for the rare and elusive. Terror and purity ambiguate into intimacy and cruelty... a deep longing for a home;
Michael Steiner wrote:
"Melisande has a distant cousin in Judith, in Bela Bartok and Bela Balazs's Bluebeard's Castle of 1911. Melisande and Judith inherit from Beethoven's Leonore the rhetorical burden of starring in a great composer's only opera. They share a parlando rubato vocal style that Bartok later stated had owed a debt to Debussy. Both women are strangers in their husbands' mysterious realms; both infuse new and spare sonorities into the dense and dark textures of their adopted venues. Bartok's score is thicker than Debussy's, and herein we must face the validity of a cliche: blood (a central symbol of Bluebeard) is thicker than water, a central symbol of Pelleas.
Bartok and Balazs's version of Bluebeard's Castle premiered in Budapest in 1918, seven years after its completion. No doubt it is a successful moment in international high modernism and symbolism. But it has also a specific cultural and allegorical significance as a Hungarian commentary on the themes of cultural fragmentation and communicative breakdown, themes that characterize the Habsburg fin de siecle in general. These themes generate the two contrasting energies: modernism and nationalism. Whether at the center of imperial geopolitical endeavors or at its increasingly vexed peripheries (in other words, whether coming from fin de siecle Vienna, Budapest, or Prague), the modernist explosion negotiated painstakingly with nationalist agendas and cosmopolitan agendas alike. In 1911, Bartok was adjusting his direction from a conventional nationalist one to a more modernist and international one. The revised picture divides a conventional, chauvinist youthful nationalism of the Kossuth Symphony with a cosmopolitan agenda into which folk culture and music are to be integrated.
For Balazs, author of Bluebeard's text, no metaphor is more central than that of home and its elusiveness to modern consciousness. The question of "home" and its elusiveness connects psychology with politics, the self (the home of the ego) and the homeland. The symbiosis of modernity and anomie cannot be compromised by nationalism, which according to this view is at least partly motivated to do just that. Balazs found a principal aesthetic source for his position in symbolist poetry and drama, especially the work of Maeterlinck. Balazs labored the theme of home and homelessness in the company of the so-called Sunday Circle, in which he played a central part along with such figures as Georg Lukacs, Arnold Hauser, Karl Mannheim, Oscar Jaszi, and Jaszi's wife Anna Lesznai. Balazs and Lesznai together successfully wrote fairy tales and produced new classics in Hungarian children's literature. At the same time, they speculated in diaries and essays about the philosophical significance of the fairy tale. In their analysis, the fairy tale arrogates too much success in the resolution of the problems it raises. In Mary Gluck's summary: "All fairy tales, they seemed to agree, have in common with mysticism and erotic love the impulse to overcome man's imprisonment within the self. . . . In a fairy tale there can be no tragedy, no irreducible conflict between the self and empirical reality, because the genre does not recognize the world as foreign from the self, having laws of its own. The fairy tale is a `happy art,' wrote Lesznai, in which `everyone has a mission . .. and everyone can return home.' In Bluebeard, neither homeland nor self provides the sense of home. The removal of the work from fairy tale to the more apposite category of myth is achieved by Bartok's music.
Communicative breakdown is a leitmotiv of fin de siecle culture. In Vienna in the decade 1900-1910, the most heralded spokesman of these anxieties is Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Bluebeard's baroque castle would seem to combine the style and concerns of the "Letter of Lord Chandos" with the tragic and mythic stakes of Elektra. The extended and aggravated dialogue between Judith and Bluebeard is in an important sense related to the so-called Recognition Scene in Richard Strauss's scoring of Hofmannsthal's Elektra, first performed two years before Bluebeard in 1909. (Bartok had unkind words to say about Elektra in general, but his comments do not impinge upon this particular point.) Elektra and Orest are long separated siblings; when Orest enters the decayed palace courtyard of their murdered father and finds his abused sister, neither recognizes the other. Their interview proceeds in the ironic agony of mutual dismissal. In talking past each other, they instantiate the collapse of family bonds, of emotional connection through rational self-presentation and exchange. Bluebeard and Judith are similarly opaque to each other on the level of rational self-presentation and mutual understanding as agents. In the first poem of his 1911 collection The Wanderer Sings, Balazs asserts that the bond between men overrides that between a man and a woman. The position recalls the structure of Maeterlinck's Pelleas et Melisande, where the bond of brotherhood (and its fratricidal inversion) seems to override the bond of the lovers. But Bartok's music argues for the intensity of the subliminal intimacy between Bluebeard and Judith. On a sublime and subliminal level, theirs is a dialogue of total intimacy and understanding. Theirs is a sexual bond, a bond deeper and more terrifying than a linguistic one. To be conceptually and historically specific, theirs is a bond of masochism.
The symptoms and the clinical discourse of masochism belong to the Central European fin de siecle, a context well known to Bartok and Balks. The clinical term "masochism" was coined in 1886 by the psychiatrist Richard Krafft-Ebing (in his work called Psychopathia Sexualis) and taken up, as "sadomasochism," by Freud in his 1905 Three Essays on Sexuality. Krafft-Ebing named the syndrome after Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose 1870 novel Venus in Furs had exposed in fictionalized form his own predilections. KrafftEbing defined masochism as the derivation of pleasure from pain, either physical or psychic. Psychic pain included humiliation, and indeed the fantasy of humiliation and the desire for it. Masochism is, crucially, a male, heterosexual syndrome, the consensual delivery of power and punishment by a male body and mind to a female agent.
It seems clear enough that Bluebeard and Judith are locked inside a masochistic contract. The contract is masochistic and not really sadomasochistic, as the personal and cultural crisis signified is Bluebeard's and not, significantly, Judith's. For Bartok and Balazs, Bluebeard is modernity; Bluebeard is, we have the right to assume, Hungary. In their story, it is Judith who possesses agency, but that agency has been given to her by Duke Bluebeard. Why did you come here? Bluebeard asks her, placing, if retroactively, her arrival into her own hands. Unlike Melisande, she was not whisked up from an anonymous oasis in nature; she chose, desired to be Bluebeard's wife. This motivation established, Bluebeard and Judith proceed to invert the signs of the gender status: he becomes feminized, according to the cultural rules of fin de siecle decadence, and she, according to the same rules, becomes masculinized.
The doors are opened with keys given by Bluebeard to Judith; the key is the phallus, given up by the man to the woman. The phallic woman must be complemented by the invaginated man; this inversion occurs at the opening of the first door. The first opened door reveals "a blood-red rectangle in the wall like an open wound." As the image appears, Bluebeard asks Judith "What do you see?"- making it clear that what she sees he has never seen. She has a power of the gaze-the power to see inside him-that he has never had. Bluebeard's "wound" is a cousin of Amfortas's in its signification of feminization and decadence, but it is more explicitly vaginal. Now, the room behind the first door reveals itself as the torture chamber. But the first and sole relevant instrument of torture has already been exposed: the key, the penetrating phallus requisitioned seven times by Judith. The blood motive reappears at every door. Everything is covered in blood, and this is menstrual blood more than battle blood: the blood, according to a well-known mythical trope, of the feminized man rather than of the hero. The second door reveals an armory, the third reveals precious jewels, and the fourth reveals flowers.
The opening of the fifth door is the musical and dramatic hinge of the work as well as its most explicitly political moment. The orchestra at full throttle and the soprano on a high C greet the display, behind the door, of Bluebeard's entire kingdom. Like Wotan displaying the completed Valhalla to Fricka, Bluebeard declaims: "Now behold my spacious kingdom. Gaze down the dwindling vistas. Is it not a noble country?" As he did with the Kossuth Symphony, Bartok here combines an allusion to Hungarian land with an orchestral rhetoric reminiscent of Richard Strauss. Notwithstanding the Wagnerian foundation of Bluebeard's gesture, the music of the fifth door recalls not Das Rheingold but rather the loudest cadences of Strauss's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The citation's effect is powerful but its logic is obscure. The bombast is unashamed, possibly suggesting an irony that would combine Bluebeard and Strauss's hero. Consistent with such a reading, Judith's reaction is the rhetorical opposite of Fricka's: rather than bathing in her man's musical rhetoric as a way of sharing his dominion, she reacts tersely, to absolute silence from the orchestra. This happens twice, and both instances shock. Judith's reaction is at the very least ironic, and indeed perhaps dismissive. In 1911, the glorious Hungarian plains show themselves to be emasculated.
The sixth and the seventh doors do not open easily. The sixth reveals a lake of tears; the seventh reveals the three living prior wives of Bluebeard. The parade of jeweled wives reveals Judith to be the last wife. The first wife, Bluebeard says, was found at dawn, the second at noon, the third at dusk, and Judith at midnight. The cycle is complete, and at the opera's end Judith takes her place among the living entombed, as Bluebeard laments "Henceforth all shall be darkness." Bluebeard's castle is the masochistic iron cage.
And yet, the masochistic bond itself is broken by the seventh door. Entombed, Judith loses her agency as Bluebeard tragically regains his. But this is the grim agency of patriarchy and possession, the bonds of history and conventional masculinity, reasserting themselves after the grim inversion of the masochistic experiment. The enslavement to patriarchy is an accurate comment on the status of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in its final decade. Literary modernism and literary criticism in early twentieth-century Central Europe revalorized allegory as a trope more adequate than symbol to the task of confronting history through art.
Symbol, wrote Walter Benjamin, conjures myths and universals; allegory, history, and particulars. Benjamin's intervention-proallegory and antisymbol-sought to reinsert history, materiality, and secularity into a system of cultural metaphors that from Romanticism to symbolism had privileged the mystical, the universal, and the neoreligious. At the same time, tropes specific and internal to a work may function ambiguously as both symbol and allegory. In this vein, it is accurate to suggest that Bluebeard himself might be understood as an allegory of Hungary, and Judith as one of Austria. From the complicated nationalistic perspective of Bartok and Balks, the Austro-Hungarian bond is understandable as one of masochism. What does Austria want?-they may be understood to be asking. What does the empire of Maria Theresa, of Catholicism, of the baroque, of a politics legitimized by grace and form, want with Hungary? The political hint suggested by the fifth door is made manifest by the seventh. The bonds of masochism are overlaid with the bonds of history, which reveal themselves in turn as a higher level of masochism itself. Such are the stakes of masochism as a cultural as well as a clinical predicament. For Bartok, Balks, and Bluebeard, Austria, like opera, is a woman; Hungary is a man, a masochist, a self-enslaver. It is of course finally Bluebeard who kills Judith: masochism ends indeed, as in John Noyes's recent formulation, in the mastery of submission, in the staging of self-subjection in the service of a new domination." There is no way out of Bluebeard's castle." [Listening to Reason]
Forbidden knowledge is punished... it leaves them *both* blue... The patriarch requires a loyal pet before a partner; the animal within must be affirmed, and not feel ashamed of as Will is, [who is known for owning loyal dogs himself],
Quote :
"We are all making our way through the Inferno. - Dante's pilgrims. - No, we're not pilgrims. We're pets." [Hannibal, 3.12]
The other must be broken down into its basics [also a kind of chewing] before allowing the other to break into oneself... Unconditional loyalty. Clarice cuffing herself to Hannibal, ready to go down with him together, moves him to cut his own hand.
Yet, that trust cannot but operate within necessary dialectics of the sacred and the transgressive;
Bedelia wrote:
"Betrayal and forgiveness are best seen as something akin to falling in love..." [Hannibal, 3.3]
Quote :
"Strangely, despite his monstrosities, Gilles clung to his belief in God and the Church, but, as Joris-Karl Huysmans wrote, “he carried his zeal for prayer into the territory of blasphemy.” Gilles refused to offer up his soul to the devil, although in his written pacts to Barron he offered everything else. In moments of fear, Gilles resorted to crossing himself or entreating God, and, during his final hours, he still firmly believed that after his execution he and his accomplices would ascend to heaven.
Georges Bataille, who edited and prepared a record of the trial, saw no incongruity between Gilles’ murderous behavior and his Catholic faith, seeing them as symbiotic to one another. He wrote: “Perhaps Christianity is even fundamentally the pressing demand for crime, the demand for the horror that in a sense it needs in order to forgive. …Christianity implies a human nature which harbors this hallucinatory extremity, which it alone has allowed to flourish.” Thus, the moral limits set by Christianity contain the necessity of their own transgression, so that the religious institution may then return and offer solace, penance, forgiveness, etc. In fact, Bataille’s view is exactly congruent with the trial itself, during which—although found guilty of heresy and sodomy—Gilles’ contrite confession kept him in the relative good graces of the Church: he was briefly excommunicated but then reinstated; he was hanged but his body was removed before being burned at the stake. Apparently, the severity of his crimes was not enough to earn more drastic condemnations from the bizarre, hypocritical justice of the Catholic Church.
Bataille wrote: “Gilles de Rais’ contradictions ultimately summarize the Christian situation, and we should not be astonished at the comedy of being devoted to the Devil, wanting to cut the throats of as many children as he could, yet expecting the salvation of his eternal soul…” It appears that, from a theological perspective, Gilles’ expectations for salvation were realized.
Before Bataille, this accommodating stance by the medieval Church had been criticized by Aleister Crowley, who in 1930 lectured on Gilles de Rais at Oxford. He explained it thus: “Whenever questions arise with regard to black magic or black masses, invocations of the devil, etc., etc., it must never be forgotten that these practices are strictly functions of Christianity. Where ignorant savages perform propitiatory rites, there and there only Christianity takes hold. But under the great systems of the civilized parts of the world, there is no trace of any such perversion in religious feeling. It is only the bloodthirsty and futile Jehovah who has achieved such monstrous births.” This lurking violence, this Christian complicity with crime, leads Crowley to go even further and accuse the Church of a conspiracy: “I think, then, it is not altogether unfair to assume that Gilles de Rais was to a large extent the victim of Catholic logic. Catholic logic: and the foul wish-phantasms generated of its repressions, and of its fear and ignorance.” Crowley believed that the crimes were exaggerated or even fabricated, and that Gilles was a political “victim” of the Catholic Church..."
In [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], the legendary version cites PTSD after the war and the witch-burning of Joan d'Arc as a possible cause for going berserk.
J.-Xt. is its own illness symptomatic of killing the feminine, and finds compensation from twisting around pagan myths... The *blue winter* is where the *bridal spring* lies buried and opens his door again and she is killed again in the annual cycle... the death of *many wives* - Bedelia, Will, and so on... Hence the significance of Hannibal marking them both in the Botticelli painting of the Primavera... the blue touch of *bluebeard* and spring's rejuvenation...
The Fisher King and Parsifal, King and Kingdom, Self and soul are more profound metaphors of Lord and Bride...
Quote :
"The Dying King is crying out for transformation and healing, but sulks in his castle while the land around him withers and dies. It takes the arrival of the hero Percival in search of the grail, to ask the right question and trigger the healing of the king and his land.
It’s the banishment of the divine feminine archetype, represented by the grail cup, that creates the Dying King. He has rejected his own soul and the loss is slowly killing him. The grail is right there in his castle, but he can’t access it because he can’t listen to his soul. As soon as the grail is acknowledged by Percival, the healing begins.
The grail restores life by turning poison into medicine. This is the secret of alchemy: the chaos and darkness of the prima materia is used to create the alchemical gold, or soul. The best is found hidden in the worst, and it’s the darkest part of the psyche which contains the key to our wholeness. Bluebeard literally carries the key to our awakening.
James Hillman says in Re-Visioning Psychology:
“It is he within who is driven out of stable connections, who cannot settle, cannot conform, because he is driven to unsettle all forms. But this fugue in the soul need not be condemned to play the antisocial criminal, since precisely his mordant insights are those that can awaken the callow unpsychological innocent – who also lives within us – to discern among ideas, discover new perspectives, and survive. This the rogue errant can teach – psychological survival. Thus may our psychopathic shadow become a guiding psychopomp and bring about a reformation of the innocents from below, through the shadow – of the lamb by the wolf.”
Not only do you collude in your own abduction by the darkness, but the darkness contains the key to your awakening.
“Persephone is untouched by life. Her abduction is cruel, yet governed by necessity; and she herself secretly invokes it, by picking the strange death-flower which Hades has planted in the meadow for her fascination. It is the plucking of the flower which heralds the opening of the earth beneath her and the arrival of the dark lord in his chariot drawn by black horses.” – The Astrology of Fate, Liz Greene
"We seem to stand, in regard to a theory of culture, where Bartok's Judith stands when she asks to open the last door on the night.
That science and technology have brought with them fierce problems of environmental damage, of economic un balance, of moral distortion, is a commonplace. In terms of ecology and ideals of sensibility the cost of the scientific technological revolutions of the past four centuries has been very high. But despite anarchic, pastoral critiques such as those put forward by Thoreau and Tolstoy, there has been little fundamental doubt that it ought to be met. In that largely unexamined assurance there has been a part of blind economic will, of the immense hunger for comfort and material diversity. But there has also been a much deeper mechanism : the conviction, centrally woven into the West ern temper, at least since Athens, that mental inquiry must move forward, that such motion is natural and meritorious in itself, that man's proper relation to the truth is one of pursuer (the "haloo" of Socrates cornering his quarry rings through our history ) . We open the successive doors in Bluebeard's castle because "they are there," because each leads to the next by a logic of intensification which is that of the mind's own awareness of being. To leave one door closed would be not only cowardice but a betrayal-radical, self-mutilating-Of the inquisitive, probing, forward tensed stance of our species. We are hunters after reality, wherever it may lead. The risks, the disasters incurred are flagrant. But so is, or has been until very recently, the axiom atic assumption and a priori of our civilization, which holds that man and the truth are companions, that their roads lie forward and are dialectically cognate.
We cannot turn back. We cannot choose the dreams of unknowing. We shall, I expect, open the last door in the castle even if it leads, perhaps because it leads, onto realities which are beyond the reach of human comprehension and control. We shall do so with that deso late clairvoyance, so marvelously rendered in Bartok's mu sic, because opening doors is the tragic merit of our identity. There are two obvious responses to this outlook. There is Freud's stoic acquiescence, his grimly tired supposition that human life was a cancerous anomaly, a detour between vast stages of organic repose. And there is the Nietzschean gaiety in the face of the inhuman, the tensed, ironic perception that we are, that we always have been, precarious guests in an indifferent, frequently murderous, but always fascinating world:
"Schild der Notwendigkeit. Hochstes Gestirn des Seins! -das kein Wunsch erreicht, -das kein Nein befleckt, ewiges Ja des Seins, ewig bin ich dein Ja : den ich Iiebe dich, o Ewigkeit !
"Shield of Necessity. Highest constellation of Being ! Which no desire can attain, Which no negation can taint, Eternal Yes of Being, I am your lasting Affirmation: I For I love you, oh Eternity!"
"Will's thoughts are no more bound by fear or kindness than Milton's were by physics. He is both free and damned to imagine anything. Now that he's imagined the worst. Like ducklings, we imprint on those ideas that grab our attention.
What's got your attention, Doctor? God, the Devil and the Great Red Dragon? Lest we forget the Lamb. Will is the Lamb of God? Hide us from the wrath of the Lamb. Who's "us"? You, me and the Great Red Dragon. The Lamb's wrath touches everyone who errs. His retribution is even more deadly than the Dragon's. It is for you. The seals are being opened, Jack. The lamb is becoming a lion. "For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?" I'll still be standing. Is your conscience clear? As clear as yours. Righteousness is what you and Will have in common. "In righteousness the Lamb doth judge and make war." War against the Great Red Dragon. He's not the Dragon, you are. The Devil himself bound in the pit. Then that makes you God, Jack. Yes it does. All gods demand sacrifices." [Hannibal, 3.12
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Episode 3:13 : "The Wrath of the Lamb"
Hannibal: "My compassion for you is inconvenient, Will.
Will: "If you're partial to beef products, it is inconvenient to be compassionate toward a cow.
Hannibal: "Save yourself, kill them all?
Will: "I don't know if I can save myself. Maybe that's just fine.
Hannibal: "No greater love hath man than to lay down his life for a friend." [Hannibal, 3.13]
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The Gospel According to St. John Chapter 15
Jesus is the vine; His disciples are the branches—He discourses on the perfect law of love—His servants have been chosen and ordained by Him—The world hates and fights true religion—He promises the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth.
1 "I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman.
2 Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit.
3 Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you.
4 Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me.
5 I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing.
6 If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.
7 If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.
8 Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit; so shall ye be my disciples.
9 As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you: continue ye in my love.
10 If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in his love.
11 These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.
12 This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you.
13 Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.
14 Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you.
15 Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you.
16 Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain: that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you.
17 These things I command you, that ye love one another.
18 If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you.
19 If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.
20 Remember the word that I said unto you, The servant is not greater than his lord. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you; if they have kept my saying, they will keep yours also.
21 But all these things will they do unto you for my name’s sake, because they know not him that sent me.
22 If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin: but now they have no cloak for their sin.
23 He that hateth me hateth my Father also.
24 If I had not done among them the works which none other man did, they had not had sin: but now have they both seen and hated both me and my Father.
25 But this cometh to pass, that the word might be fulfilled that is written in their law, They hated me without a cause.
26 But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me:
27 And ye also shall bear witness, because ye have been with me from the beginning."
""Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power." (Mark ix, 1.) --Well lied, lion!...
[Note: A paraphrase of Demetrius' "Well roar'd, Lion!" in act v, scene 1 of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." The lion, of course, is the familiar Christian symbol for Mark.]
"And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea" (Mark ix, 42).--How evangelical!.." [AC, 45]
"Finally, let us not underrate the proprium of all great, and especially all sectarian veneration: it tends to erase from the venerated objects all its original traits and idiosyncrasies, often so painfully strange--it does not even see them. It is greatly to be regretted that no Dostoyevsky lived in the neighbourhood of this most interesting décadent--I mean some one who would have felt the poignant charm of such a compound of the sublime, the morbid and the childish. In the last analysis, the type, as a type of the décadence, may actually have been peculiarly complex and contradictory: such a possibility is not to be lost sight of.
What the Gospels make instinctive is precisely the reverse of all heroic struggle, of all taste for conflict: the very incapacity for resistance is here converted into something moral: ("resist not evil!"--the most profound sentence in the Gospels, perhaps the true key to them), to wit, the blessedness of peace, of gentleness, the inability to be an enemy. What is the meaning of "glad tidings"?--The true life, the life eternal has been found--it is not merely promised, it is here, it is in you; it is the life that lies in love free from all retreats and exclusions, from all keeping of distances. Every one is the child of God--Jesus claims nothing for himself alone--as the child of God each man is the equal of every other man.... Imagine making Jesus a hero!--And what a tremendous misunderstanding appears in the word "genius"! Our whole conception of the "spiritual," the whole conception of our civilization, could have had no meaning in the world that Jesus lived in. In the strict sense of the physiologist, a quite different word ought to be used here.... We all know that there is a morbid sensibility of the tactile nerves which causes those suffering from it to recoil from every touch, and from every effort to grasp a solid object. Brought to its logical conclusion, such a physiological habitus becomes an instinctive hatred of all reality, a flight into the "intangible," into the "incomprehensible"; a distaste for all formulae, for all conceptions of time and space, for everything established--customs, institutions, the church--; a feeling of being at home in a world in which no sort of reality survives, a merely "inner" world, a "true" world, an "eternal" world.... "The Kingdom of God is within you"....
In the whole psychology of the "Gospels" the concepts of guilt and punishment are lacking, and so is that of reward. "Sin," which means anything that puts a distance between God and man, is abolished--this is precisely the "glad tidings." Eternal bliss is not merely promised, nor is it bound up with conditions: it is conceived as the only reality--what remains consists merely of signs useful in speaking of it. The results of such a point of view project themselves into a new way of life, the special evangelical way of life. It is not a "belief" that marks off the Christian; he is distinguished by a different mode of action; he acts differently. He offers no resistance, either by word or in his heart, to those who stand against him." [AC, 29-31]
Hannibal describes Will as a Righteous one who's gone beyond fear or kindness, and whose imagination is unbound to be both free and damned.
Nietzsche saw Jesus in Dostoyevsky's 'Idiot' as a type of Decadent that lives in its own internal world. The incapacity for resistance that N. analyzed as Jesus' 'glad tidings' is echoed in Hannibal's remark: "Like ducklings, we imprint on those ideas that grab our attention"... this type of the Fool or the Idiot is unable to resist;
"Will: "I don't know if I can save myself. Maybe that's just fine."
...is walking on the path of Jesus who resisted nothing in his way.
N.'s goal in the WTP was to distinguish the Fool in the form of the Crucified vs. the Fool in the form of Dionysos;
Nietzsche wrote:
"The god on the cross is a curse on life, a signpost to seek redemption from life; Dionysus cut to pieces is a promise of life: it will be eternally reborn and return again from destruction." [WTP, 1052]
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"Oh, the dye, a blood red setting sun rushing through my veins burning up my skin, I will survive, live and thrive Win this deadly game Love crime Love crime I will survive, live and thrive I will survive, I will survive I will..." [Siouxsie Sioux & Brian Reitzell, Love Crime]
The Xt. or Blakean Lion is merely the Wrath of the Lamb. The sacrificial lamb of god.
The Nietzschean Lion in the metamorphoses is the prelude to the Heraclitean Child [aion] playing dice with the gods; this Lion does not "lie", it roars and wins its freedom to create;
Nietzsche wrote:
"We few or many who again dare to live in a dismoralized world, we pagans in faith: we are probably also the first to grasp what a pagan faith is:-to have to imagine higher creatures than man, hut beyond good and evil; to have to consider all being higher as also being immoral. We believe in Olympus-and not in the "Crucified."" [WTP, 134]
Although Will does find the abolition of duality between life and death when he sees blood appearing as black - as beautiful, terror and beauty co-existing side by side ("blood and breath are only elements undergoing change to fuel your Radiance"), he is unable to Live the contradiction, crucified between god and the devil, jesus and dionysos...
The Schizophrenic is able to live with many private 'realities' because of compartmentalized discontinuity. The Red Dragon is such a one; he *fears* death so much, he chooses life:
Ernest Becker wrote:
"Too much possibility is the attempt by the person to overvalue the powers of the symbolic self. It reflects the attempt to exaggerate one half of the human dualism at the expense of the other. In this sense, what we call schizophrenia is an attempt by the symbolic self to deny the limitations of the finite body; in doing so, the entire person is pulled off balance and destroyed. It is as though the freedom of creativity that stems from within the symbolic self cannot be contained by the body, and the person is torn apart. This is how we understand schizophrenia today, as the split of self and body, a split in which the self is unanchored, unlimited, not bound enough to everyday Things, not contained enough in dependable physical behavior." [The Denial of Death]
Hannibal wrote:
"I'm so happy you chose life... Suicide is the enemy. You were seized by a fantasy world with the brilliance and freshness and immediacy of childhood. It took you a step beyond alone." [Hannibal, 3.13]
But there is also the other kind of Schizophrenic:
Chris Bohjalian wrote:
"A term came to her that they used on occasion at the shelter: the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]...They used the expression in much the same way that they would use a term like [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]." [The Double Bind]
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Bedelia: "Can't live with him. Can't live without him. Is that what this is?
Will: "I guess this is my Becoming.
Bedelia: "What you are "becoming" is pathological.
Will: "Extreme acts of cruelty require a high degree of empathy.
Bedelia: "You've just found religion.
Will: "Nothing more dangerous than that." [Hannibal, 3.13]
The very word religion from re-ligare - to "bind back" is a double-bind.
Religion is a pathology, a schizophrenia that cannot be cruel without being compassionate;
David Icke wrote:
"I believe that the human race has developed a form of collective schizophrenia in which we are not only the slaves to this imposed thought behavior, but we are also the police force of it."
Will is the pathology of civilization caught in the double-bind of modernity [god, law, reason, righteousness], that is both virtue and vice, both order and dis/ease, both hospitable and sheltering...
The word Asylum means both - a place for the insane, and a place from the insane:
early 15c., earlier asile (late 14c.), from Latin asylum "sanctuary," from Greek asylon "refuge," noun use of neuter of asylos "inviolable, safe from violence," especially of persons seeking protection, from a- "without" + syle "right of seizure." So literally "an inviolable place." General sense of "safe or secure place" is from 1640s; meaning "benevolent institution to shelter some class of persons" is from 1776.
Just as the word "Bluff" points to both the bank and the river:
"Beach ridge, a high, steep bank, as by a river or the sea, or beside a ravine or plain; a cliff with a broad face."
A double-bind is a space that leaves one with no place... yet another double-bind in itself...
The broken tea-cup that is, and also continuously eroding in, the flux of time. Will is the tension that flows on in our "atlantic" undercurrents.
"Kintsugi - (Japanese: golden repair) is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum, a method similar to the maki-e technique. As a philosophy it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.
As a philosophy kintsugi can be seen to have similarities to the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi, an embracing of the flawed or imperfect. Japanese æsthetics values marks of wear by the use of an object. This can be seen as a rationale for keeping an object around even after it has broken and as a justification of kintsugi itself, highlighting the cracks and repairs as simply an event in the life of an object rather than allowing its service to end at the time of its damage or breakage.
Kintsugi can relate to the Japanese philosophy of "no mind" (無心 mushin) which encompasses the concepts of non-attachment, acceptance of change and fate as aspects of human life.
“ Not only is there no attempt to hide the damage, but the repair is literally illuminated... a kind of physical expression of the spirit of mushin....Mushin is often literally translated as “no mind,” but carries connotations of fully existing within the moment, of non-attachment, of equanimity amid changing conditions. ...The vicissitudes of existence over time, to which all humans are susceptible, could not be clearer than in the breaks, the knocks, and the shattering to which ceramic ware too is subject. This poignancy or aesthetic of existence has been known in Japan as mono no aware, a compassionate sensitivity, or perhaps identification with, [things] outside oneself. ” — Christy Bartlett, Flickwerk: The Aesthetics of Mended Japanese Ceramics
"Once it was broken and mended, however, that order was disrupted by bold zigs and zags of gold, along with a golden crescent where a piece of the original rim was replaced. Because the repairs are done with such immaculate craft, and in precious metal, it's hard to read them as a record of violence and damage. Instead, they take on the look of a deliberate incursion of radically free abstraction into an object that was made according to an utterly different system. It's like a tiny moment of free jazz played during a fugue by Bach."
"Ruin value (German: Ruinenwert) is the concept that a building be designed such that if it eventually collapsed, it would leave behind aesthetically pleasing ruins that would last far longer without any maintenance at all. The idea was pioneered by German architect Albert Speer while planning for the 1936 Summer Olympics and published as "The Theory of Ruin Value" (Die Ruinenwerttheorie), although he was not its original inventor. The intention did not stretch only to the eventual collapse of the buildings, but rather assumed such buildings were inherently better designed and more imposing during their period of use.
The idea was supported by Adolf Hitler, who planned for such ruins to be a symbol of the greatness of the Third Reich, just as Ancient Greek and Roman ruins were symbolic of those civilisations."
""Hitler liked to say that the purpose of his building was to transmit his time and its spirit to posterity. Ultimately all that remained to remind men of the great epochs of history was their monumental architecture, he would philosophize. What had remained of the emperors of Rome? What would still bear witness to them today, if their buildings had not survived? Periods of weakness are bound to occur in the history of nations, he argued, but at their lowest ebb, their architecture will speak to them of former power. Naturally, a new national consciousness could not be awakened by architecture alone. But when after a long spell of inertia a sense of national grandeur was born anew, the monuments of men’s ancestors were the most impressive exhortations. Today, for example, Mussolini could point to the buildings of the Roman Empire as symbolising the heroic spirit of Rome. Thus he could fire his nation with the idea of a modern empire. Our architectural works should also speak to the conscience of a future Germany centuries from now. In advancing this argument Hitler also stressed the value of a permanent type of construction." (Speer 1970: 55f.)
Hitler may have known what the art historian John Ruskin had already in 1849 asked architects to consider (1996: 42):
"when we build, let us think that we build for ever. Let it not be for present delight, not for present use alone; let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stone will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, 'See! this our fathers did for us.'"
""a monument can be defined as a cluster of intentional results, made concrete in the form of an artificial product which is visible though space and which maintains this visibility through time" (Criado 1995: 199). Monuments therefore 'alter the earth', forever (Bradley 1993).
Our word 'monument' (which is the same in most European languages) derives from the Latin "monimentum", meaning "reminder". In the Roman world, inscribed monuments guaranteed the memory of events of lasting significance, such as treaties and acts. But there were also more personal monuments by individuals who saw aspects of their own identity threatened by public oblivion and thus erected public reminders of their loyalty and patriotism, of the public offices which they had held, or of their military victories and triumphs (Woolf 1996; Wiseman 1985; Barrett 1993). Similarly, the Greeks distinguished between 'human time' and 'monumental time' (Foxhall 1995). While human time refers to a time-span of three or four generations and is normally expressed as a kinship relationship, monumental time is truly permanent and connected with posterity and the realm of the divine Gods. Lin Foxhall argued that Greek citizens were very interested in achieving fame for posterity. Poetry, drama, historiography, sculpture and architecture are all to be seen as the Greeks' attempts to create memories-to-be; they were meant to act as signifiers which trigger off the words of humans, in which truly permanent memories reside. Likewise, the Greeks built grave monuments in order to achieve for their dead perpetual remembrance: the dead did not become ancestors but monuments themselves (Humphreys 1980: 269-70). In Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, burial mounds function as permanent reminders of the glory of heroes (e.g. Iliad VII, 85ff.; Odyssey 11, 76; 24, 80; cf. Andronikos 1968: W33-4). This function has been directly transferred to Bronze Age tumuli in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern by Robert Beltz (1899: 41), who called the earlier Bronze Age the 'Heroic Age of Mecklenburg'. The same function of burial mounds is, by the way, also hinted at in the Beowulf Song from approximately the 8th century AD (43, 3156ff.). If such monuments were thus meant as 'cultural mnemonics', what matters is the message they wanted to preserve for the future. This message can be described as 'prospective memory' (Assmann 1992: 169): an aspect of the 'past present' was encoded in a form that was hoped to have an effect on a 'future past', e.g. our own 'present past'. Another good example for such prospective memories are 19th and 20th century war memorials (see image right) and other commemorative monuments (Shils 1981: 72-3; Riegl 1982: 21, 38)."
"Variations of the name Baba Yaga are found in the languages of the Eastern Slavic peoples. The first element, baba, is transparently a babble word, meaning 'woman', or, specifically, 'old woman'. The same word is still used for both grandmother and old woman in general in Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian. In modern Russian, the word бабушка babushka (meaning 'grandmother') derives from it, as does the word "babcia" (also 'grandmother') in Polish or Ukrainian. In Polish, the term is considered to be pejorative, meaning 'vicious or ugly woman'.
While a variety of etymologies have been proposed for the second element of the name, Yaga, it remains far more etymologically problematic and no clear consensus among scholars has resulted. For example, in the 19th century, Alexander Afanasyev proposed the derivation of Proto-Slavic *ǫžь ('serpent') and Sanskrit अहि ahi ('serpent, snake'). This etymology has subsequently been explored by other scholars in the 20th century.
Related terms to the second element of the name, Yaga, appear in various Slavic languages; Serbian and Croatian jeza ('horror, shudder, chill'), Slovenian jeza ('anger'), Old Czech jězě ('witch, legendary evil female being'), modern Czech jezinka ('wicked wood nymph, dryad'), and Polish jędza ('witch, evil woman, fury'). The term appears in Old Church Slavonic as jęza/jędza (meaning 'disease, illness'). In other Indo-European languages the element iaga has been linked to Lithuanian engti ('to oppress, to skin'), ingti ('to become lazy, to become bald, to shed skin') and ingas ('lazy, slow'), Old English inca ('doubt, worry, pain'), and Old Norse ekki ('pain, worry').
In the narratives in which Baba Yaga appears, she displays a variety of typical attributes: a turning, chicken-legged hut; and a mortar, pestle, and/or mop or broom. Baba Yaga frequently bears the epithet "bony leg" (Baba Iaga kostianaia noga), and when inside of her dwelling, she may be found stretched out over the stove, reaching from one corner of the hut to another. Baba Yaga may sense and mention the "Russian scent" (russky dukh) of those that visit her. Her nose may stick into the ceiling. Particular emphasis may be placed by some narrators on the repulsiveness of her nose or other body parts.
In some tales a trio of Baba Yagas appear as sisters, all sharing the same name."
Joan Halifax described one of the stages of shamanic initiation as experiencing physical pain, often being chopped and cooked up. In the fairy tale, the witch fattens Hansel in order to eat him, while Gretel is made a slave, but then the witch decides to eat them both. Psychic experiences of initiates being cooked up by magical entities have been reported worldwide, from the Australian Aboriginals, to the Inuit people of the North Pole, and Siberia. Documentation of such experiences in Europe appears among the Sicilian shamanic healers known as Ciarauli, the tales of the Hungarian Táltos, and the Kresnik of Istria and Slavonia, and in Inquisition records made during 1575 to 1647 about the Benandanti, a shamanic society in northern Italy. This traumatizing experience allegedly occurs in order “to teach [the initiate] the art of shamanism."
The wicked witch of “Hansel and Gretel” is in many ways similar to the Russian fairy tale figure of Baba Yaga. Being featured in countless folk stories, she is perhaps the most famous figure in Slavic folklore; she’s a hag/witch who just like the witch in “Hansel and Gretel”, lives in the middle of the forests in a very strange house, this time described as standing on chicken legs, having a fence made of human skulls, and containing all sort of witchy items. Many of her stories, in fact, resemble that of the Grimm’s “Hansel and Gretel”:
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“The lovely maiden looked at the witch and her heart failed her. Before her stood Bába Yagá the Bony-Legged, her nose hitting the ceiling . . . . Then the witch brought wood, oak and maple, and made a fire; the flame blazed forth from the stove. Bába Yagá took a broad shovel and began to urge her guest: ‘Now, my beauty, sit on the shovel.’ The beauty sat on it. Bába Yagá shoved her toward the mouth of the stove, but the maiden put one leg into the stove and the other on top of it. ‘You do not know how to sit, maiden. Now sit the right way.’ The maiden changed her posture, sat the right way; the witch tried to shove her in, but she put one leg into the stove and the other under it.
Bába Yagá grew angry and pulled her out again. ‘You are playing tricks, young woman!’ she cried. ‘Sit quietly, this way-just see how I do it.’ She plumped herself on the shovel and stretched out her legs. The maiden quickly shoved her into the stove, slammed the door, plastered and tarred the opening and ran away.”
The witch in the Grimm’s tale is just a subtle version of Baba Yaga, who has achieved goddess status as the ruler of the underworld in Slavic folklore. Baba Yaga is burned alive just like the witch in “Hansel and Gretel”, however, no matter how many times she dies in these tales, Baba Yaga reappears in countless others as the same wicked witch, or sometimes as a benevolent wise woman, giving life-saving advice to heroines.
In the epic saga of “Vasilisa the Wise” (also known as “the Beautiful” or “Brave”), Vasilisa, a beautiful maiden, is purposely sent by her evil stepmother to Baba Yaga’s house to get a lantern. Once inside, she must perform the witches’ impossible tasks in order to come back home. Although she accomplishes the tasks with the help of a magical doll, Vasilisa passes the witch’s test and completes her initiation. Just like Vasilisa, Gretel must perform every command the witch asks her to do. Additionally, in the Russian story, Vasilisa asks Baba Yaga about the three dark riders outside her house, and she responds by saying they are the day, the Sun, and the night. But we are missing another being – the Moon. Baba Yaga is obviously the Moon, after all, she’s a witch/folk-goddess, and this is connected to Gretel being fed shellfish – lunar food.
When Vasilisa comes back home, the lantern she brings back from Baba Yaga burns the evil stepmother and stepsisters to ashes, which frees Vasilisa from their torture. It seems that whether the witch dies or not, the protagonist always emerges victorious.
Baba Yaga is also depicted as the guardian of the Waters of Life and Death. The Water of Death kills, but is also often part of a healing process. In many Slavic folktales, the “Water of death heals the wounds of a corpse or knots together a body that has been chopped up. The second, the Water of Life, restores life”."
"This flight into wilderness is a common theme in shamanic initiation from cultures around the globe. Through deprivation, an elemental existence, and even madness, the shaman embarks on an inward journey; when he or she returns to world it is as a changed and not-quite-human being, aligned with the powers of nature, able to converse with animals and to see into the hearts of men."
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"It’s about hunger. It’s about not being able to cope. It’s about mother love of a warped kind. It deals with contrasts.
The premise, of parents wanting to rid themselves of their children, is horrendous. But in the context of the Hundred Years’ War and starvation and deprivation in much of Europe, there must have been thousands of desperate families with too many mouths to feed. Infanticide becomes more common when things are tough but these parents don’t commit murder with their own hands. Rather, they try and lose their children in the forest and hope for the worst.
So that’s where we start: with every child’s worst fear. They dread, we all dread, abandonment and the disappearance of the familiar.
This, the Gingerbread Cottage, the Sugar House, the House made all of sweets and goodies...is the standout image of the story and it’s immensely powerful. We know it’s a snare and a delusion… They haven’t eaten for days. Icing sugar. Toffee. Marzipan. Sticks of barley sugar holding up the lintel. Chocolate windowsills...it’s completely blissful. Then, from a door the Witch emerges.
She loves to eat them. It reminds me of the Maurice Sendak phrase from Where the Wild Things Are:
“We’ll eat you up, we love you so.”
Sendak has said that this was uttered by his aunts and uncles when they pinched his chubby childish cheek in an excessively affectionate way… In Yiddish: A zissaleh! Which means: A sweet little thing!"
"Hunger is the most basic of instincts and drives the actions of all living things, even more so than sexual desire. Hansel and Gretel’s parents forsake their children because of hunger. It is a primordial need that can overpower all sense of reason and humanity. When the children discover that the breadcrumb trail is gone because the animals of the forest have eaten the crumbs, Gretel comments that
They are then captured and are faced with the terrible realization that humans, like animals, are meat and can be eaten. Cannibalism is the ultimate symbol of the dark, primordial state. It represents the animal instinct taking complete control of one’s psyche, where hunger overpowers all human reason."
The shamanic aspect in Grimm's tale of Hansel and Gretel was grossly overlooked in the Hannibal plot. The loss of his sister and the consuming of her flesh is a darker variation, more close to the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], where perhaps many children did die from the famine, and some saved by those taking them in. In the twist, its Hannibal's family that dies and the siblings that escape. And the lonely widow witch Murasaki who takes Hannibal in and feeds and nourishes him, is the one horrified by the latter's 'monstrosity'. It is her having "seen into the hearts of men" and exiling him, that initiates his coming to his true full nature. It is he who hungers for a full moon and all that it stands for - feast, festival, family, foreknowledge, a round love.
Another darker variation of the same tale is the Verger story of siblings almost incestually feeding on each other, than helping each other like Hansel and Gretel.
Applied to modernity, it brings to light,
"beware of parents who want to fatten their children only to eat them for dinner."
Verger's fattening the pigs, is also a reminder that flattery too, the 'self-valuing' 'For' another, is a modern variant of the same Grimm grim tale.
Many a parent keep their children un/consciously from developing, in the name of "love", either from envy that the latter shouldn't outdo them, or from greed, as crutches to lean on in old age.
The world after the loss of a good mother is an exile back into the savagery of the forest and the wilderness. The moon is intimately related to the growth of herbs and healing, as well as our emotions and emotional securities, appeased by food and liquid offerings, blood offerings.
When family which is one's primal security, unconsciously keeps you from developing, lavishing feel-goodness, it is the moon-mind - the emotional maturing into reason, the aging of reason ceases. The tea-cup is forever cracked and cannot be healed or stitched or put back together, and puerile infantilism descends into infamy, and hyper-masculine displays, and attention-coveting. When hunger over-powers reason, you co/inhabit the sphere of the dark moon in its negative crone aspect; crone from 'carrion, corpse, carcass, carnage'…
A hedonistic cannibalism. You either starve perpetually, or you stab incessantly. You go mad.
The moon as the element of reflection takes over in the initiated as the one who now Mirrors, and reflects/reflex back his deep reflections on society and social securities - the blind and mind-less moral ties and masks that bind the basest, most at-bottom anxieties.
It also takes over in the initiated as the one who Mends, and Amends all the fault-lines.
Mind over Matter, and Matter over Mind is a delicate sea-saw.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] is another quick introduction to all the concepts in Girard's theory. All those concepts are applicable at one level or the other in Hannibal.
The idea of Girard's Mimetic desire is reminiscent of Hannibal's 'White trash' dialogue to Clarice, and the idea of "coveting" in general - "we learn what to desire by watching others…":
Quote :
"We desire what other people want or what we believe other people want. Through his literary examinations, Girard observed that human needs are based on the needs of those around a person: because an individual does not know what to desire, she desires what those around her desire. Thus, individuals imitate the desires of people they see around them. Palaver points out that Girard’s theory does not refer to shallow imitation of gestures or expressions. Rather, Girard’s theory reflects the openness to and influence of humans toward one another."
"Coveting" goes back to Gk. epithumia or the 'appetitive' part of our nature.
Girard elaborating on Doubles contrasts Dionysos with Pentheus:
Girard wrote:
"In the collective experience of the monstrous double the differences are not eliminated, but muddied and confused. All the doubles are interchangeable, although their basic similarity is never formally acknowledged. They thus occupy the equivocal middle ground between difference and unity that is indispensable to the process of sacrificial substitution-to the polarization of violence onto a single \ictim who substitutes for all the others. The monstrous double gives the antag onists, incapable of perceiving that nothing actually stands between them (or their reconciliation), precisely what they need to arrive at the compromise that involves unanimity minus the victim of the gen erative expulsion. The monstrous double, all monstrous doubles in the person of one-the "thousand-headed dragon" of The Bacchae becomes the object of unanimous violence :
Appear, great bull ! Come, dragon with a thousand heads! 0 come to us, fire-breathing lion! Quick, quick, you smiling Bacchant, and cast your fatal net about this man who dares to hunt you Maenads!
We can now appreciate the atmosphere of terror and hallucination that accompanies the primordial religious experience. When violent hysteria reaches a peak the monstrous double looms up everywhere at once. The decisive act of violence is directed against this awesome vision of evil and at the same time sponsored by it. The turmoil then gives way to calm; hallucinations vanish, and the detente that follows only heightens the mystery of the whole process. In an instant all extremes have met, all differences fused; superhuman exemplars of violence and peace have in that instant coincided. Modern pathological experiences offer no such catharsis; but although religious and patho logical experiences cannot be equated, they share certain similarities.
In The Bacchae, the monstrous double is everywhere. As we have seen, from the opening of the play animal, human, and divine are caught up in a frenetic interchange; beasts are mistaken for men or gods, gods and men mistaken for beasts. Perhaps the most intriguing instance of this confusion occurs during the encounter between Dionysus and Pentheus, shortly before Pen theus is murdered-that is, at the verv moment when the enemv brother is due to disappear behind the frorm of the monstrous double.
And that is exactly what happens. Penrheus has already fallen prey to Dionysiac vertigo; he sees double:
Pentheus: I seem to see tv.·o suns, two Thebes, with two rimes seven gates. And you, you are a bull walking before me, with two horns sprouting from your head.
Dionysus: You see what you ought to see.
In this extraordinary exchange the theme of the double appears ini tially in a form completely exterior to the subject, as a double vision of inanimate objects, an attack of dizziness. Here we are dealing solely with hallucinatory elements; they are undeniably a part of the experi ence, but only a part, and not the essential one. As the passage unfolds, so too does its meaning. Pentheus associates the double vision with the vision of the monster. Dionysus is at once man, god, and bull. The reference to the hull's horns links the two themes: doubles are always monstrous, and dualitv is alwavs an attribute of monsters.
Dionysus's words are arresting : "You see what you ought to see."
By seeing double, by seeing Dionysus himself as a monster bearing the double seal of dualitv and bestiality, Pentheus conforms to the im mutable rules of the game. Master of the game, the god makes sure that events take their course according to his plan. The plan is identical to the process we have just described, with the monstrous double making his appearance at the height of the crisis, just before the unanimous resolution.
These lines become even more intriguing when read in conjunction with the passage that follows. :1\;ow we have to reckon not with hal lucination or vertigo but with real flesh and blood doubles. The identi cal nature of the antagonists is explicitly formulated:
Pentheus: Tell me, who do I look like? Like lno, or like my mother Agaue?
Dionysus: You seem the very image of them both.
Surely it is the similarity of doubles that is being suggested; that of the surrogate victim and the community that expells it, of the sacrificed and the sacrificer. All differences are abolished. "You seem the very image of them both" : once again it is the god himself who confim1s the basic principles of a process initiated by him and \vhich, in fact, comes to seem a sign of his presence.
The subject watches the monstrosity that takes shape within him and outside him simultaneously. In his efforts to explain what is hap pening to him, he attributes the origin of the apparition to some ex terior cause. Surely, he thinks, this vision is too bizarre to emanate from the familiar country within, too foreign in fact to derive from the world of men. The whole interpretation of the experience is domi nated by the sense that the monster is alien to himsel f.
The subject feels that the most intimate regions of his being have been invaded by a supernatural creature who also besieges him with out. Horrified, he finds himself the "victim of a double assault to which he cannot respond. Indeed, how can one defend oneself against an enemy who blithely ignores all barriers between inside and outside? This extraordinary freedom of movement permits the god-or spirit or demon-to seize souls at will. The condition called "possession" is in fact but one particular interpretation of the monstrous double." [Violence and the Sacred]
The doubling effect and the collapse of difference resulting in rivalry-and-courting, violence-and-friendship, and animosity appeased through a scapegoat is everywhere from between Hannibal and Graham, Graham and Red Dragon, and Red Dragon and Hannibal…. The killing off of the Red Dragon by both Hannibal and Graham perfectly completes Girard's thesis. - Someone else apparently had also thought of this link between Girard and Hannibal:
Quote :
"René Girard’s theory of mimesis (i.e., imitation) , which states that desire leads to conflict and rivalry between a subject and the mediator of the desire. The closer the subject and mediator become, the more their double-nature, or mirroring each other, is revealed. Once the difference between subject and mediator collapse, the mediator becomes a monstrous double of the subject, a being in whom the good and evil merge:
"Graham’s conversation with Jack Crawford points to Graham as the mediator between law enforcement (the subject) and the Tooth Fairy (the object). This creates one triangle of desire: FBI + Graham (mediator) + Tooth Fairy. Graham is drawn into an investigation seeking a serial killer. That is, Graham takes on the FBI’s desire to catch the Tooth Fairy. Even though he has not worked for the FBI in three years, he accepts this desire as his own. Graham takes on speech patterns, facial expressions, emotions, and the mindset of those around him, including the criminal. Graham shows that boundaries between people are more fluid that we think or maybe want to believe. Graham’s ability to flow between mindsets (especially criminal and law enforcement) shows the subjectivity of good and evil. While Graham is on the side of the “good guys” and hunts the “bad guy,” he still shows signs of existing on both sides of the good/evil fence. Springfield sees a lifer’s demeanor in Graham’s face."
"After a few moments of conversation (that oddly resembles two old friends catching up ), “Graham felt that Lecter was looking through to the back of his skull. His attention felt like a fly walking around in there.” The ease with which Lecter penetrates Graham’s psyche (which Graham allows) shows the fluidity between boundaries that we believe separates “good” from “evil.” In relation to Rene Girard’s theory of imitation, Lecter’s poking around Graham’s skull collapses the difference between their two separate worlds (i.e., that of the subject and the mediator respectively). According to Girard, this move leads to conflict and violence because two separate beings now exist on the same plane. Eventually, the mediator becomes a rival for the subject.
Graham says he caught Lecter because the doctor had disadvantages: passion and insanity. According to Girard, passion drives the collapse of difference between subject and mediator, which then leads to rivalry and violence. Graham’s earlier mention of Wound Man (which he excludes from this conversation with Lecter) plus his mention of passion emphasizes the doubling nature of the relationship between Lecter and Graham. Their closeness leads them to into an area of vagueness, where Lecter is revealed as a monstrous double in which good and evil merge.
In discussing Lecter’s initial views of the Tooth Fairy, Lecter speculates that the reason for Graham’s visit was “to get the old scent again,” and suggests that Graham “just smell” himself. Lecter’s suggestion that the scent already lies on Graham indicates their relationship as doubles and touches on Graham’s previously expressed need to recover the mindset of a serial killer to help the FBI.
Graham leaves the case file with Lecter, and as he towards the exit, Lecter asks him twice more: “Do you know how you caught me?” Though Graham never responds, Lecter provides the answer:
"The reason you caught me is that we’re just alike."
The pairs renewed connection is confirmed once Graham leaves the hospital, and he “had the absurd feeling that Lecter had walked out with him.”
"Graham recognizes Lecter’s ability to blend in with society, not only as a foreigner, but also as the monster who "looks normal [on the outside] and nobody could tell." [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Quote :
"Satan in the Hebrew Bible, shatan or satan, means accuser or adversary. The Greek diabolos means much the same thing, accuser or slanderer. The classical Greek diabole would thus mean (false) accusation or slander. Its use in Socrates' long defense in the Apology gives us, perhaps, a deeper sense of its connotation.
Socrates says, "Now let us take up from the beginning the question, what the kategoria is from which the diabole against me has arisen...." Here the kategoria, from which our word category, is the formal accusation, while the diabole is what supports and exacerbates the accusation. The Loeb translation renders it "false prejudice."
Since the indictment alleged Socrates' corruption of the youth by calling into question traditional belief in the gods, the ostensible issue was disruption of civic order and tradition, but anxiety--perhaps also envy?--about his influence on a great number of young men informed the charge against him. If we translate this into the mimetic terms of this discussion, then diabole is identified with mimetic rivalry both as its cause and its result."
At the psychological level of provoking and convincing without coercing, mimesis introduces a "scandal" which has an avalanche effect of slowly dissolving differences, and how one is able to penetrate the other, rendering each other into mirrors. Scandal, as defined by Girard:
Quote :
Scandal
"Pursuit and defense of an acquisitive desire mimetically reinforces the desire of the rival/model/obstacle and vice-versa, leading to an escalation of conflict unless something external to the conflict (like a taboo or a legal authority) intercedes or unless one of the rivals submits or dies. Girard calls this mimetic escalation scandal, after the Greek word skandalon, suggesting a “trap” or “snare.” A chief characteristic of scandal is that attempts to escape a problem only makes the problem worse (analogous to pulling against a snare). An example is the behavior of a nation-state perceived to be threatened by another nation-state. (A familiar situation?) Its defensive preparations look to its rival like aggressive provocations, which only increase the perceived threat. The rival then arms itself defensively, which is interpreted as aggression by the other side, and so on and so on. Therefore, the actions that were undertaken to secure each nation from threat have actually increased the threat and have fed a dynamic that is dangerously self-reinforcing (e.g. Europe, circa 1914.)"
"Internal mediation: If the subject desires the object because the mediator desires it, the mediator will become a rival for the subject. This rival must be defeated, and this is where conflict enters the situation. According to Oughourlian, rivalry is essentially connected with desire and cannot be separated from it.
When the mediator (person B) and the subject (person A) become close, the double nature of the pair reveals itself. The closer the subject comes to the mediator, the more the mediator desires what the subject desires. Thus, the two (subject and mediator) mirror one another. According to Girard, the closeness of the pair is determined by spiritual, not physical, distance. Girard describes the relationship between the pair (subject and mediator) as symmetrical. Whatever you say about one, you can say about the other. Oughourlian calls this process a mirror mechanism in which the link between the pair is responsible for the doubling and the rivalry.
The truth of desire is that the mediator plays a dual role: evil and sacred. Once the distance and difference between the subject and mediator collapse (in the case of internal mediation), the two exist on the same level. Here the mediator becomes a monstrous double of the subject, a being in whom the good and evil merge and morality is more gray than black and white. Girard notes that humanity is uncomfortable with the idea that good and evil exist in the same being. It is on the basis of this doubling that Lecter as the monstrous human exists in a paradox: serving good and evil, and living inside and outside of society at the same time."
"I hunt you down. I chase you. I pursue you, because I am pursued. I am pursued – by myself. I am afraid – of myself. I scare myself. I am haunted (by myself), so I obsessively chase you. I chase you away, I exclude you, I banish you – because I am haunted. It’s as if I am after my own ghost.
One could go as far as saying that rivalry is conjuration: rivalry takes place because of a desperate need to conjure away a rival. One is hunted (haunted), so one hunts down (haunts) the other.
In Specters of Marx, Derrida associates haunting and hunting calling this affiliation ‘the very experience of conjuration’. The ‘two great hunters’ in question in this text are Marx and Max Stirner, who are both in principle ‘sworn to the same conjuration’. Marx accuses Stirner of betraying and serving the adversary, while at the same time resenting him for having been ‘first’ with the spectre, for getting to the spectre first, for giving the spectre the pride of place in his thought (‘at the centre of his system, his logic, and his rhetoric’. Marx begrudges Stirner, ‘he wants not to want the same thing as him’ – the ghost – yet they are both obsessed with the same thing, about which they cannot stop talking.
While the English verb ‘to conjure’ has significations of ‘to charge or entreat earnestly or solemnly’, ‘to beseech, to implore’, it also means ‘to affect, effect, produce, bring out, convey away, by the arts of the conjurer or juggler’ (1535); ‘to bring, get, move, convey, as by magic’; and ‘to affect or effect by or as if by magic [often used with up]’.6 As Derrida notes in Specters of Marx, the French noun conjuration has the further benefit of combining and articulating not only the meanings of two English words but also two German ones Verschwo ̈rung and Beschwo ̈rung:
(1) Conjuration is the conspiracy (Verschwo ̈rung) of those who promise solemnly by swearing together an oath to struggle against a superior power. To conjure is ‘to swear together’ (from Latin conjurare, cum þ jurare to swear), to make a compact by an oath. Though the verb ‘to conjure’ in English is no longer used to mean ‘to plan by conspiracy, to conspire’ (the OED refers to this usage as dating from the fifteenth century), the French still retains this meaning. Derrida writes:
A conjuration is first of all an alliance, sometimes a political alliance, more or less secret, if not tacit, a plot or a conspiracy. In the occult society of those who have sworn together [les conjure ́s ], certain subjects . . . ally themselves together in the name of common interests to combat a dreaded political adversary, that is, also to conjure it away. For conjure means also to exorcise: to attempt both to destroy and to disavow a malignant, demonized, diabolized force.7
(2) As well as the significations mentioned above, conjuration also signifies the magical incantation destined to evoke, to convoke a charm or a spirit. Thus, conjuration means ‘conjurement’: ‘the magical exorcism that tends to expel the evil spirit which would have been called up or convoked’,8 (my emphasis). Specters of Marx also takes into account another essential meaning of conjuration: ‘the act that consists in swearing, taking an oath, therefore promising, deciding, taking a responsibility... committing oneself in a performative fashion’. What interests me here is the English expression ‘to conjure away’. Who does one conjure away and how and why is this done? Both Marx and Stirner want to conjure away the return of the ghost, while Marx wishes to conjure away Stirner. A rival or an adversary is someone one conjures away, but who exactly is ‘the rival’?
In the Western tradition several figures have been identified with the rival: one’s fellow human being, the other, the neighbour, the competitor, the enemy, the brother, the father, etc. have all been considered as adversaries par excellence. While Derrida almost never speaks about the rival as such, the relation of two figures involved in a conjuration as described in Specters of Marx would allow for a discussion of rejection, exclusion, persecution, and rivalry – of what, as we shall see, ultimately amounts to a relation to self. Rather than singling out any of the particular figures that have taken the place of the rival mentioned above and tracing a history of such a figure, I would like to dwell on the relation of rivalry itself.
According to Rene ́ Girard, whose early work explored notions of mimetic desire and rivalry [rivalite ́], rivalry is not caused, as it has been traditionally thought, by two protagonists’ desire for the same object. Rather, as he writes in an early work, desire is ‘a desire according to, following the Other [un de ́sir selon l’Autre]’. It is desire according to the other that shapes one’s desire and ultimately creates a situation of rivalry. The mimetic double imitates the other’s desire. As Girard writes in ‘From Mimetic Desire to the Monstrous Double’ in Violence and the Sacred, ‘the subject desires the object because the rival himself desires it. In desiring an object, the rival indicates [de ́signe ] it to the subject as desirable’. Girard provides the following explanation: ‘Man desires intensely, though he does not know exactly what, because it is being [l’eˆtre ] that he desires, a being [un eˆtre] of which he feels deprived and which somebody else, it seems to him, is endowed with [ pourvu ]. The subject waits for this other [autre ] to tell him what he should desire in order to acquire that being.’ In Girard’s account, since the two desires are identical, this invariably leads to rivalry and eventually to violence. In fact, conflict in general, for Girard, arises because there is almost no difference between the adversaries – for, they are ‘doubles’. ‘Mimetic antagonists’ are doubles in the sense that the intensification of rivalry has led to the elimination of characteristics that previously distinguished them. In attempts to outdo each other, they begin to resemble each other.
he psychoanalytic approach to the double establishes a close link between death and narcissism. Freud in ‘The Uncanny’ and Otto Rank in The Double both cite primary narcissism as animating the motif of the Doppelga ̈nger.18 The sighting of the double may be associated with an infatuation with one’s own image. The appearance of the double bespeaks a denial of the power of death and an insurance against the destruction of the ego. Yet this narcissism may be ambivalent. The flip side of the narcissistic fixation on the ego is a desire to escape from oneself, the double serving here as an indication of the self as a burden and as a source of identification with the other.19 The fear of and revulsion toward one’s own image or the loss of the shadow-image (Verlust des Schatten – oder Spiegelbildes) may both function as a defence against narcissism. Paradoxically, these both lead to the further strengthening of narcissism.
Narcissism is also linked to paranoid ideas of being pursued: ‘pursuit by the double, the self [der Verfolgung durch den Do ̈ppelganger, das eigene Ich].’21 According to Rank, literary representations that describe ‘the persecution complex [Verfolgungswahn]’ confirm Freud’s concept of ‘narcissistic disposition in paranoia [narzissischen Disposition zur Paranoia ]’. For example, in Dostoevsky, ‘the hero is prey to paranoid ideas of pursuit [ paranoische Verfolgungs ] as a result of his double’.23 Persecution and pursuit (die Verfolgung) are etymologically linked in German (the verb verfolgen means to pursue, hunt, or track; der/die Verfolgte is a victim of persecution, and one can use the verb verfolgen to describe being haunted such as in the phrase ‘the thought of something haunted him [der Gedanke daran verfolgte ihn ]’).24 In The Schreber Case (1911) Freud explains the mechanism of symptom formation (Symptombildung) in paranoia, by showing that in paranoia feeling (Gefu ̈hl) is transformed from an inner perception (innere Wahrnehmung) to perception from without. Thus in the ‘delusion of persecution [Verfolgungswahn ]’ the thought ‘I hate him [Ich hasse ihn ja ]’ is transformed by projection [Projektion] into ‘He hates (persecutes) me [Er hasst (verfolgt) mich)], which will entitle me to hate him’. In this transformation of affect, what should have been felt internally is perceived as its opposite from without. What is worth noting about Freud’s examination of projection as a feature of symptom formation in paranoia is that he seems to have no difficulty distinguishing what is internal from the external and what is conscious from that which is unconscious. He writes that ‘an internal perception is suppressed [unterdru ̈ckt ] and, by way of substitute, its content having undergone a degree of distortion [Entstellung ], is consciously registered as an external perception.’
In all of his analyses of paranoia Freud detects a strong connection between paranoid projection and homosexuality. The intensification of the homosexual bond, Freud concludes, leads the paranoiac to project onto others what he does not wish to recognize in himself. In The Schreber Case Freud observes that ‘homosexual wishful fantasy [Wunschphantasie]’ is at the core of the conflict in ‘male paranoia [Paranoia des Mannes ]’. The enmity that the persecuted paranoiac sees in others is a reflection of his own hostile impulses against them. The delusion of persecution thus transforms the one longed for into the persecutor.
In a further discussion of ‘paranoid pursuit [paranoischen Verfolgung]’ Rank devotes his attention to literary texts, in many of which the pursuer and the pursued are in a relation of rivalry. The double is, as Rank writes, ‘the rival [der Rivale] of his prototype [Urbildes] in everything’. He mentions that the double is often identified with the brother and discusses the ‘fraternal attitude of rivalry [bru ̈derlichen Rivalita ̈tseinstellung ] toward the hated competitor [Nebenbuhler; rival]’ in relation to the love for the mother.
The figure of the double also retains its originary relation to death. An aspect of the relation to death noted by Rank is the significance of the double as an embodiment of the soul. The development of a notion of the soul in the West, bound up with changing attitudes toward life, death, and the status of the living body, goes hand in hand with a thought of the double and doubling. The figures of the dead, whether the phantom of the deceased, a shadow, a wisp of smoke, a dream image, a mobile wooden idol, the xoanon, or an upright, immobile stone replacement for the corpse, the colossos, philosophically and religiously give way to a notion of a soul within the living person. In the expression made popular by Montaigne regarding the relation of two friends, ‘one soul in two bodies (un aˆme en deux corps)’, whose origin may be traced back to Aristotle, the friends even come to inhabit one soul.
According to the Ciceronian model of friendship, the friend is at once the exemplar, the portrait, the type or the model, and also the exemplum, the exact copy or reproduction of the self. If one projects or recognizes in the true friend one’s ‘own ideal image [ propre image ideale ]’, then the rival could also be said to be a double, an exemplum, an exact copy or reproduction.
For Schmitt, the enemy has to be identifiable. The political necessitates, and is dependent upon, an oppositional structure in which the enemy can be identified. In fact, the principal enemy, the ‘structuring’ adversary, makes the realm of the political possible. What Schmitt shares with Heidegger, Derrida writes, is ‘credit given to opposition [...] to oppositionality itself, ontological adversity, that which holds adversaries together [maintient ensemble les adversaires], gathering them [les rassemble ] in logos as ontological polemos’. When the adversary ‘ceases to be identifiable and thus reliable [fiable]’, Derrida glosses Schmitt’s position, ‘the same phobia [phobie] projects a mobile multiplicity of potential, substitutable, metonymic enemies, in secret alliance with each other: conjuration [la conjuration ]’.
Hostility, Schmitt argues, belongs to the public domain. Hostility toward the friend is what occurs in public (I can like him in private), even though it is a hostility without affect, a purely philosophical hostility. Schmitt, who with Freud belongs to what Derrida calls ‘the Empedoclean tradition’, and whose ‘two fundamental principles’, philia and neikos, Freud in Analysis Terminable Interminable equated with his own Eros and Destruction, does not appeal to death or nihilation as the source for this hostility. The source of ‘the deadly drive of the friend/enemy [pulsion mortifie`re de l’ami/ennemi]’ is not death; this drive proceeds from life itself. For Schmitt, it is a movement of life against life.
One bears this ‘someone’ inside ‘in order to repulse him’ outside. But one also spends one’s life, an entire lifetime, coming close to him and keeping him close by. In this ‘specular circle’ that is rivalry
"one chases someone away [On chasse quelqu’un ] . . . excludes him . . . in order to chase after him, seduce him, reach him, and thus keep him close at hand [garder a`sa porte ́e]. One sends him far away, puts distance between them, so as to spend one’s life, and for as long a time as possible [le plus longtemps possible], coming close to him again [a` s’en rapprocher ]."
This ‘long time [longtemps]’ spent coming closer is what Derrida calls the time of the ‘distance hunt[chassea` l’e ́loignement]’,the time taken to hound and chase after the rival, the better to keep this ‘someone’ close by." [Parallax, Rivalry and Conjuration]
"In addition to its religious sense and its particular meaning in the context of shamanism, the word katharsis has a specific use in medical language. A cathartic medicine is a powerful drug that induces the evacuation of humors or other substances judged to be noxious. The illness and its cure are often seen as one; or at least, the medicine is considered capable of aggravating the symptoms, bringing about a salutary crisis that will lead to recovery.
In other words, the crisis is provoked by a supplementary dosage of the affiiction resulting in the expulsion of the pathogenetic agents along with itself. The operation is the same as that of the human kathtrrma, although in medicine the act of purgation is not mythic but real. The mutations of meaning from the human katharma to the medical katharsis are paralleled by those of the human pharmakos to the medical pharmakon, which signifies at once "poison" and "remedy." In both cases we pass from the surrogate victim or rather, his representative-to a drug that possesses a simultaneous potential for good and for bad, one that serves as a physical transposition of sacred duality. Plutarch's use of the expression kathartikon pharmakon seems meaningfully redundant in this context.
Katharma and katharsis are derived from katharos. If we wished to group together all the themes associated with these terms, we would find ourselves with a veritable catalog of the subjects discussed here under the double heading of violence and the sacred. Katharma is not limited to the victim or the surrogate object; it also refers to the supreme efforts of a mythic ortragic hero. Plutarch speaks of the pontia katharmata, expulsions that purified the seas, with reference to the labors of Heracles. Kathairo means, among other things, "to purge the land of monsters." Its secondary meaning, "to whip," may appear puzzling in this context, until we recall the practice of whipping the pharmakos on the genitals.
It is worth noting that catharsis is used in connection with purification ceremonies that form part of the "mysteries" initiation rites; the word is also sometimes used to designate menstruation. Such usages make it clear that we are not dealing here with a heterogeneous collection of references, but rather with a unified system, to which the surrogate victim holds the key." [Violence and the Sacred]
Camus wrote:
"Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being." [The Rebel]
Whoever cannot see the difference in style and focus....is truly obtuse and, of course she would doubt objectivity as something dogmatic and ideological.....something theoretical.... The rest know, because they see....and what they see morons remain blind to... Nuance....
