James Baldwin.

James Baldwin talking about love

A cobra is dangerous only when it is coiled, ready to strike in an instant; when its body is completely erect it is quite harmless. Similarly, the kundalini is dangerous only in its form of the diffuse life energies, which fuel the unillumined person's hankering for sensory and sensual experiences, entangling him or her ever more in worldly karma. When the serpent power is erect, however, it is not poisonous but a source of ambrosia, because it is erect only when it has entered the central pathway leading to liberation and bliss. As Jayaratha explains in his commentary on the Tantra-Aloka (chapter 5, p. 358), when one strikes a serpent it draws itself up and becomes stiff like a rod. Similarly, through the process of "churning" the kundalini stretches upward into the perpendicular pathway of the sushumna, reaching with its head for the topmost psychoenergetic center. Georg Feuerstein, Tantra: The Path of Ecstasy, Chapter 11: Awakening the Serpent Power.

As with most female horror fans, people love to ask me what it is I get out of horror. I give them the stock answers: catharsis, empowerment, escapism and so on. Less easy to explain is the fact that I gravitate toward films that devastate and unravel me completely – a good horror film will more often make me cry than make me shudder.

Kier-La Janisse, House of Psychotic Women

Indian Gateways🪷~

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

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

Proserpine, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

One of the oldest goddesses in the historical record is Inanna of Mesopotamia, who was referred to, among other honorifics, as “She who makes a woman into a man, she who makes a man into a woman.” The power to alter such fundamental categories was evidence of her divine power. Inanna was served by at least half a dozen different types of transgendered priests, and one of her festivals apparently included a public celebration in which men and women exchanged garments. The memory of a liminal third-gender status has been lost, not only in countries dominated by Christian ideology, but also in many circles dedicated to the modern revival of goddess worship. Images of the divine feminine tend to appear alone, in Dianic rites, surrounded only by other women, or the goddess is represented with a male consort, often one with horns and an erect phallus. But it is equally valid to see her as a fag hag and a tranny chaser, attended by men who have sex with other men and people who are, in modern terms, transgendered or intersexed.

— Speaking Sex to Power: The Politics of Queer Sex by Patrick Califia

As I am reading an aggregation notebook about fairytales, I am reminded of another reason for why there is this change from “folklorist” to “literary” studies of fairytales recently.

As you might know, the “folkloric” studies of fairytales led to typification, classification, catalogues - the famous Aarne-Thompson classification. We identified the “families” of fairytales, the common points they shared, the ingredients of the recipes, the pieces of the puzzle placed together ; we’ve got lists of archetypal characters and the typical scenarios and routines. And don’t get me wrong, this is really good and cool - through this we were able to identify the “untold rules” of fairytales, and the unofficial canons of the genre, and better highlight the unusual or brilliant variations…

But there is a slight problem with those studies. Their “break-down” method might start out or end as a catalogue, but it passes by a system of “molds”, if I dare say so. Basically, to forge types, to classify, to make lists and divided categories, they enforce the stories into a mold, into general archetypes, into “typical behaviors”… And this is where people see things differently nowadays.

The example I can bring forward is how the folklorist studies usually consider an archetype of the story to be the “aggressor”. You know, the typical fairytale villain. And this folklorist approach will often end up basing their categorization on “What does the aggressor does? How does the hero encounters the aggressor? Is the aggressor killed or robbed?”. But who is the aggressor? Anyone and nobody. In the “aggressor” position, they treat the very same way dragons and evil stepmothers, ogres and wicked fairies, witches and lustful kings, greedy knights and devious dwarves. These are all just “costumes”, for some folklorist, placed on an archetypal “fairytale aggressor”, and these “costumes” are just ornaments that are only a secondary, if not tertiary matter.

But… what the “literary studies” are bringing forth nowadays is the question: “Wait… Maybe it does matter. Maybe who or what the aggressor is does matter. Maybe we shouldn’t treat the same way stories that are about dragons and those about evil witches. Maybe there is a reason why the storyteller prefers to talk about a greedy abusive mother rather than an ogre deep in the woods. And the literary studies precisely ask those questions because - unlike the folklorist studies which mostly see fairytales as ancestral plans and outlines, traditional schemas and structure, cultural frameworks and fabrics, the literary studies try to consider the fairytales more as stories first. Stories told by a certain person, in front of a certain audience, crafted a certain way for a certain time and era. 

This is why, while the folklorist studies tend to discard or disregard the “little details” as not so important (because they are searching for the bone structure or “primordial core” of the story), the literary studies rather focus on these details - because it is those details that make the story. The little twists and turns that each storyteller adds to the formula, the specific additions of a man or woman’s own mind and culture. For a folklorist study, it doesn’t matter if the key is made out of gold or bronze - or even if it is a key at all, it might be a magical egg as long as it has to be found by the protagonist to open a magical door. But to the literary study, the implications of changing the key from gold to bronze will be questioned, and having an egg instead of a key will be a BIG deal. 

I don’t know if what I said is clear, but I just wanted to point it out. (With such a big topic as this whole literary VS folklorist debate, one needs to pile up the little crumbs over each other until they make a big pile, because that’s literaly centuries of scholarship, studies and popular culture reception at war here)

Ariadne ♡

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