Statuette Of Alabaster Standing Nude Goddess, From Babylon, Circa First Century B.C.-first Century A.D.

Illustration for Wuthering Heights by Felix Abel Klaer

the girl with a pomegranate (1875)

William-Adolphe Bouguereau

Also forever grumbling about the fact that people want to divorce the myth but more specifically the Homeric Hymn to Demeter from its cultic purposes; Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries play a major role in the story and this has a huge effect on the storytelling, and if we divorce all of the themes it imposes on Persephone/Demeter’s storylines from their myth in this adaptation, you lose a significant amount of context and meaning

Or did she learn to be colder when she got older and now she saves them the pain?

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.

Persephone the Wanderer (I)

by Louise Glück

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

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

we may call this negative creation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You must ask yourself: where is it snowing?

White of forgetfulness, of desecration—

It is snowing on earth; the cold wind says

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

White of forgetfulness, white of safety—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s not ‘natural’ to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little–have few verbal means. Eloquence–thinking in words–is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality.”

— Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh (via the-book-diaries)

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

THE ART of GRACE SLICK

Grace Slick, formerly of Jefferson Airplane (and later Starship) who were one of Woodstock's monumental participants, has been involved in the visual arts scene lately in her life...

The Airplane, most notable for their psychedelic masterpiece 'White Rabbit', entwines the tale of Alice In Wonderland with lyrics advocating for the expansion of one's consciousness through hallucinogens as the ultimate solution; which, in opposition, dismisses the validity to the otherwise socially acceptable norm of the American pharmaceutical diet's true effectivity.

it's refreshing to see that, after many decades have passed, even though she chose to pursue a different artistic avenue than music—the thematics and probable integrity remain the very same.

included are just a few selections from her primary focal point, that eternal fascination with Wonderland; however, she has also paid homage to some of her fellow peers of the Revolution, by painting portraits of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Garcia, amongst many others.