Camille Paglia - 2
Excerpts from Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson [continued]
...polemicists like William Blake who seek to abolish guilt and covertness in sex. The taboo on woman's body is the taboo that always hovers over the place of magic. Woman is literally the occult, which means "the hidden." These uncanny meanings cannot be changed, only suppressed, until they break into cultural consciousness again. Political equality will succeed only in political terms. It is helpless against the archetypal. Kill the imagination, lobotomize the brain, castrate and operate: then the sexes will be the same. Until then, we must live and dream in the daemonic turbulence of nature...
The autonomy of the ancient mother goddesses was sometimes called virginity. A virgin fertility seems contradictory, but it survives in the Christian Virgin Birth. Hera and Aphrodite annually renewed their virginity by bathing in a sacred spring. The same duality appears in Artemis, who was honored both a virgin huntress and patron of childbirth. The Great Mother is a virgin insofar as she is independent of men. She is a sexual dictator, symbolically impenetrable. Males are nonpersons: Neumann elsewhere speaks of "the anonymous power of the fertilizing agent." Thus Joyce's sensual Great Mother, Molly Bloom, sleepily mulls over all the men in her life as "he," implying their casual interchageability. The Great Mother did not even need a male to fertilize her: the Egyptian goddess Net gives birth to Ra by parthenogenesis or self-fecundation.
The mother goddess gives life but takes it away. Lucretius says, "The universal mother is also the common grave." She is morally ambivalent, violent as well as benevolent. The sanitized pacifist goddess promoted by feminism is wishful thinking. From prehistory to the end of the Roman empire, the Great Mother never lost her barbarism. She is the ever-changing face of chthonian nature, now savage, now smiling. The medieval Madonna, a direct descendant of Isis, is a Great Mother with her chthonian terror removed. She has lost her roots in nature, because it is a pagan nature that Christianity rose to oppose.
The masculine side of the Great Mother is often expressed in serpents, wound about her arms or body. Mary trampling the serpent underfoot recalls pagan images in which goddess and serpent are one. The serpent inhabits the womblike underworld of mother earth. It is both male and female, piercing and strangling. Apuleius calls the Syrian goddess "omnipotens et omniparens," all-potent and all-producing. Energy and abundance on so vast a scale can be crushing and cold. The fluid serpent will never be converted to a friend.
