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| What is a Demon-Lover/Sburator ? |
| "Waking to the morn, the maiden finds the web is torn insunder; Sees her bright lips blue and shrunken, gazeth on the glass in wonder; Softly smiles at her reflection; whispers, wistful, "Come! Oh hear me! Sburator with locks of raven, come to-night; away then bear me!" ("Calin", Mihai Eminescu, Romanian poet ) The first of Eminescu's great long poems, "Calin" (1876), stars one of those supernatural concept-beings we, of the West, have learned to think of as vampire-like. But Eminescu's Sburator is not something from the dark side. He's a concept that allows us to work out the consequences of a set of desires. A Sburator/Demon-Lover is a perfect male sex object, the man of any girl's dreams. In fact, there shouldn't be just one model. Every girl's Sburator/Demon-Lover is designed to her own specifications. How can you beat that? The content in the idea, as developed in the tradition, is twofold. First, a Sburator is so incredibly super-perfect that, once you've been laid by one, you lose interest in everything else in life. But second, he only comes once every seven years. (A close relative of the Tam Lin character of Gaelic-English tradition.) Well, more than once. We did say it has to be super-perfect. But you only get him for a short period of time, then he's gone again. It's a parable. Almost a Zen riddle. It gets us thinking about just what our goals in life are. Could there be some experience that constitutes the entire point of life? Is there anything for which one should give up the entire rest of the world? Is the good of life found in the particular nature of one's experience, or in something else? Most Sburator stories told on hot summer nights in Transylvania are surely much cruder than Eminescu's. They're probably more like your basic American horror movie. Something to make young girls pull the covers up all the way, and be afraid of men until they're properly married and all the dowry's worked out. He's not a folklorist recording the tradition. He's a philosopher-poet telling the people of the tradition how to use what they have to make something much better out of themselves. ( Source: der blaue Geiger * Internet edition volume 1/3 * February 1998 * part 9 of 10 , http://home.earthlink.net/~blauegeiger/bG.1.3.9.html ) |
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| Motto: "Ebon braided, Demon-Lover, Come and take me off tonight..." (Eminescu/Bantas, "Calin-files from a tale") |
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