Queen of Swords

I'm pondering what looks like it will become a lengthy essay, not just on C&P but on close reading, moralizing, and myth-making.

The oldest version of the story appears in The Golden Ass, and it is nothing like Ashcroft-Nowicki describes it in Your Unseen Power. I'll do a complete breakdown later, probably this weekend, but one of the biggest points of departure is that A-N describes Psyche as "wandering the earth looking for her lost love" and "as she does, she meets and helps [various small creatures] along the way." These small creatures then help her in her trials later.

Nope. The only "helping" she does is to straighten a temple of Ceres -- which earns her the gratitudes of the goddess, but not the help. The various beings who help her later (ants, eagle, river, reeds) do so because she's beautiful and naive and they take pity on her.

She is passive, suicidal, and gives her trust to the wrong people. The only time she takes decisive action is to deliberately orchestrate the deaths of her sisters, who had persuaded her to try to kill her husband.

"Cupid and Psyche" is frequently referred to as an allegory for the purification of the soul through trials until it is ready to stand with the gods. I think they're pushing the story a bit to make this connection. Even at the end, Psyche is not deified because of her own merits but because Cupid is in love with her and he persuades Jove to do him a favor. Personally, I think it reads more like a romantic farce than a spiritual allegory.

I am going to continue studying and reflecting on the story and its variations and see where it takes me, and I still like the idea of the story as a personal meta-story. But it's definitely going to involve some myth-making of my own, not adopting the story as it is.

This evening at a group meeting, one person referenced a story she had heard from a professor, which she believed had been taken from Celtic lore: that when returning from battle, warriors stopped to bathe at each of seven pools, each of which was cooler than the one before it. The idea was that by the time they reached home, their battle rage had been cooled.

Does anyone have an actual reference for this story?

Aaarrgghh!

Myth-making is a wonderful, honorable pursuit.

Re-writing old myths is -- or can be -- an act of sacred creativity.

But for heaven's sake if you re-write an old myth, and post it, label it as such!

Twice in the past week I've come across references to Inanna's mythology in which major roles were attributed to entirely different figures than in the originals, with no hint given that this was a modern variation. And there was nothing about the way they were posted to give a casual, uninformed reader, any reason to think it wasn't the original version of the tale.

In one case, a feminist re-telling of Inanna and the Huluppu Tree tells the story with Ninshubur, Inanna's friend/servant, helping her drive out the creatures from the tree instead of Gilgamesh. Just a few minutes ago I read a reference to Inanna's Descent in which the person who wrote it said that Ereshkigal was a warrior goddess who rescued Inanna from the underworld. Ummm. . . . NO!

Elsewhere -- on a site which I usually hold in high regard -- someone refers to a story in which Inanna steals something from Ereshkigal by sending a handmaiden to seduce her. The handmaiden succeeds in the seduction, steals the item, and Ereshkigal waking, curses her. Inanna then tries to soften the curse and promises to be the patron of prostitutes to be with them in their despised state -- a story which is totally unsubstantiated in the ancient texts.

Did I mention: Aaarrrggghhh!

Tell new stories! Please!

But make sure your readers or listeners are aware that you are telling a new story.
If it's UPG, great! But say so.

Let those who hear it hold your story dear if it moves them -- but honor the original story, and your readers, by being open about what you've done.

/rant

Today after attempting the gate, LM urged me to take advantage of the nice grassy area on the edge of the desert and make love with him. This seemed like a lovely idea, and we were in a relaxed, romantic mood. We reclined together, starting to kiss -- when suddenly he was enclosed in a tree that hadn't been there a minute ago.

One of the ways I distinguish between an inner world experience and simple imagination is that when in the inner world, I can't simply make something happen. I hadn't been thinking of trees, but one appeared and enveloped LM. And when I tried to imagine him back with me it did not work.

The only remotely reasonable explanation I had was that we had been swept into an element of Isis's story: the body of Osiris had been hidden in a swamp, and a tree grew up out of it. A king took the strong, fragrant tree and made it a column in his palace. Isis became a human servant, earned a boon from him, and regained the tree. Since this was my Isis day, and I had just been reading about the sorrows of Isis in The Moon Under Her Feet, I guessed that I had been given the opportunity to participate more directly in that story.

But that was just a guess. And I had no idea what to do about it.

I broke out of the journey and reached out for LM. I could not sense his presence. So I called my teacher, asked her if she could sense him. He very often appears next to her when she's talking to me, but this time she said, "No, I can't feel him. Scotty says he's all right, though. What's up?" I explained what was going on. She listened and conveyed a message from Scotty. "He asked if you chopped the tree down."

No, I hadn't. I'd thought about it, but hadn't been sure it was a good idea.

"You need to chop the tree down, then use your sword to split it open and free him. Don't worry, you'll nae hurt him."

( The story continues. . . )

Yesterday, kateri_thinks invited me, uncrowned_king and _storyteller_ to see "The Fountain." It's a movie I had heard of, but not one I would have gone out of my way to see. However, opportunity to go out with both Kateri and L&L was not to be passed up.

Three stories are interwoven in this movie: the story of Izzy, a young woman dying of a brain tumor, and her husband Tommy who is a medical researcher frantically searching for a cure; Queen Isabella of Spain and the Conquistador she sends to South America searching for the Tree of Life in order to combat the Inquisition; and a mysterious bald man wearinng what looks like prison jammies floating through a nebula in a bubble with a dying tree.

Because Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz play the main characters in each scenario, and because I had read a review that suggested it, I watched the movie thinking that they were the same two souls manifesting over time. It was only this morning that _storyteller_ pointed out the truth: only the story of Izzy and Tommy is real. The story of the Queen and the Conquistador is the book that Izzy is writing, and the man in the bubble with the tree is Tommy in his dreams. I realized that the movie isn't about Death, as we all had been discussing the night before, it is about The Fear of Death.

Izzy starts out afraid of her own impending death. She copes with that fear, wrestles with it, by writing her own story as myth. Tommy expresses his fear of her death in his dreams, where he has a close relationship with a dying tree but keeps pushing away appearances by both Izzy and the Queen. He is so afraid of Izzy's death he is incapable of facing it with her. He pushes her away again and again. Sometimes it is so he can go to the hospital and continue his research, but some of it is that his anger and denial and helplessness prevents him from offering her any real support. He won't accept that she's dying, so he can't stand beside her as she needs him to.

Visually it's a beautiful, dream-like film. More dream-like than any other film I've seen. But as uncrowned_king pointed out, it wasn't able to do any of the three stories justice. It was a long film, but none of the stories went as deep as they could have, and so the overall impact of each was lessened.

I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in myth-making as a response to spiritual struggles, or who has an interest in death and dying -- and it's definitely a movie to see on the large screen, or the impact of the visuals will be lost, further reducing the effectiveness and emotional impact of the film.

I classify this one as a Noble Failure.