Thursday, September 04, 2008
The White Goddess
It is pathetic that what gets the Repug base fired up is a hope that their presidential nominee is elected & then kicks the bucket so that the truly sanctified agent of the almighty on the ticket, a Sarah Palin, ascends to the office.
This is actually blind White Goddess* devotion by the most goddess deprived religious demographic in America, conservative Calvinist protestants. Their natural hunger to fill their tremendous spiritual vacancy is both touching & frightening, & should have been predictable. They were ready to defend their goddess & die for ther before they even knew who she was, so deep their desire, so great their relief. Perhaps McCain, who views his entire life as that of a willful, rebellious warrior-leader out of Greek myth, was unconsciously in need of a goddess protector, & intuitively moved to find one.
Her first appearance over the weekend was in her fertility/birth manifestation, which was conveniently deflected on to the minor daughter goddess with the swelliing belly; distasteful for this crowd to dwell upon the implications & images. She had no time to demonstrate her love manifestation, & politically risky to do so, but had to move directly to her death manifestation, in her speech to devotees incapable of comprehending a complete goddess of seamless spiritual fabric. The dilemma arises when the cyclical meaning of the White Goddess is wrenched into the linear-historical mode, a dimension that destroys her, with death becoming disconnected from fertility/birth & the cycle broken.
To speak of these matters to these people, of wholeness, of the beauty of eternal return, requires that one become apostate. Culturally, they have nothing but deep & troubling Appalachian songs they no longer acknowledge or understand, wonderful poems in which they dream of defying gravity, yet the men in them praise goddesses as they murder mortal women, then grovel in the ground, comparing themselves to moles.
*Book by poet Robert Graves proposing a lost prototypical supreme goddess predating the various god pantheons that have come to us from historical antiquity, particularly those of northern Europe. Reading it won't hurt your poetry. Might inspire peculiar political commentary.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
This is actually blind White Goddess* devotion by the most goddess deprived religious demographic in America, conservative Calvinist protestants. Their natural hunger to fill their tremendous spiritual vacancy is both touching & frightening, & should have been predictable. They were ready to defend their goddess & die for ther before they even knew who she was, so deep their desire, so great their relief. Perhaps McCain, who views his entire life as that of a willful, rebellious warrior-leader out of Greek myth, was unconsciously in need of a goddess protector, & intuitively moved to find one.
Her first appearance over the weekend was in her fertility/birth manifestation, which was conveniently deflected on to the minor daughter goddess with the swelliing belly; distasteful for this crowd to dwell upon the implications & images. She had no time to demonstrate her love manifestation, & politically risky to do so, but had to move directly to her death manifestation, in her speech to devotees incapable of comprehending a complete goddess of seamless spiritual fabric. The dilemma arises when the cyclical meaning of the White Goddess is wrenched into the linear-historical mode, a dimension that destroys her, with death becoming disconnected from fertility/birth & the cycle broken.
To speak of these matters to these people, of wholeness, of the beauty of eternal return, requires that one become apostate. Culturally, they have nothing but deep & troubling Appalachian songs they no longer acknowledge or understand, wonderful poems in which they dream of defying gravity, yet the men in them praise goddesses as they murder mortal women, then grovel in the ground, comparing themselves to moles.
*Book by poet Robert Graves proposing a lost prototypical supreme goddess predating the various god pantheons that have come to us from historical antiquity, particularly those of northern Europe. Reading it won't hurt your poetry. Might inspire peculiar political commentary.
Labels: Grandma Palin, religion, THE election
