The Mythic Blueprint of Killing Eve, Part 1: Enchantment and the Goddess of Sex and War

Killing Eve is rebellious, seductive, and shrewdly on-trend. It is also the retelling of an ancient myth about wild feminine power and subversion. 

Pop Archetype is a series that explores the way timeless myths and archetypes bubble up through the cracks in popular culture. While the plot of the myth might take new twists, and the heroines might play under different masks and guises, the essence of the story remains the same. We look at what gets lost, what's restored and given new energy, and how the medium changes the message. 

Part 1

The first moment Villanelle sees Eve, she’s exiting a hospital toilet stall. Eve is shaking out her dense, wavy hair, something she does when she’s flustered or thinking about a problem. Eve releases the elastic from a tight bun, and her hair explodes into its natural startling fulness. This kind of hair — dark, abundant and kinked — is an acute sexual trigger for Villanelle, whose face empties out at the sight. She gives Eve a look of helpless longing that collapses into a cold stare. “Are you alright?” Eve asks, as their eyes meet.

Villanelle, a young assassin working for The Twelve, a mysterious Russian group, has come to kill the girlfriend and accidental witness of one of her previous hits. Eve, an American employed at the British Secret Intelligence Service, is there to protect the witness. She also intends to pump the girl for more details and prove a hunch to her bosses at the agency: the killer is a woman, and one with a flair for stagey, self-pleasuring kills.

The pull of this chase has been irresistible; Eve breaks protocols to gather proof, transgressions that have brought a chastising threat of “trouble” from her boss, Bill. Eve’s bitter, muttered response, “Trouble isn’t interested in me,” comes as the verbal coda to a scene in which she offers Bill the tupperware of cold shepherd’s pie her “nice” husband has packed for her lunch.

Yet here is Big Trouble, in the form of the rococo Russian hit-woman Eve intuited all along, disguised in a nurse's uniform of flat, primary blue. Villanelle is just about to leave the bathroom and, with the speed and precision of a mongoose dispatching a cobra, slit the witness's throat and lay waste to her four attendants. But before, she will pause at the door and look tenderly back at Eve, who is still fretting with her wild hair. 

"Wear it down," she says. 

Eve’s hair turns her on, and Villanelle will not, even as she prepares for slaughter, deny herself the image of Eve’s unbound hair.

Moments later, Eve is screaming in Villanelle’s bloody wake. Yet the true climax of that night, what Eve will return to again and again, is their shared gaze. In that look a delicious, tormented dynamic is born. They each recognize in the other a part of themselves that has been invisible to the world. Like a devotee gazing into the eyes of an idol and imbuing it with mysterious powers, Villanelle and Eve take one look and begin to make, elude, and need each other to fully exist.

A brief detour into the the power of fascination in myth…

To be rapt, to gaze and gaze, is an act of surrender. The rest of the world fades to black, our bodies disappear, we disappear into a single point of focus. The ancients used the word fascinare to denote occult powers of irresistible attraction, the ability to hex or enchant, or to "make the evil eye." Overwhelming sexual attraction progresses towards la petite morte, the small death of climax; folkloric belief tells us that a pregnant woman transfixed by the evil eye will miscarry. To fascinate is to kill.

Its constellation of synonyms, “captivate” and “catch” “mesmerise”, “spellbind”, and “enthral” describe states of confinement and enslavement, a loss of psychic sovereignty, a total abandonment of discernment and self. To fascinate is to bind. In full bloom, it is the de facto offline-ing of the prefrontal cortex, a connection to the body, a sense of future consequence, sometimes even the will to live. The seemingly innocuous french synonym, ‘touché,’ or ‘touched’ evokes trespass, a moment when a weightless but powerful element (image, lyric, fantasy, memory) can penetrate and take us captive, or when we allow our attention to fixate on another, to return again and again for a hit of envy, arousal, or hope.

This is not to be confused with the loss of self and time that characterises the state of 'flow.' The flow state has the integrative power of sensing into the object of attention. Flow can be felt as a sudden and transformative intimacy with the unknown, absent of desire and fear. More is possible; attention narrows and simultaneously, awareness dilates. Random, disconnected pin-points of focus become nodes where streams of awareness intersect. We might expand in our capacities and skills. Fascination takes them away. 

To fascinate is to capture our unconscious attention - that which grabs us, wipes our discernment, and brings us into trance. We hang from one small point of enchantment like a fish on a hook, and the mind and ego work overtime manufacturing meaning in proportion to the intensity of the pull. 

And therein lies the danger: Fascination is not about the thing itself, but our fantasy of it. We project a depth or potency into its object that might not exist, and create a story that supplants a deeper inquiry about why we're so transfixed, and whether or not it serves us.

Myth is threaded with stories that warn us about allowing our attention to stray from the path. Joseph Campbell describes an episode in The Odyssey when Odysseus and his crew, nearing the end of their journey, reach the Aisle of Helios, where the cattle are sacred. Before Odysseus can see the Sun God, a symbol of ultimate power, he falls asleep, and his men kill and eat the cows. Zeus punishes him by destroying his ship with a thunderbolt and Odysseus is then "swept back along the path he has just traveled." 

His 'sleep' is the strayed attention that might sever the hero from a greater intent. "When you have come to this point of high concentration and are about to have a breakthrough to the ultimate realisation, all the mere earthly impulses have been held back. But if the concentration breaks, they sweep you back again."

This movement toward ‘breakthrough’ is the mystical drive, an instinct to be what Campbell calls, “ravished out of your skin” by a vision of the divine, or to take the journey that will actualise your potential. A “sweeping back along the path” represents the necessary journey back home, where the sublime vision or achievement can land in the body and ordinary life — an integration that some might call wisdom. It is why Odysseus straps himself to the mast before his ship enters the waters where he will hear the ravishing voices of the sirens: he wants to be annihilated by their song, but not leap into the water and be lost forever. He wants to experience the ravishing and return home.

The hallmark of fascination — as Eve will soon learn — is its recursive nature: you end up where you began, but unlike the mythic hero’s return, nothing has been transformed. Perhaps on this go-round the colours were a little brighter, the rooms a little bigger, the highs a little higher, but there’s no internal progression. You’ve just exhausted an impulse that leads to a greater unraveling. Or as Campbell writes: “Distraction. Now if you let a little bit go, a lot’s going to go.”

Back to Eve…

For fascinated Eve, a lot's going to go. She's fired for the hospital debacle (and for calling her boss a "dick swab") and secretly hired by an M-I6 operative, the comically canny and sphinx-like Carolyn Martens, who heads the Russia desk and also suspects the killer is a woman.

When Eve, now leading a rag-tag crew assembled to catch the female assassin, realises the identity of the staring stranger in the bathroom, her unconscious fascination is made flesh. Villanelle is suddenly specific and real, and Eve is free to gaze and gaze. In one scene, she describes Villanelle's face to a police composite artist, and Eve's gut-fascination coalesces into a kind of devotional poem:

"Her eyes are cat-like, wide, but alert. Her lips are full. She has a long neck, high cheek bones. Her skin...is smooth and bright. She had a lost look in her eye that was direct, and also chilling. She's totally focussed, yet almost entirely inaccessible."

Eve says this with a drag in her voice, a savouring quality. Her eyes glaze over, and she loses herself in the telling. In painting the beloved, the one whose eyes were “direct and chilling,” she will soon learn that she is describing Villanelle’s own fascination with her.

The radical embrace of unconscious desire, even as it leads toward chaos and death, drives the action in Killing Eve. And while it ornaments itself with au courant millennial obsessions, (A short list: fashion, travel, food, economic freedom won through the exploitation of both trauma and uniqueness, and a near constant kiss-off of any form of masculine authority) the show is a direct descendant of a revelatory myth about a woman following her deepest instinct toward total embodied power. 

In The Descent of Inanna, a myth from ancient Sumer composed roughly 4,000 years ago, a Venusian fertility goddess at the height of her powers "opens her ear to the great below" and follows an intuitive urge all the way down to Hell - though she knows return is forbidden. There, her dark sister Ereshkigal reigns as Queen of the Underworld, and kills Inanna with a look "of death," then hangs her carcass on a peg to rot. Through a little divine intervention from the wisdom god Enki, Inanna receives the "waters of life" and is able to ascend back to heaven. Inanna self-initiates by defying her father-gods through a confrontation with death, a process in which she is literally "ravished out" of her skin. 

Stories and hymns about Inanna that lead up to the Descent portray her as a robust, earthy maiden who ruled the realms of sex, love, agriculture, poetry, and war. She expressed a primal, sex-and-death archetypal force and was also 'created' as an agent of cultural unity between Akkad and Sumer. A native Sumerian fertility goddess and a more bellicose Akkadian one, Ishtar, were syncretised into the figure of Inanna, "the Queen of Heaven," an intact feminine with all her facets, dark and light, expressed in the body of one. Inanna was lustful and benevolent, generous and bloodthirsty, and pursued her desire without apology or censure.

When Dumuzi, the man Inanna freely chose to be her consort and king, comes to court her, she stands before him and hypes her own vulva as "the boat of heaven" before asking, Whose gonna plow it? 

"Who will plow my wet ground?" she asks. "Who will station the ox there?" 

Dumuzi assures her that he will definitely plow her vulva. 

"Then plow my vulva, man of my heart!" she shoots back. "Plow my vulva!"

After a few poetic agricultural references to "sprouting" and "burgeoning," Dumuzi apparently successfully stations his ox, inspiring Inanna to drop the queenly hauteur and gush, "My honey-man, my honey-man...the one my womb loves best."

So much to unpack here! Apparently what characterised the Queen of Heaven, and merited countless sprawling temple complexes, maintained by a horde of priestesses and minions, was a woman of honest sexual desire and sovereignty. A woman who claimed her desire, and made the one and only qualifier to both her celestial kingdom and her heart a man's ability to plow her vulva right. 

Inanna is also, like Eve, transgressive in her ambition, breaking rules and boundaries to get what she wants. Following her marriage, Inanna demands from her fathers a greater portion of the 'me,' or the cultural knowledge and powers of Sumer.  Their steward Enki refuses, so Inanna shows up at his shrine and plies him with beer until he drunkenly surrenders them. After collecting the powers of the eighty me, which include, "the kissing of the phallus, the art of the hero, the perceptive ear, and the art of power," Inanna comes in to her full queenship. 

It is at this stage of life where we find the goddess - before she makes her descent. In this full-flower phase she has children, but isn't strictly identified with the receptive and tender qualities of the maternal. Rather, she sustains through marriage and child-bearing her innate saltiness, and the imprint of the virgin archetype, or the sovereign feminine who is "one-in-herself." As Karl Kerenyi writes, Inanna exists eternally at the "border region between motherhood and maidenhood joie de vivre, and lust for murder, fecundity and animality."

At the very beginning of the Descent there are two elements that set Inanna up to, like Odysseus, ensure both her "ravishing" and her return. The first is  her "ear," or the place from which her decision to descend is made. The Descent begins with these incantatory lines:

"From the Great Above she opened her ear to the Great Below.

 From the Great Above the goddess opened her ear to the Great Below.

 From the Great Above Inanna opened her ear tot he Great Below."

Diane Wolkstein, a folklorist who worked with Sumerian scholars to interpret the Descent into poetry and performance, breaks down the significance of Inanna's "ear" as an instrument of intuition:

"Inanna is queen of heaven and earth, but she does not know the underworld. Until her ear opens to the Great Below, her understanding is necessarily limited. In Sumerian the word for ear and wisdom is the same. The ear, which is located mostly internally and is coiled like a spiral or labyrinth, takes in sound and begins to transform the imperceptible into meaning. In order to fully appreciate or know what is said or meant, a great understanding is needed - an understanding of all things."

Having sated her external ambitions and desires, Inanna is suddenly “open” to an “understanding” that was previously unavailable, a lawless directive muted by the voices of her rage, passion and greed. This “understanding” is not the urgent demand of ambition, or unconscious fascination. This voice emerges from silence, defies reason, and promises no certain outcome.

Yet Inanna heeds the call, and enacts the second instinctive strategy that will ensure her return: she informs her "faithful servant," Ninshubur. Inanna says that if she doesn't return, then Ninshubur should go to her father-gods Enlil, Nanna, and Enki, and implore them to save her. "Tear at your eyes," Inanna says, "your mouth, at your thighs."

Ninshubur is a formidable figure in her own right. She is the "Queen of the East," a priestess and warrior who fended off the giants and sea-creatures that roared down their backs when she and Inanna made off with the me. Inanna calls out Ninshubur's virtues whenever she addresses her, "Ninshubur, my constant support,/ My sukkal who gives me wise advice, / My warrior who fights by my side..."

The two women share a primal, devotional bond. Sylvia Brinton-Perera, who unpacked the myth through a depth-psychological lens in Descent of the Goddess, sees Ninshubur as the part of the psyche that is able to stay relational, grounded and watchful as we 'descend' or risk journeys of transformation:

"[She] is the remarkable, strong, humble, functioning consciousness that can permit life to continue [...] that can persist in its journey to find what is necessary. [...] She simply carries out precisely what the goddess asks of her. "

Her servant's "integrity and reverence and capacity for action" allow Inanna to risk greatly and go into free-fall. Ninshubur is an administrator of the soul, an aspect of the self who can stay in communication with reality. She knows when to block critical voices, or ask for help, and provides the means to stay the course. She ensures that the higher creative faculties - the goddess - can be fully realised, through processes that might appear from the outside to be destructive, ugly, crazy, or futile.  

It is Inanna's command to Ninshubur, to bear witness and rescue her if necessary, that makes the revelation of the myth possible. Ninshubur is her anchor point; she embodies Inanna's intent to take the wisdom of the underworld and then return, like Odysseus, after her metamorphosis. 

Inanna suits up for the journey, adorning herself with symbols of her power, the me. She dons a crown, a lapis bead necklace, a royal robe, a breastplate, a gold ring, and lapis measuring rod, daubs a magical ointment on her eyes, and arranges her "dark locks" of hair. 

At the entrance to the underworld, a gatekeeper asks Inanna why she is descending, "Why has your heart led you on the road from which no traveler returns?"

Inanna begins by saying, "Because...of my older sister Ereshkigal," but then then hedges and says that her sister's husband has died and she has come to "witness" the funeral rites.

The gatekeeper informs Ereshkigal that Inanna, "a maid as tall as heaven," and bedecked lavishly in the me, wants entrance into hell. Ereshkigal, enraged by her sister’s coolness and arrogance, orders him to bolt the gates and demand that Inanna remove one of the me at each portal.

"Let the holy priestess of heaven enter bowed low," she says.

When Inanna questions the keeper, he says, "Quiet, Inanna, the ways of the underworld are perfect. They may not be questioned." 

She relents, and at the seven successive gates, Inanna is stripped naked and divested of all her powers. She enters her sister's domain utterly exposed, and is met by the judges of the Underworld. Ereshkigal sees her sister, rises from her throne, and gives her the killing gaze:

           "Ereshkigal fastened on Inanna the eye of death. 

            Inanna was turned into a corpse,

           A piece of rotting meat,

           And was hung from a hook on the wall."

Inanna's rotting corpse hangs for three days and nights. Ninshubur begs Inanna's fathers Enlil, the Lord of the Wind and Nanna, the God of the Moon, for help, but they both rebuke Inanna for attempting to bypass the laws of the Underworld:

"My daughter craved the Great Above,

  Inanna craved the Great Below.

  She who receives the me of the Underworld does not return.

  She who goes to the Dark City stays there."

Inanna has dared to confront the unrevealed potentials of chaos and death, an act her father-gods have not risked and will not condone. A return from those depths has the whiff of a phenomenon more caustic, more insurgent, than the merely miraculous. Inanna has bypassed law and custom, and in so doing, she has assimilated the void. What new potent creature would be born of this knowledge?

Ninshubur goes last to the shrine of Enki, the god of water, wisdom, mischief, crafts and art, who is "troubled" and "grieved" to hear of his daughter's state. He also possesses the "waters of life." Enki fashions two creatures "neither male nor female" from the dirt under the fingernails of both hands. He tells them to slip through the doors of the underworld "like flies," and find Ereshkigal, who will moan "with the cries of a woman about to give birth."

When these two magical androgyne creatures descend and empathically mimic the strange cries and groans of Ereshkigal as she writhes on the floor, Ereshkigal softens and grants them a boon. The little flies ask for the corpse of Inanna, and give to it the food and waters of life, after which Inanna is miraculously restored. But there is a price to be paid: the judges of the underworld remind her:

          "No one ascends from the underworld unmarked.

           If Inanna wishes to return from the underworld,

           She must provide someone in her place."

To ensure the exchange of bodies, demons or "galla" follow Inanna on her ascent. For a deeply tribal culture, the 'demon' is a mercenary, detached from bond of family: 

"[Those] who know no food, who know no drink. 

  Who accept no gifts, who enjoy no lovemaking. 

  They have no sweet children to kiss. 

          They tear the wife from the husband's arms. 

          They tear the child from the father's knees." 

These ruthless and implacable ghosts "cling" to Inanna as she enters the realm of heaven. There she first comes across abject Ninshubur who wears a "soiled sack cloth," a dress of mourning, and who immediately throws herself "in the dust" at Inanna's feet.

The demons say, "Walk on Inanna, We will take Ninshubur in your place."

But Inanna stops them, saying, "She did not forget my words. [...] Because of her, my life was saved. I will never give Ninshubur to you." 

Twice more Inanna enacts this refusal with the galla, to save her sons Shara and Lulal, who are also both dressed in humble sack cloths and, upon seeing their mother, throw themselves at her feet. 

Inanna and the galla arrive at her native city of Uruk, where she finds her husband, Dumuzi sitting on her throne. He is not in mourning dress, nor does he throw himself at his wife's feet. Embodying Inanna's own electric rage, the demons grow restless and smash things.

Inanna is then seized, and performs the power she has learned, the hell-gaze of Ereshkigal:

"Inanna fastened on Dumuzi the eye of death.

She spoke against him the word of wrath. 

She uttered against him the cry of guilt:

                   Take him! Take Dumuzi away!" 

The demons beat Dumuzi savagely, "gash" him with axes, and attempt to take him. Later, Inanna cuts a deal for Dumuzi and his grieving sister: each will trade places and spend only half the year in the underworld and half the year in heaven. 

The brother-sister duo, united in their fate, represent and become surrogates for Inanna's fully realised self, the one who knows heaven and hell, death and rebirth, passion and discernment, ruthlessness and receptivity. Inanna places Dumuzi, "in the hands of the eternal," and the story concludes with her cry: 

"Holy Ereshkigal! Great is your renown! Holy Ereshkigal! I sing your praises!"

The Mythic Blueprint of Killing Eve, Part 2: Embodiment, Desire as Power, and Resurrection

Killing Eve is rebellious, seductive, and shrewdly on-trend. In Season 1-3, it is also the retelling of an ancient myth about wild feminine power and subversion. 

Pop Archetype is a series that explores the way timeless myths and archetypes bubble up through the cracks in popular culture. While the plot of the myth might take new twists, and the heroines might play under different masks and guises, the essence of the story remains the same. We look at what gets lost, what's restored and given new energy, and how the medium changes the message. 

Part 2

The Descent of Inanna was excavated in 1900 in fragments of broken clay tablets, and survived not only an aeon, but a Solomon-like split between competing museums before it was soldered together into one narrative. We can only guess at the wisdom the original story was attempting to alloy and press, like a branding iron, into the culture from which it was mined.  

The myth, however, has remained alive. The terse, shocking progression of the Descent, and its cutting, emotive language have resonated with women through time. It has been interpreted by feminist depth psychologists, in trauma studies, and used as a tool to reframe feminine initiations like pregnancy and menopause, as well as "stripping" events like divorce, job loss, illness, radical physical change, and depression. 

With its emphasis on return and rebirth, the Descent can be viewed as one of our few feminine resurrection myths. Jungian analyst Sylvia Brinton-Perera sees it as the emotional blueprint of an initiatory process for the "daughters of the patriarchy" who have lived and achieved in accord with the roles society has deemed acceptable and laudable, but feel cut off from the most primal, free and creative layers of the self.

An errant "daughter" of the father-gods will become, at some point, haunted by the intuitive realisation that if she continues on the expected path, where she has received validation and praise, then she will remain obedient and unexpressed. She will die as she was made by the culture and not as she wishes to define herself. 

One need not have a father to be groomed to act as a compliant daughter to men. We are often imprinted by mothers possessed entirely by the shadow of the masculine and with an impoverished relation to the feminine. Nor does one have to be in the physical body of a cis-woman. The 'daughter' represents one's experience of the presence of the feminine, inside and out. Brinton-Perera takes as fact that the "virtues and aesthetic ideals" of a patriarchal culture are the very air we breathe. They are adopted unconsciously by children in the family systems and institutions upon which they are dependent during their most formative and impressionable years. 

Goddesses like Inanna, with their all-encompassing and boundary crossing powers, put the feminine in relation to everything: Nature, the cosmos, art, discipline and craft, the collective, the sacred, death, the masculine, and her own erotic imagination.

Inanna does not tell her father or her husband that she is making her descent, she tells another woman. She is not a codependent goddess, but one who can exist, with conviction, in her own "personal core identity, her feminine value and standpoint." 

To enter the death-process of her former, high-test, good-girl self, the praised daughter must turn toward whatever she persistently suppresses or denies. Whatever her experience in the culture has deformed, she must heal or free. The praised daughter must also voluntarily strip away the attachments that will hold her in the boundaries of the known self - before life does it for her. 

And this is where we find Eve, as the series begins, in middle age, in a good job and good-enough marriage, in a cozy, cluttered home in London, pouring in her off-hours over images of the bodies slain by another woman. 

As devoted hubby Niko, a Poland-born maths teacher, preps their dinner, Eve is pressing a small kitchen knife into her inner thigh. Villanelle has managed in her most recent hit to slice the femoral artery of her target in the same spot without him noticing until he bled out on the pavement - a feat that Eve finds "impressive" and "cool."  Transfixed by the blood bubbling up on her own skin, she conjures the presence of both killer and killed. 

Her unconscious preoccupation has taken on a life of its own, and emerges in passive aggressive blurts. Out of the blue, she asks guileless Niko how he would kill her. He shrugs before taking a mollifying stab, "I dunno. Flatter you to death?"  

Eve's riposte whips out of her like a hot poker: "I'd paralyse you with [a nerve toxin] and suffocate you in your sleep. Chop you into the smallest bits I could manage, boil you down, put you in a blender, take you to work in a flask and flush you down a restaurant toilet."

Eve has been bathing her imagination in Villanelle's whimsical savagery for some time. Stacked on her desk are the crime novels of Donna Leon and PD James, as well as studies on female murderers, Hysteria, When Women Kill and Psychopathy and Women. She wonders what makes Villanelle and her dark, psychotic sisters tick, but keeps her interest hidden. When Carolyn first confronts Eve about the secret file she has compiled on Villanelle's kills, Eve can barely articulate her fascination, "I was just interested in what makes a woman able to, uh...I'm just a fan."

From the outside, Eve might not resemble vigorous, sex-forward Inanna whose erotic energies are the very the fulcrum of her identity, and who "makes of every man her bridegroom."  The first time we see Eve she's in bed and screaming because her arms have fallen asleep; she's unconscious and howling for the parts of her that express agency and desire to come back to life. 

What Eve does share with Inanna is that she has achieved solely within male-dominant structures and hierarchies, but chafes at their resistance to her emergent ambition. Eve appears independent, but her life up until Villanelle's entrance has been entirely defined by her relationships to men in their roles as boss, husband, and father. In the second episode of season 1, Eve gives Carolyn a brief bio: raised mostly by her father, she returned to London when he died, joined M-I5, and then, she says, "I basically married my dad!" 

Her bosses at the agency dismiss her instinct and capacity to lead, and the routinised sex in her marriage offers no channel for an untapped erotic hunger that is gradually becoming enmeshed with her fixation on Villanelle. Eve is prized but subordinate, and rebels through acts of spastic aggression and subterfuge. She is a 'bratty bottom' in both roles, the sub who won't truly submit because the play feels too small. Eve performs mousy subordination to placate the men in her life while dimly sensing her own frustrated internal force, the sheer vehemence of which, if unleashed, would likely bury them all. 

As Eve's obsession with Villanelle foments, she begins to subvert the rules of the security agency and the uxorious attentions of her husband, who tries in vain to keep Eve secure. "We all know you care about me. Sometimes I think it's all you have," she spits at Niko after he challenges her insistence on pursuing Villanelle. "I'll leave the stew out," he responds. (Needless to say, he made the stew.)

Carolyn poaches Eve because, she says, "you're intuitive and you make insane suggestions," and with this blessing Eve experiences a burst of agency and self-trust. She assembles a team that includes former boss Bill, (also sacked for the hospital murders) and anxious, quietly devoted Kenny who handles digital espionage. They're now all in league with Eve, collapsed into her obsession and willing, as Bill puts it, to "[stare] into the abyss." 

Villanelle soon makes another hit, fatally gassing a Chinese attache in an S&M kink clinic in Berlin (but not before having a little fun mercilessly "clamping" his balls), and Eve heads to the site with Bill to investigate. Eve scents blood, but even more tantalizing is that Villanelle uses her name as an alias during the kill, a move that acts as both signal and lure, and recasts Eve not as hunter, but prey. 

Villanelle also steals Eve's luggage in Berlin. Like Ereshkigal forcing Inanna to disrobe as she passes through each gate on her way down to Hell, Villanelle's first power-move is to strip Eve of all clothes and possessions. Back in her hotel room, Villanelle pokes sniffily through the bag and dons a hideous scarf Niko gave to Eve. She holds up a box of toothpaste and looks at it pityingly. "Poor baby," she says, with a distinctly Slavic mix of tenderness and bullish contempt. She can see what Eve is missing and will endeavour to fill the void. 

The show is, on the whole, excitable about the transmissive powers of clothes, and Eve's wardrobe is one of its running gags. Eve rocks a collection of what appear to be vintage Casual Corner also-rans that edge perilously into frump. While Villanelle wears extravagant clothing as an act of aggression to seduce and "devastate" the world, Eve hides beneath shapeless layers in noncommittal hues: oatmeal, greige and navy blue.  

Twenty years Eve's junior, Villanelle has her generation’s flair for curation, able to wade bravely into the stupefying breadth of consumer options and know and declare, with the conviction of Saint Joan, what's worthy. In another life, Villanelle could have been a successful lifestyle vlogger, feeding her viewers a never-ending scroll of DIY room make-overs, clothing and make-up 'hauls,' or beautifully arrayed meals. 

If the internet enables a culture of profligacies - of information, stimulation, and consumables - then those who rise in its ranks must have the gift of discrimination. Like baleen whales sucking in vast amounts of ocean water and sieving out the tiniest bits of plankton, the champions of this realm can push through the overwhelm with strength leftover to not only discern, but endorse. Evangelism is key; the lingua franca and currency of such content is not mere liking, but "lov-ing," being "obsessed with" or "addicted to" a specific lip balm, pillow case, or nut milk. For a certain special mascara one might be willing to "protest" or "die." 

Villanelle makes sure to inquire about the brand of a lovely silk bedspread from a mark before jamming a hairpin into his frontal lobe. Female fans of the show gushed their praise. Villanelle, unburdened of a conscience, is free of the self-curbing emotional gymnastics many women feel beholden to perform in order to sustain relationship or their 'good-girl' status. Her one hobby is shopping with blood-money, but it's ok, because she pays for it, and is therefore 'empowered.'

Villanelle is irresistible as the ultimate progression of market-friendly feminism: part sociopath, part tastemaker, an apex predator in both life and style who would quite literally kill for the Halpern print blazer she sports in season 3.

Eve has far fewer spikes of immoderate desire or consumption - and they're often toothless. At the beginning of season 2, after Eve performs an act of climactic violence, she stress-eats an enormous bag of candy, a trope that seems pretty stale for a show this astute and unrepentant in its revelation of sideways feminine catharsis.

It's not so much that Eve has poor taste, but that she has no taste, no compass of self-defining sensual appetite, at all. She eats whatever her husband puts in front of her, wears clothes as bland and utilitarian as her male bosses, is indifferent to ambiance, shows no preference for art in any form, and has whittled her sexual life down to a restive infatuation with Villanelle. 

During their stay in Berlin, Bill steps in to show her the way. He tells her to shave her pits for her 'date' with a source, asks her pointedly about her shadow-crush on Villanelle, and reveals his own carte-blanche sexuality, "I lived here for 8 years. I said yes to everything for 5 of them. Dark horse aren't I?" 

Bill is arguably the most dynamic character in the show. As Eve's boss, he played as a jaundiced sixty-something government cog with a wife and baby, but as her report he cocks his fedora Henry Miller-style and offers impromptu lessons on the contracts of kink. Like father-god Enki, who hails Inanna after she has tricked him, stolen his powers, and levelled the ground between them, Bill surrenders to Eve's mission after she has rebelled and reversed their roles. Eve, in playing outside the bounds, is finally a contender and worthy of respect.

Bill has already made his descent. He "said yes to everything," lived out his forbidden desires and played via sex with the dynamics of power. For years he maintained a traditional, authoritarian role at the agency, and a secret-but-thriving open marriage. Eve is shocked when Bill discloses that he has loved and fucked "hundreds" of men, that his wife fucks other people, and that he and his wife are not the "perfect couple" Eve imagines, but simply "a good team." 

Owning and expressing his own paradoxical parts allows Bill to sense what is unconscious in Eve, to know when she is lying to him and herself. He doesn't buy it when Eve claims that her obsession with Villanelle is about serving justice; "She's killing people!" Eve wails, instead of admitting to the aliveness she saps from the pursuit. He pegs the connection between Eve's obsession with a female killer and her marital ennui, and senses that her reverent description of Villanelle is mere froth on the lip of a rabid dog. 

Bill coaches Eve on what to wear, "A dress like that requires women to go braless," he says, "a monkey could tell you that." After removing the bra, she immediately asks if Bill has ever been attracted to her. He says no, bouncing her externalised gaze back and cutting her loose. 

Bill doesn't mean to groom her to reflect his taste, but to orient her within. It's an invitation from an "old tart" to play with her disowned femininity through moments of carnal presence, to land in her primal senses - affects that are "messy" and "preverbal" (smell touch taste) - in order to locate her own pleasure, and to simultaneously see what is objective and real. It's pleasure as discipline and ritual; instead of wheat-pasting a layer of 'feminine' artifice over the body, there's painterly experimentation, a noticing of what emerges on all sensory levels and guiding this awareness toward gratifying self-creation.

But Eve is too antsy to plant herself so unflinchingly in the body, or to hand over her heady obsessions to its organs of sense. Her fantasies and projections, vindicated by gut-level 'insights' into Villanelle's moves and motives, are too addictive to quash.

This restless, disembodied aspect of the feminine is given dramatic voice in one of the more plaintive ancient hymns to Inanna. It occurs after Gilgamesh, intent on seizing the goddess' powers and domain, ousts her from her native home after aeons of reign. Inanna sings: 

"I, the woman who circles the land - tell me where is my house

Tell me where is the city in which I may live…

I, who am your daughter...the hierodule, who am your bridesmaid - tell me where is my house...

The bird has its nesting place, but I - my young are dispersed,

The fish lies in calm waters, but I - my resting place exists not,

The dog kneels at the threshold, bu I - I have no threshold..." 

The passage is heart-rending in its expression of exile, of being pushed so brutally outside spaces of belonging that one loses not only the ratifying gaze of a community, but the capacity for loving self-definition.

To have no 'threshold' is to have no boundary, no safe container, or "house" for the exploration of one's full feminine powers, and no "city" in which to offer them as cultivated gifts.

The feminine, dispossessed and "circling the land" (body), and punished and humiliated for the perplexing range of her potencies, can now only conceive of herself in subservient relation to the masculine who has stolen them, "daughter, hierodule, bridesmaid," and yearn for his presence to provide the solid ground or "resting place" and "calm waters" she can no longer create for herself. 

Prior to this, Inanna exemplified a rich and direct communion with body, emotion, and landscape. This affinity is the very medium in which the story and its characters play. The tactile warmth of the poetry describing the courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi draws the reader (or listener, as much of the poetry was likely sung) into cellular rapport with the entwined bodies of the two lovers, "He put his hand in her hand./ He put his hand to her heart./ Sweet is the sleep of hand to hand./ Sweeter still is the sleep of heart to heart."

Inanna revels in her preparations for lovemaking with Dumuzi: "I bathed for the shepherd Dumuzi, I perfumed my sides with ointment, I coated my mouth with sweet-smelling amber, I painted my eyes with coal." 

She is gathering up her body, awakening each sense, and making her own experience of them whole before opening to another. When she and Dumuzi do make love, there's no language of heady sensing, no sight, sound or memory-triggering scent, only the language of touch, "He shaped my loins with his fair hands,/ He stroked my pubic hair,/ He watered my womb, / He laid his hands on my holy vulva,/ He smoothed my black boat with cream, / He caressed me on the bed." 

The later poetry of Inanna's painful exile presents an anguishing schism of self from  body, an inability to touch ground, the shadow of being "ravished out" of one's skin by trauma and left to circle the wound. Like Odysseus being "swept back along the path," the survivor of trauma often finds herself in a loop, reliving in the present the fragmenting story of the past.

In the third season of the show, Villanelle returns to Gryzmet, her abysmal home town in Russia, to seek out the narcissistic mother who abandoned and traumatised her into heartless sociopathy. In a generous, four-episode arc we see how a mother's madness grows through a daughter into full, poisonous bloom.

In contrast, we get only a sketch of Eve's past, one that reveals an absence of a mother figure, but no exceptional trauma. We do know that a considerable chunk of her identity is that of a good, benign, girl. Maybe I'm not kind, she hisses at Nico when he tries to restore the bond between them. "You're the best person I know," he says - to her displeasure, "Always have been."

Sandra Oh imbues Eve with a comic obliviousness that helps account for her irrational risks and the lack of empathy and protective care she shows for those around her. Laid alongside Villanelle's extremes, Eve's dislocation and self-absorption seem within the range of 'normal.'  They play not as disorder but quirk.

One might say her physical and relational gaps are 'hidden in plain sight,' naturalised within a pathologically disembodied Anglo culture, and therefore require no explanation. In the absence of self-orienting 'taste,' introspection, real intimacy, or bodily 'sense,' no vertical lines or grounding forces exist for Eve. She, like Inanna, is homeless.

As Eve tries to charm their source, Bill chases Villanelle from the subway to a subterranean night club. Through a thicket of Berliners twitching to Aggrotech, he wades toward Villanelle until she stops and pivots with a beatific smile, brandishing a tiny blade. Bill tries to flee back through the crowd, but Villanelle seizes him, draws him close in the crush of bodies, stabbing ecstatically at his heart. 

Bill dies in the strobing blue light of a liminal world, one akin to the watery realm of Inanna's father-god Enki, who lives "deep in the abyss." A wily and intuitive masculine, he, like Bill, cultivates states of flow through sex, pleasure, and transgressive play. 

He is also the only father-god moved by Ninshubur's cries for help on behalf of Inanna. Enki doesn't aggress in order to help his daughter, but moves on a surge of grief, descending imaginatively to her, willing to merge with the utter emptiness of her death-state. He responds in kind, resourcing the 'leftovers' of his own body, the river silt and clay scraped from under his fingernails, to fashion two small, empathic creatures. They are the sexless and unwanted 'residue,' of creation, the shit-eating, death-eating "flies," humble enough to penetrate hell and meet Inanna without judgment in her most degraded and vulnerable state. They can go without fear to the ground level of being, without fanfare to Ereshkigal performing her "birth-pains," and offer a witnessing presence.

"It hurts, it hurts," they chant to her, as she pantomimes the labour of a phantom pregnancy, twisting and groaning on the very floor of Hell. Enki's compassion and receptivity provide both sisters with what they truly require.  

The little dirt-beings represent what Brinton-Perera calls the "despised slag" of our most modest and earthy processes, the real-ness exposed in unconscious displays of emotion, involuntary contractions and triggers. They affirm that god's body - the sacred - also comes with dregs and remainders, seemingly useless elements that, if acknowledged and used creatively, have transformative gifts. They are the shame-bits, the ugly-bits, the too-much-bits, the 'former self' bits, but they're also the tiny, specific expressions of taste and preference that dare to take up space. It's this in-the-moment "embodied stuff" that Eve has abdicated in favour of fantasy and projection, the evidence of her unique or 'terribly' ordinary human-ness. 

Humble "earth" - the Sumerian word for Hell - is also what triggers the goddess' descent. Inanna "comes from on high" and treats as parade what should be pilgrimage. Ereshkigal senses Inanna's pride and flays her rudely, nailing her to the wall like so much meat.

The feminine-encoded myth propels the heroine toward chaos; she's dismembered and reconstituted over and over again and thus imbued with an unshakeable power. But she must be earthed and fleshed first.

What makes for a good myth, however, doesn't make for good TV. Enki's "bisexual breadth" and capacity to "penetrate [...] the underworld," allow him to fathom Inanna's deep play and intervene. Likewise, Bill's dynamism and discernment in this medium necessitate his death. To kill Bill is to cut away the net, ensuring that Eve will remain homeless, a restless ghost fascinated with a darkness bigger than her own.

The Mythic Blueprint of Killing Eve, Part 3: Pleasures of the Bad Girl and the Queen of Hell

Killing Eve is rebellious, seductive, and shrewdly on-trend. Seasons 1-3 also retell an ancient myth about wild feminine power and subversion. 

Pop Archetype is a series that explores the way timeless myths and archetypes bubble up through the cracks in popular culture. While the plot of the myth might take new twists, and the heroines might play under different masks and guises, the essence of the story remains the same. We look at what gets lost, what's restored and given new energy, and how the medium changes the message. 

Part 3

Villanelle would kill for free, but killing is her job. How does Villanelle kill? She kills in fetching dark wigs, and on-trend clothes with dead-on accents; she kills with a hair pin snatched from an expertly highlighted chignon, with poisonous perfume, with guns and garden hoses, neck ties, suspension bondage, salon equipment, steering wheels, tuning forks, plastic bags, her bare hands (choking, punching, neck-snapping), spices, subway trains, city buses, golf clubs, gases, axes, hunting knives, fire, and pills. She neuters male corpses and puts them in drag, guts and trusses one up in a De Wallen window brothel, stuffs a toilet scrubber down another's throat. If there's time and she's feeling indulgent, she'll tell her mark what she's about to do to them, share her thoughts on the afterlife, and listen as they beg. 

She takes her inspiration from art, from fashion, from the pleasures of character creation, at which she is painstaking, a miniaturist really, crafting a necklace from macaroni and glitter-glue to play a dotty school-yard misfit, or commissioning a perfume so that she might smell like a "Roman centurion." She finds the look, the dialect, the cup size, the gait; to be invisible to a mark who prefers Junoesque blondes, she becomes a brunette and binds her breasts.

Her kills and recon have drama, humour, a gift for mise-en-scene. She devises a role then plays it, working from the outside in, donning costumes, a new language, inventing backstories. She can collaborate, improvise in the moment; to thrill a voyeur, she slits his throat before a mirror so they can both watch him die. In staging and style, she's an artist, but the kill itself is all technique, clean and precise. She wastes nothing, but does enjoy a bit of confessional repartee with her mark, to taste them, draw them out, locate their chinks.

She will make a fool, amuse herself. None of this humanises her victims; their lives mean nothing beyond her power to end them. Rather, it's a kind of savouring, like smelling your food before you eat it. When it's done, she asks that they meet her gaze, and breathless, she milks the last moment, enthralled by the sight of their life force draining away. 

Villanelle is an auteur of the hit, an assassin who transforms her kills into a performance art that allows her to embody a multiplicity of selves. What would otherwise be an anonymous and dirty job becomes a medium of self-refraction and play, a realm where she can 'take on the flesh' of another, enacting the full rhythm of death and birth. For every sham persona she creates, one real person must die. Throughout, she will steer the narrative, even if it means prodding the lifeless palm of a freshly dead woman to make it wave her a cheery 'bye-bye.' 

Villanelle's insistence on imprinting what should be clandestine acts with her flamboyant style, and minutely choreographing their trajectories call to mind what Janet Malcolm once wrote after observing the "obliviousness" of photographer Thomas Struth as he laboured behind his cloth: "To enter the state of absorption in which art is made requires reserves of boorishness that not every exquisitely courteous person can summon but that the true artist unhesitatingly calls upon."  

Her choice of costume is frequently sly, meant to induce and express internal states. It's also aggressively feminine; when called in for a psych evaluation by the Twelve, Villanelle shows up in an extravagantly flouncy pink tulle dress and couture combat boots, making sure to mention her "heavy period" to the two middle aged Russian men interrogating her. She often wears the rosy and livid hues of engorged labia or the reds of menstrual blood: a burgundy silk robe, a ruffled cranberry blazer over a T-shirt with silk-screened lips across the breast, a long fuscia skirt, worn while gorging on Fairy Bread at a cafe, a campy hot-pink fuck-me dirndl with a pink pig's mask. A scarlet red jumper tied at the waist with a snake-belt. 

She is essentially the inverse of Eve, a woman in a male-dominated world who wields a uniquely feminine aesthetic as a tool of power, and screams her identity through the details of a disguised and uncredited role.

One can't, however, mistake her for a feminist, or one of those noble graffiti artists toiling unseen in the favelas of Brazil as an act of artistic purity, or to democratise beauty, or to sand-mandala their way to a reconciliation with the transient nature of existence, or...whatever. No, Villanelle simply can't help herself; she's a sociopath with an unlimited budget, and part of the reason she takes the risk of telegraphing her style through the violent spectacle of her work is that she wants so badly to be seen. The fact that Eve recognises the anonymous killer is a woman, and one with a florid imagination and notable style, is an aphrodisiac to Villanelle.

Though she brings a baroque sensibility to the act of killing, for Villanelle there's no richness or poiesis in death itself. As she tells a mark before stabbing and castrating him, "Your eyes will just...empty. And your soul goes in. People think your soul or personality leaves your body when you die; I swear it just goes further in. It falls so far in, it just becomes so small that it can't control your body anymore. It's just in there, dying forever."

She and Eve are both ciphers, but of different species. Villanelle, internally empty, and absent of any feeling beyond desire, is all shameless gut-want and gratification. Eve, without specific desire and a strong embodiment, is trapped in projection and doomed to chase the figure who manifests the bull-dozing will, violence, freedom, and gluttony she has suppressed. 

Eve has the same dynamic with Villanelle that the nebbish Narrator has with cartoonishly masculine Tyler Durden in Fight Club, an alter who lets him live out his every tamped-down urge: "I dress how you want to dress, fuck the way you want to fuck, I'm free in ways you wish you were free." 

When Nico gets wind of Eve's continued entanglement with Villanelle, he confronts her, yelling, "You're not saving the world, honey bunch! You're getting off on sniffing out a psycho!"

She slaps him hard and pushes him hard. Then pushes him again. "You don't want that in your life," he says, appalled. "Whatever that is. Trust me."

But she does want that; Eve wants the force that will annihilate the stagnant, 'this-will-do' energy that pervades her life with steady, caring Nico and set her free from a quicksand of frustrated longing. Insensible, however, to the demon driving her, Eve can only swing into raw sadism, throwing her confusion and pent-up wrath at an oppressively devoted man. Before the first slap, she tries to goad him into a shouting match. Even her rage seeks permission.

It could be argued that Eve doesn't actually possess a body until the fifth episode of Season 1, when Villanelle 'gives' her one. The gift begins with Villanelle 'stripping' Eve in Berlin by stealing her luggage, and then returning it filled with adornments of Villanelle's choosing: expensive clothes and shoes in Eve's size, and a bottle of perfume named 'La Villanelle.' 

Eve has an apes-around-the-monolith moment as she riffles through its luxe contents, and then proceeds to enter her own body through the gaze and touch of Villanelle. She casts off her scuffed little moccasins and puts on a satiny, skin tight dress, the heels, dabs on the perfume, and looks at herself wonderingly in the mirror, touching and seeing the contours of her own body as if for the first time.

The gift achieves what Villanelle intuited: Eve needs to be filled and dominated. When Villanelle finally appears and puts a knife to Eve's breast, she leans in for a sniff. "Are you wearing it?" she asks, meaning, Are you wearing me? 

Ballerina turned writer turned sexual explorer Toni Bentley writes of her own pre-nooky ceremony: "I knew from public performance that artifice, ambiance, and ritual could propel the participant into a state of truth and beauty far more effectively than thoughts or good intentions."

Likewise, Villanelle recruits her killer instincts and flair for performative world-building to seduce Eve; she dresses her, anoints her, and imposes her chilling, alien presence into Eve's domestic milieu as an act of erotic domination. 

A true submissive is turned on by the strength of another's desire for her. To enter a dom-sub play, she empties herself of will and tunes in to sensation. She is utterly in the present, riding a series of aesthetic moments over which the dom has full command. When Eve sees herself in the mirror she flushes with shock and recognition; Villanelle has taken over Eve's atrophied desire muscles and given her a silhouette that feels so very right. By putting on the dress Eve implicitly enters a play of submission with Villanelle that's not "show me what you want," it's "Show me what I want."  

Show me what I won't let myself want. Show me how to want myself. 

Villanelle thus becomes dangerously necessary to Eve as the embodiment of her shadow and the bestower of what she lacks. This is also a form of displacement. Villanelle is a void; what she fills, she also makes empty.  Without her, Eve runs the risk of having to feel what Inanna becomes: discarnate, incomplete, hung on the hard peg of reality, in need once more of an external animating force. She would have to schlep back to the inertia of home and job and marriage, and the kind of flattened, default states that serve as the perfect canvas for misadventure.

After Bill's death, marriage hanging by a thread, Eve breaks into Villanelle's apartment, located, bien sur, in a fashionably frayed part of Paris. There she sees the girlish grandeur in which Villanelle dares to live: gold-fish bath fixtures, kitted-out vanity, Piper-Heidsieck stacked in the fridge. Eve guzzles the champagne and wrecks the place.

But there's no payoff. We've seen the apartment before, so the primal, voyeuristic pleasure of finally peeking at the intimate details of Villanelle's life doesn't arise. We don't even buy the moment as genuine revelation; Eve knows the animal she's hunting, and might have guessed at the voluptuousness of her lair. We've just been dragged through the Russian juvie-gulag where Villanelle cut her teeth as a teenager, and by its dismal light can see the apartment as something of a triumph.

The fun of watching Villanelle is fuelled by our complicit love for everything she consumes. Eve's trashing of it feels banal, the usual puerile impulse that follows what arises first when stumbling on an uncommon power: the urge to be on one's knees before it.

Beneath her indignation at the "assholes win" of it all, the more subtle thing Eve registers, and that we can share, is an itchy realisation about Villanelle's true power: there's greatness in her excess. Where Eve is merely obsessed, Villanelle is committed; where Eve is liberated only in moments of petty tyranny, Villanelle practices her freedom relentlessly through violence and beauty.

She'll go big and do it in style, a trait for which most classical heroines are punished. The western canon is strewn with the bodies of small-town girls with quicksilver libidos who simply wanted too much: Becky Sharp dies rich but friendless, Madame Bovary gags on poison, Moll Flanders returns to England "in sincere penitence for [her wicked life],"Anna Karenina tosses herself on the train tracks, and Nana dies in a Parisian bedsit, face half-eaten by smallpox, "a shovelful of putrid flesh." 

A dread of being savaged by the small gods crouches in the back of most women's psyches, ready at the first signs of outrageous ambition or appetite to jump up and slam the bunker door. Inanna herself is abandoned by the divine fathers when her plans exceed heaven; two of the three say 'I told you so, sweetie,' and leave her to rot in hell. Yet here is Villanelle, bigger than death or common decency, and navigating it all with serious panache.

"I feel nothing," Villanelle says at an AA meeting where she's posing as an American trust-fund boho. "More and more and more and more. No matter what I do I don't feel anything. I hurt myself, it doesn't hurt. I buy what I want, I don't want it. I do what I like, I don't like it." 

Most pleasure is electrified by boundaries, and Villanelle has none. She kills with impunity and purges through beauty (shopping sprees, threesomes), acts of catharsis that go where most catharses go: right back to the status quo. When not killing or shopping, Villanelle is terminally bored, left to a vacant inner realm where chaotic emotions threaten to engulf her.

In Season 2, Eve 'hires' Villanelle to seduce but not kill a spoiled tech CEO connected to several murders. He picks at her, smelling a rat. She bashes him in the face with a book. It's not enough. She leaves in a dissociated trance, her unspent aggression a giant abscess that needs to be drained.

She walks the streets, enters a kebab shop, gazes at its sweating cylinders of meat, at two lamb's heads propped on a tray. They offer some relief, a gut-stimulus she can follow. Two drunk girls clatter in; they're going to scrape their pennies together for some chips. These poor, dumb girls. We next see them walking through the dark with Villanelle prowling behind. She resolves it with sex this time, instead of the intended kill. 

The scene captures the turbid, dislocated state in which hell-bound Ereshkigal lives - and must live in for an eternity.  Ereshkigal was once an 'above ground' grain goddess named Ninlil. She was married to Enlil, the god of wind, who raped her repeatedly under different disguises, forcing her to carry and give birth to "monsters." The gods sent him to hell as punishment and Ninlil followed. Once they entered the Great Below he became Gugulanna, the Bull of Heaven, and she Ereshkigal, Queen of Earth.

As goddess of the harvest, Ninlil was a celebrated daughter, embodying what Gareth Hill describes as the positive static feminine, or "the great, self-regenerating round of nature," which primarily supports the values that sustain collective life and family.

Agriculture goddesses govern sowing and reaping, growth and death. Their constructive ruthlessness works in broad strokes; they nurture the communal good, but not individuation. Similar Death-Mother figures like Kali or Durga perform an analogous role, but in the realm of spiritual awakening. They might 'reap' one's private demons (the ego), but do so for trans-individual purposes, and not to foster personal uniqueness.

Ninlil is violated so terribly that her power splits off and goes "underground" (i.e., unconscious). There she uses it to uphold the inexorable law of reality, that of death. She 'reaps' in adherence with nature, but also, as she embodies feminine instinct divorced from awareness, she reaps arbitrarily, out of her own triggered rage and desire for "justice." 

Ereshkigal presides over a tribunal of masculine judges and sexless demons, who both police the boundaries of her realm and enforce her will. In Hell, Ninlil's natural lawfulness curdles into blind adherence. She then personifies the negative static feminine, compulsively loyal to patterns out of a desire for dominance.

She borrows temporary feelings of internal worth and security from an imposition of external control. This facet of the feminine pole replaces life-giving cycles with rigid, neurotic habit and unquestioning loyalty to and from kinship groups. She is exemplified in the possessive mother who encourages the dependence of her children, or the dry-drunk who arrests behaviours for animal survival, but does none of the transformative inner work. 

Her endless cycles of 'productivity' are punctuated by pressure-relieving, and often violent, emotional purges or repetitive lateral movements that exhaust her creative faculties. On a collective level, especially in highly stratified cultures, this 'purging' takes the form of clamorous festivals or cathartic theatre, which enable the continuity of a strict hierarchy. 

Nothing in the field of the negative static feminine is allowed to graduate or ascend, as this would remind her of her own inertia and be experienced as a betrayal. Her sense of significance is derived from watching others 'wither on the vine' of what she suffers and endures, and her unconscious reflex is toward competition, even with her own children, as she feels pride at her ability to energetically drain or outlast others.

Paradoxically, her secret longing is to have her suffering acknowledged, and for it to engender a 'specialness' in the eyes of others. Her 'vulnerability' is generally a mawkish and simpering display. She wants to be chased, overwhelmed with pity and empathy and rewarded for her survival; she wishes, at long last, to finally receive the intimate love of the mother, and the 'blessing of the father' who failed to protect her from the brutality of men. 

The 'Hell' to which Inanna descends and from which return is "forbidden" is in fact Ereshkigal's traumatised psyche turned inside out. Inanna presumes that she can simply 'visit' her sister's domain without consequence, and this enrages Ereshkigal, for whom there's no escape.

The world above recoils from Ereshkigal, and Inanna's light-filled, regal presence enforces her sense of being a dark 'other,' albeit a feared and exalted one. Though she seems to have the power advantage over Inanna, Ereshkigal perceives her little sister only as a threat, which then incites her aggression.  

Inanna, a generation younger, has experienced union with the masculine as pleasure and not violation, she's beloved by her people, and feels entitled to her freedom - especially that of passing between realms. She has a strapping, hungry air, is adaptive, open to the unexpected, and trusting of herself in whatever circumstance to 'hit the ground running.' Her one law and language is that of Eros and she seeks under all conditions to not merely survive, but thrive.

Inanna emanates life, her face mobile and embellished with the energies of fully expressed and digested emotion, a principle over which she rules: "Downheartedness, calamity, heartache - and joy and good cheer - is your domain, Inanna. Tremble, afright, terror - and dazzling and glory - is your domain, Inanna.”

Ereshkigal's unlined visage reveals her internal emotional 'freeze,' the veritable Petrified Woman she has become. Inanna moves: bodily towards what she desires and internally through deeply felt and wide-ranging emotions. Sarcasm and cynicism are utterly foreign to her; she is the gnosis that comes from whole-hearted participation.

Inanna's capacity to be active in her desire and yielding to her feeling makes her an artist of life's experience. She strides through, uninhibited, internal barriers down. Brinton-Perera notes that Inanna "craves and takes, desires and destroys, and then grieves and composes songs of grief." 

She's felt the intransigence of the father gods, but not been brutalised in the way of Ereshkigal, and can't empathise with her suffering. Inanna freely chose her descent out of an instinctive desire for wholeness, whereas Ninlil followed her rapist out of a displaced sense of power. As Brinton-Perera writes, "A woman suffering Ereshkigal [...] falls easily into the underworld as into a vortex, or she follows a beloved man with psychopathic or psychotic tendencies, who can lead her into the depths." 

As she is over-identified with her wounds, she can't break free; to return, to be brought to the full 'light' of consciousness would be to risk intolerable shame. She imagines the gaze that will meet her is the one she has cultivated: critical, defensive, and perceiving only in binaries.

She makes the impossible choice to break relationship with her deepest self in order to stay in relationship with an unworthy man. When he finally dies, Ereshkigal doesn't then turn toward her generative powers but to the lost procreative, aping the labour of a cryptic pregnancy, giving birth only to dust. 

Like Ereshkigal, Villanelle is respected and feared as a bringer of death. She too has gained status and power in a role that rewards her worst proclivities and deepest traumas. In season 3, Villanelle attempts to liberate herself by clawing up the ranks of the Twelve while under the gimlet eye of Dasha, the trainer who "broke" her, and through a redemptive return to her mentally ill mother and family of origin.

She then turns to father-figure handler Constantin for rescue, and finally cold-pitches herself to Carolyn as an employee. She's flailing. The fantasy of unearthing one's authentic self is as seductive as that of reinvention; Villanelle falls for both. When all Hail Marys end in more death and rejection, she realises there's no escape. 

What is most inspiring about Villanelle is her hubris: she crosses every threshold, breaks every taboo, and claims every pleasure and privilege as her due. What is most moving about her is that the transgression she now craves, that of intimacy, requires permission. Charm, lying, coercion and brute force don't work in this realm, and Villanelle has no other means. She's omnipotent but helpless. In Season 3 we see her seeking entry where she has no power, and finally wanting something she can't have.

Flickers of a tragic awareness poke through: her 'protectors' and patrons have simply milked her pathologies and weaknesses, ensuring she will have no life 'aboveground;' Villanelle thought she was free but she was merely indulged. She functions as Sacred Monster to the Twelve and to Eve, who exploits her as well, gorging on a proximity to darkness without having to pay the ultimate price. Eve is, like Inanna, smugly 'light passing,' convinced that she can play in darker domains without cost or consequence.

As Villanelle's jealous love for Eve grows, she, like any narcissist, enmeshes with her, making Eve feel close by making her "the same." She implicates Eve in an appalling act, ensuring they will share the psychic momentum of dark memory, the intense bonding that can come from hardship or violence.

Under a ruse of self defence, Villanelle goads her into killing her new handler with an axe. Eve flinches, but after the first good whack, really goes for it, howling with berserker rage. As they flee, Villanelle looks back at Eve's butchery, burying her face in Eve's neck with all the flush and glee of a woman surveying a hotel room trashed during an illicit tryst.  

They journey underground through Rome, and eventually stumble into a palatial hell-scape, the parched ruins of Villa Adriana. "We'll go to Alaska!" Villanelle proposes, cheerfully indifferent to Eve's shock and horror. The gulf between them opens again. Eve claims the one power unavailable to Villanelle: she can go back. She can still belong to the world 'above.' Villanelle in turn, claims her last power, her one law and only language - that of death. She  initiates Eve as Ereshkigal initiates Inanna: she slays her and leaves her to rot. 

The Mythic Blueprint of Killing Eve, Part 4: Killing the Beloved and Radical Reinvention

Killing Eve is rebellious, seductive, and shrewdly on-trend. Seasons 1-3 also retell an ancient myth about wild feminine power and subversion. 

Pop Archetype is a series that explores the way timeless myths and archetypes bubble up through the cracks in popular culture. While the plot might take new twists, and the heroines might play under different masks and guises, the essence of the story remains the same. We look at what gets lost, what's restored and given new energy, and how the medium changes the message. 

Part 4

Mythic time is always timeless. It is, as Karen Armstrong writes, "about something that happened once, but is also happening all the time." Myth adheres to another chronology as well: you can't go back, only forward or down. As in a dream, myth doesn't 'remember' solipsistically, within its own confines. It is memory itself, accessed through the present moment, a vertical phenomenon. 

Thus a change made in the present transforms all past iterations. When Inanna resurrects, she does so entirely, and her reality makes a coordinate change. The gaze "of death" she gives to Dumuzi represents a new mode of perception, detached and discerning. Her strength - one shared by all the great heroines - is rooted in the pliability of her persona, and not faithfulness to a singular role. Whatever direction she turns, whatever that new role, she will embody one hundred percent.

The timelessness of the mythic realm bestows an inherent unity; Inanna doesn’t look back because there’s nothing to look at. She cries out Ereshkigal’s name in praise, but doesn’t seek her or return to the site of her slaying. ‘Why’ it happened is irrelevant. Inanna unhooks from what her slaying might have meant to her slayer. 

Some stories teach us how to embed with destructive forces, and others how to confront and leave them. The Descent is among the latter. Inanna merges with her dark sister, extracts her powers and exits. She will take the gift but not the story or its players. She doesn't chase the catalyst.

In the world of television, however, success and duration are synonymous. A TV show is meant to last, season after season — and that requires certain dramatic devices. What functions as a catalyst or inciting event in myth (Inanna’s death and flaying) liberates the heroine and provides momentum to end the story. But the catalytic element in a TV series (Eve and Villanelle’s mutual fascination) becomes an enslaving vice, the very force that will help perpetuate the drama. 

As Marshall Mcluhan said, the medium — in this case one that intends to be unending — truly is the message.

In Killing Eve, our heroine is pried out of a mid-life rut by an inciting character (Villanelle), only to fall into a pit of obsession. As season 3 opens, we discover that Eve has survived the shooting, but is in subsistence mode, chopping up chicken carcasses at a Chinese restaurant and living in self-medicated squalor.

Nico is in an asylum, her team has scattered, Villanelle has vanished, and so too, it would seem, are the means for Eve to have learned anything from her experience. At the first nudge from Carolyn, she is raised from the proverbial dead, back in the game and in league with Villanelle. Their rapprochement takes place in a mirror-ball-dappled House of Dreams, an old dance hall where they greet each other with wistful affection. As beaming couples twirl around them, Villanelle asks Eve if she ever thinks about the past. "All the time," sighs Eve. "It's all I think about."

Eve's inner life is confined to the compulsive repetitions of addiction and fascination, the inverse of mythic timelessness. For her the present is always and only the past, which is simultaneously the future. "When I try to imagine the future," says Eve to Villanelle. "I just see your face over and over again."

Myth, writes Armstrong, "is primarily a guide to behaviour." By applying the dimensions of the sacred and the timeless to lived experience, myth achieves its primary purpose: to bring tragic and paradoxical truths into a coherent whole. Though Palaeolithic peoples lived closely with and revered animals, they had to kill them in order to survive. Stories and ritual from this period centre in the hunt, reconcile its terrifying risk, and the psychological distress of causing another creature's death.

When trapped in the seams of an enigma, myth gives us an orientation away from eddies of self-analysis and doubt that "prevent [us] from acting effectively," and allow us to stand in our choices with greater conviction. Those choices must be adapted or invented, but the myth is meant to guide us toward their essence.  

As a vehicle for the myth's unfolding, the heroine embodies capacities one or several dimensions greater and more concentrated than our own. Her deeds become symbols that provoke powerful unconscious responses from us. Drawn down from the ethers with imagination and feeling, we metabolise her wisdom through action. Her being becomes our doing, her doing our being. She's not to be imitated per se, but presents internal powers that can be invoked and applied to difficult choices. 

When Inanna emerges from hell, what she brings back is discernment. We can imagine her raw and open, her mind newly retrieved from the deepest unconscious sleep. With speed and purpose she and the galla advance through her realm, and as the central players of her life appear, Inanna observes them without emotion. Her new-found potency becomes solidified through a shocking act: she indicts her husband Dumuzi as usurper of her throne, then watches coolly as the galla savage him with axes and attempt to drag him to the underworld.  

Just as the archetypal hunter models a necessary boldness and decisiveness in the hunt, Inanna's detached appraisal of kith and kin, and her willingness to 'kill' the one with whom she shares the most intimate bond, model the essential ruthlessness of individuation for some women. Her previous roles - daughter, wife, mother, ingenue, helpmate, sexual object - are questioned and redefined. Conditioned behaviours - fawning, pleasing, deferring, seduction, apology, martyrdom, and performative 'goodness' -  heretofore so easy and automatic in their expression - are examined as wastes of life energy that diminish power.

Her outward-moving emotional tentacles, finely calibrated toward approval or disapproval, are withdrawn and sensitised to personal pleasures and autonomous drives. Though it might seem 'monstrous' to others, she must, at pivotal moments, decide to sever herself from pleasing but outworn identities and attachments in order to inhabit her full self. 

The tyranny of imposed identities is derived from their narrow, opportunistic scope, but also from their implied expectation of stasis; one is allowed to exist only as fully or change as radically as another can comfortably bear.

Change often requires a greater capacity to tolerate - even savour - the discomfort and displeasure of others. Inanna shows us, in extremis, what it is to choose growth and freedom over conditioning and belonging, what it is to 'serve one mistress' instead of the arbitrary demands of a contingent love.

In television, however, such rebellions are seldom borne consciously. If myth taps the unconscious and puts in story form the means to align with the core of reality and human thriving, then television functions more as a form of play; it reveals our fantasies and fears, uncurbed desires and unspeakable urges.

Play explores the unconscious from the vantage point of the id, of pure instinct. Its theorists contend that children often spin imaginative scenarios from the darkest material - death, abuse, social rejection and banishment, violation, loss, evil, greed, domination - as a kind of rehearsal, preparing their psyches to confront such events and their inevitable pain. 

Television adds the delights of both voyeurism and moral superiority to this shadowy 'play.' Its protagonists are frequently less than heroic; they say what they shouldn't say, do what they shouldn't do. They act outside the bounds of middle-groound morality and put our human absurdity on full display. Serial television is the medium of fascination par excellence, able to capture our unconscious attention by enacting our terror and longing in the most vivid and 'realistic' fashion. 

In other important ways, television is also entirely unlike play, as it requires no imaginative or embodied participation - no element of risk - from the audience. Like many instruments of fascination, it induces stimulation and passivity all at once, but robs both of their respective powers to invigorate or truly rest.

Jerry Mander, (is that your real name?) in his cranky-but-prescient 1978 manifesto, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, writes, "To relax the mind, one needs to cease thinking. In Zen meditation, something called 'empty mind' is desirable because once achieved, renewal begins. When you are watching television, images are pouring [in], and your mind is not calm or empty. It is occupied." 

"Occupied," here, could mean for Mander both definitions of the word, of busy-ness and also conquest, a 'take-over' of the creative and imaginal faculties. "When the mind is quiet," writes Mander, "One produces one's own new imagery, or experiences a new sense of one's place in the world."

This self-orienting "quiet" is the space into which mythic stories penetrate. They are meant to call forth symbols and guidance whose function, according to Joseph Campbell, is "to keep us in sync - with ourselves and the environment in which we live," a task at odds with the explorations of most television shows. The tension and momentum in serial plots is more often rooted in the Freudian principle of "the wish and the prohibition, a collision between the psychological and the sociological."

In 'dark' but successful (i.e., popular and long-running) shows made in the last decade (a random sample: Mad Men, House of Cards, Breaking Bad, Nurse Jackie, The Sopranos, Dexter, Ozark, Weeds, Killing Eve) this wish/prohibition clash goes as follows: the central character compulsively breaks the law and/or social taboos to fulfil a private desire, thereby accumulating a hidden inner life that cordons them off from family or society. Their secrets devour more and more internal space and demand greater extremes of behaviour (As in Freud's model, there's no 'win-win' in the human psyche; if you grow one side, the other side contracts). 

Ultimately, their moral thresholds extend until they become 'liberated' as rule-breaking outsiders who are also caged by their secrets. Like most addicts, the protagonist comes to be defined not so much by who they are, but what they've gotten away with. If there is a repeated 'myth' in contemporary television, it's concerned with the freedoms and pleasures of moral exile, and what people do when no one is watching. Ironically, what most people are doing when no one is watching is watching TV. 

Whatever psychic spells it might cast, television has also been, at least for the past decade, the most powerful delivery system in pop culture for depictions of feminine subversion, for richer, deeper and more complex portraits of women. It has been a haven for female characters who tend to fall into the margins of cinema and popular music: the contradictory, the relentless, the unfaithful, the greedy, the unlikable, the unfuckable, and, as is the case with Villanelle, the irredeemable.

It is as if the exiled aspects of the feminine, combed out of one-dimensional portraits and roles in movies and literature, were smuggled into a baggier, more elastic medium that could accommodate maximum nuance and empathy, one that usually 'lives' in the centre of the domestic sphere. Like all over-constricted life energies, the feminine shadow has grown in the dark and erupted in the place where its powers were once confined: the home. 

Killing Eve combines the thrills of the wish/prohibition formula with extremes of feminine subversion: women acting out what they really want and what they're really capable of. Villanelle and Eve give us two sides of the same coin, an id unchecked and semi-checked, respectively. Their dynamism is derived more from enantiodromia than either character's will toward autonomy. One gradually becomes a little more like the other, but as a duo they remain static.

The completion of their tortured, exhausting, compulsive pull into each other remains elusive, as it must, because full assimilation would provide resolution. It would mean an end. The apotheosis of each demands a flattening, of Eve's humanity and Villanelle's incorrigible 'bigness,' the very elements that make them so watchable. That would be the myth: the path of integration, of endings and lessons extracted and lived - and it would likely make for terrible television. 

A mythologist might say that we forsook the myth for television and movies. We chose catharsis over wisdom, the timeless for the relevant. But what if Killing Eve were a myth? What would it be telling us, orienting us toward? What are its archetypes emanating?

In the last episode of season 3, Villanelle and Eve meet on London Bridge. "Help me make it stop," pleads Eve, and Villanelle positions them back to back. 

"Now we walk and never look back," Villanelle tells her. "Don't turn. Just walk."  

For those expected to be tirelessly relational, to perform for a culture its emotional and moral labor as benign givers and good girls, the most taboo fantasy is one of indifference, the 'no fucks given' dream of emotional autonomy. Take away the sociopathy, the killing, the narcissism of Villanelle and strip her down to that singular power: indifference, and the sovereignty and playfulness it engenders. There is our aspirational archetype. 

Eve is our heroine, the everywoman - us - longing to express the full range of her powers, her light and dark, to cast off confining roles and live without apology, to stop concealing her urgent desire for power and passion, to shed her need to live safely and be good, and to know what she wants precisely, and go after it as Villanelle would, with the remorseless efficiency of a great white shark.

In her way are a lot of bad sweaters and cheap merlot, are self-doubt and guilt and ambivalence, obligation, memory and habit, the psychic debris of childhood and trauma, are all  her self-abandoning obsessions and projections; there is the terrible inertia, the tug and traction of the past, of who she once was, and who she thinks herself to be.

But what if she could?

What if she could cross the bridge, going god knows where, but commit to it and keep walking? What if you could just...pivot? Simply let go and go forward, pocket the lesson and leave the rest behind? What if, like a great heroine, you could shed one skin and adopt another? What if a deeper, more spontaneous self could emerge moment to moment, unconfined by the past, each whole-hearted, each immersed, invested - but free?

"Don't turn. Just walk." 

That is the pith of all dreams of reinvention. We don't thrill to the actual change, but the fantasy of its simplicity. In the myth, Inanna will make the change. She will leave hell and never look back. This is television; of course Villanelle and Eve must turn and look. With that twin gaze of helpless fascination and familiar longing, the series manages to end in both an old-fashioned duel where both parties lose, and a cliff hanger that promises - and leaves us wanting - more. 

Works Referenced:

1. Armstrong, Karen, A Short History of Myth, 2005

2. Brinton-Perera, Sylivia: Descent to the Goddess, 1981

3. Brooks, Douglas, Durga Lecture Series

4. Bentley, Toni, The Surrender, 2004

5. Campbell, Joseph, Pathways to Bliss, 2004

6. Eliade, Mircea, The Sacred and the Profane, 1957

7. Hannan, Hollie Jeanne, Initiation Through Trauma, 2005

8. Hill, Gareth, Masculine and Feminine, 1992

9. Malcolm, Janet, Forty-One False Starts, 2013

10. Mander, Jerry, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, 1978

11. Wolkstein, Diane and Kramer, Samuel, Inanna Queen of Heaven and Earth, 1983

Why Journal About Our Dreams?

Routes from the visible to the invisible are discovered in acts of attention…our recognition of what lies in the here and now.

                 - Christopher Merrill

Dreams are the rainbow bridge between your waking mind and the deep unconscious, the realm of creativity, myth, and healing.  

Most dreams occur during the REM cycle of sleep, its most restorative phase. Science tells us that our REM dreams - whether you remember them or not - bolster both emotional wellbeing and the associative, problem-solving aspects of creativity.  They selectively 'digest' emotionally charged moments from our day and integrate them into pre-existing memory structures, providing a sense of continuity. They also process troubling or "edgy" events, good and bad, from our waking life, and therefore serve a necessary therapeutic function. All the more reason to get a good night's sleep.

We are just beginning to uncover the important role dreams play in the nightly 'smoothing out' of our private psychologies. Yet the study of dreams, as both science and interpretive art, has flourished for millennia - as has our understanding of their oracular and creative gifts. 

To ancient peoples dreams were gifts from the gods: they contained prophesy and wisdom, diagnoses for body and soul. Surging up through the chinks of a deeper stratum of reality, the dream, if read correctly, could illuminate one's proper place in the cosmos and help to navigate it with a little more finesse. Dreams provided insight into what encumbered our lives and what we could do (or stop doing) in order to thrive. The dream-world ran parallel with and animated our own; actions committed in them had weight and consequence, and their revelations were best obeyed.

I've recorded my dreams since adolescence and been astounded, time and again, by their insight and predictive power. They've served as a kind of 'shortcut' to my unconscious, a window to what it's meditating upon - and where it might be valuable to consciously place my attention. If they don't always foretell concrete events, they communicate and depict a deeper psychic will-to-evolve. What I've come to believe about the nature of dreams is that they reflect a kind of genius - the instinctual movement of consciousness toward wholeness and healing. 

I also find some validity to Jung's taxonomy of dreams as "little" and"big": the former collect fragments of our life and persona, and rub up against the limits of our familial conditioning and sense of social taboo. The latter address big, overwhelming existential questions, and are dredged up from the 'ocean,' or the collective unconscious, and its stories and archetypes. They feed us symbols that activate and lead us from the personal to the mythic. 

To access and translate the content of dreams, you simply need to engage. I've refined a method over the years to work with my own, the Dream Extraction process. (Far less painful than it sounds.) If you're eager to get to the exercise, then please go here. If you'd like a brief history of dream-theory in both science and culture - and how it might serve you - please read on. 

The Science of Dreams

In Why We Sleep, researcher Matthew Walker details the REM-cycle dream phenomenon and its delicate chemical dance, something he calls "overnight therapy:"

"Concentrations of a key stress-related chemical called nonadrenaline [the brain equivalent of adrenaline] are completely shut off within your brain when you enter the dreaming state. REM sleep is the only time during the 24 hour period when your brain is completely devoid of this anxiety-triggering molecule." ¹

Simultaneously, structures of the brain related to emotion and memory are switched on, producing the cascade of images and stories that constitute our dreams. All of this is happening, however, in a "neurochemically calm" or "safe" brain environment (i.e., adrenaline-free). Walker's dreaming-as-therapy model posits that REM-sleep dreams allow us to both harmonise and release daily events:

"[We are] sleeping to remember the details of valuable, salient experiences, integrating them with existing knowledge and putting them in biographical perspective, [and also] sleeping to forget, or dissolve, the visceral, painful emotional charge that had previously been wrapped around those memories. [The] dream state supports a form of introspective life review, to therapeutic ends."

Walker's description called to mind an interview I did several years ago with two clinicians involved in early trials of MDMA therapy. In this modality, patients with acute and chronic PTSD take several doses of MDMA, (commonly known as 'ecstasy') in a controlled environment. The euphoria-inducing drug essentially "offlines" their overworked amygdala, (the part of the brain that controls our fear and survival responses), and allows the patient to process their traumatic experiences in a "safe" brain environment, free, that is, of primal, adrenalised impulses to fight, flee or freeze. 

Walker's research reveals the brain's innate ability to assimilate both novel and difficult episodes in our life, essentially performing a very low-intensity version of MDMA therapy every single night it has uninterrupted REM sleep cycles. Mother Nature, as the old saying goes, doesn't leave us defenceless. As Walker writes:

"If REM sleep did not perform this operation, we'd all be left with a state of chronic anxiety in our autobiographical memory network; every time we recalled something salient, not only would we recall the details of the memory, but we would relive the same stressful emotional charge all over again."

In support of Walker's theory I can add, anecdotally, that extended deep sleep was a common thread I found while interviewing refugees who had had to remain in 'survival mode' for long periods of time. After weeks or months of war-time chaos, forced flight, hunger, loss of family and home, injury and other extraordinary stressors, many of my subjects reported that, once they found shelter, their bodies would surrender to sleep for days on end. One Bosnian woman told me that, upon finally reaching a "safe" camp in Croatia, she slept for more than a week. Others would wake her to administer food and water, but she remained in her cot, "just sleeping and dreaming." I heard similar stories over and over, and wonder now, in light of Walker's research, if the sleep was more than physically restorative, but also allowed their brains to feast on REM-cycle dream states and integrate the harrowing events of their recent past.

There is a caveat to the brain's generous REM-dream gifts, and it occurs in the presence of significant trauma. Walker discovered that the "traumatised brain" will generate repetitive nightmares about a shocking or disturbing event, but doesn't stop the flow of adrenaline during the REM cycle. Rather, the most searing moments will replay ad nauseam, with an acid rinse of anxiety to boot. Some patients, robbed for years of the nurturing benefit of REM cycle sleep and subjected to tormenting dreams, exhaust myriad therapies and medications in pursuit of equilibrium. Hence the use of more powerful compounds like MDMA, that saturate key brain centres with waves of chemical rapture, is truly a healing boon. 

Time spent in dream sleep can begin to heal our wounds, but to receive their daily, therapeutic benefits, dreams must be relevant. They must reflect (albeit obliquely) the emotions and themes of our present waking lives. Walker cites another researcher, Rosalind Cartwright, who looked into connections between dream and 'waking life' content, and their relative benefits:

"Cartwright showed that it was not enough to have REM sleep, or even generic dreaming, when it comes to resolving our emotional past. Her patients required REM sleep with dreaming, [about] the emotional themes and sentiments of the waking trauma." 

A separate study confirmed the importance of 'relevant' dreaming, but added the element of attention and reflection. In this experiment, women going through break-ups and divorces were put into two groups, one control, the other engaged with dream interpretation. Evaluated after a 2-month period for changes in "anxiety, depression, coping, and self esteem," those involved in an active process of dream interpretation showed greater resilience and more promising results in adjusting to the transitions in their lives. The key, however, was making a conscious link between the dream-theme and their present reality.²

Jung's "Little" Dreams

Most dreams are like those detailed above - local and germane - but cloaked in colorful veils that can obscure their hot emotional core. From the many dream journals I've kept over the years, I've learned that paying attention to the emotions I experience in dreams is as important as their narrative or cast of characters. My theory is that the 'plots' of these daily, minor therapeutic dreams are orchestrated - quite ingeniously - to induce powerful sentiments. They reveal what I'm most afraid to feel. Jung referred to them as "little" dreams, elucidated here by Joseph Campbell:

"Little dreams come from a level of dream consciousness that has to do with quite personal complications. They emerge from the level that has come to be known as the unconscious. Little dreams are autobiographical in their character, and there will be nothing in these dreams that you would share with others - you are sorting through the expansion of consciousness as it bumps up against the taboos and "thou shalt nots" of your childhood and infancy."

This last part, regarding the "thou shalt nots," explains why many dreams involve scenarios that conjure strong feelings of social embarrassment and shame. (The naked-but-for-your-underwear-in-public is a classic). Because they have a subtle purgative emotional effect, such dreams are laying down tracks for resolution and transformation. We essentially 'live' through our worst case scenarios of humiliation, abandonment, grief, heart-break, displacement, etc., but benefit the next morning from this nocturnal catharsis. We have a sense of having survived or 'moved through' a particular trial or inhibition. In this way, I believe the psyche, by playing out the fear or restriction, is revealing the dream's inverse: what it's 'outgrowing' or liberating from within, and in what direction it now wishes to evolve.

While the landscape of our "little" dreams might be riddled with self-aware 'taboo,' the dream environment, paradoxically, appears to be distinctly amoral. We do what we would never do in our waking lives. This atmosphere of ethical neutrality and freedom lends itself to another potential benefit, similar to the release of emotional fears: the disclosure of that which we are afraid to know. By dispensing with our waking binaries of right and wrong, good and bad, dreams sometimes reveal truths that our conscious mind represses, the 'reality' of certain situations we keep at bay for fear of disruption or change. 

It's all too human to avoid heartache, even if it means abiding within a lie. I've dreamt of painful betrayals and the ends of relationships and partnerships before they happened, truths my conscious, at times profoundly deluded, mind would strongly resist. Such dreams, however, have a galvanising force - like someone clapping their hands rudely in our face - and can serve as powerful catalysts, should we choose to act. 

"Big" Dreams and Connecting to our Personal Myth

If the "little" dream cracks open our ego defences, forcing us to feel and know what is just below the surface, then Jung's "big" dreams are those that will draw us into even deeper water. Here Campbell describes the more timeless concerns of this realm: 

"There's another kind of dream where you find yourself facing a problem that's not specific to your peculiar life or social or age situation. Rather, you've run up against one of the great problems of man. At such times the psyche and the ego consciousness are forced to wrestle with two huge mysteries: the nature of the cosmos and death. These are what Jung called big dreams.[...] When you face these questions you're in a field of profound problems." ³

These "profound problems," regarding the nature of existence and how to reckon with it, are precisely those that our mythologies endeavoured to address. Myths present the actions of deities, heroines, and legendary ancestors, providing an exalted model for human behaviour. They help us reconcile some of the more tragic and bewildering truths of human life, and thus keep us out of 'analysis paralysis,' orienting us toward bold and effective decisions. The symbols encoded in myth are the 'keys to life,' meant to provoke powerful, unconscious responses, and thus activate part of our ancient memory. 

The "big" dream can be seen as the eruption of the mythical world and its symbols into our often myopic and time-bound one. Such dreams are vivid, yet apparently 'disconnected' from  waking life; as with our "little" dreams, the onus is on us to make them relevant. To awaken their potential, Campbell notes,we are invited to forge a connection with deeper dimensions and befriend their archetypal powers: 

"These symbols stem from the psyche; they speak from and to the spirit. They are in fact vehicles of communication between the depths of our spiritual life and this thin layer of consciousness by which we govern our daily existences. And when those symbols - those vehicles of communication between our greater and lesser selves - are taken away; we are left without an intercom. This split leaves us schizoid; we live in a world up in the head, and the world down below is quite apart."

After the in-between of reflection, action must follow. The creativity of dream analysis lies in the associative mind and its capacity to meaning-making, but also how we apply it to our lives. The "little dream" gives us practice in translating the revelations of one realm to another, priming us for the potentially greater demands and initiations of the "big."

 The Mistress of the Dream-Sea

Dream interpretation served in ancient cultures as a prophylactic against Campbell's "schizoid" split; it provided a way to stay personally connected to the sustaining narratives and symbols of one's environment and orient correctly within them. 

If this seems like a formidable task to undertake alone, then it is perhaps why dream interpretation was an important collaborative ritual in the Ancient Near East. In ancient Sumer, and later Assyria, great distances were travelled by those in search of temple priestesses skilled in oneiromancy. An offering would be made to the priestess to perform a rite, a sacrifice, or administer intoxicants and clear the channel between the 'dreamer' and the gods. The seeker would then sleep in the inner sanctum, where the deity of the temple lived, and the following morning, offer their dream to the priestess for evaluation and diagnosis.  

Dream interpretation has traditionally been a feminine art. The priestess would sometimes act as a conduit, and dream on behalf of a seeker. Seals and clay tablets from this period depict women lying on beds, a tell-tale moon above, a scorpion scuttling below, a supplicant at her feet, keeping vigil. When Enheduanna, the high priestess of Sumer and earliest poet of record, was ousted from her temple, she laments the loss of her role as "unraveler" of the "gift of dreams." 

Indeed, the deity believed to preside over the netherworld of the unconscious was female, Goddess Nanshe, ruler of the "strong dark waters" where shadowy, demonic forces lived. In the earliest cosmologies there was no 'underworld' that personified and contained our shadows or the mysteries of death, only the image of an encircling sea that lapped at the borders of the "known" world. Nanshe's power was to serve as a bridge, a communicator between the city's people and the deep water teeming with both life-giving food and demons. Her domain was an underwater shrine that resembled a maze, a "knot of threads" where the above-ground father gods could visit and ask for her aid. 

Nanshe was, of course, the great Mistress of Dreams, a "dream opener," who could shuttle between the mysterious, dangerous, watery world of the unconscious and the safe terrain of the temple. She was called upon to induce or 'incubate' dreams in those desiring answers to the pressing problems of their lives. In his translation of an ancient Assyrian dream book, Leo Oppenheim details remedial measures prescribed for "bad" or "evil" dreams, noting that such dreams are dangerous "only as long as [they] remains enigmatic, and therefore interpretation is necessary." 

Nanshe's power of "immunity" is instructive of how we can potentially hold our experience of dreams: She was exempt from the grip of the "demons" of the sea/unconscious because she had the power of interpretation. Her practice was to face and engage with the "messages of the night." She dispelled potentially negative potencies by transforming the "demons" of the unconscious into messengers; she turned the dream into meaning and creative action. 

For a process to interpret your dreams, go here.

To Promote Dreaming:

1. Get 7-8 hours of sleep every night, optimally beginning before midnight. This allows your brain to have two cycles each of both restorative deep non-REM, and dream-inducing REM sleep. 

2. We all have multiple dreams every night, but remembering them can be tricky. As you're falling asleep, tell your brain that you will remember the dreams in the morning. It may take a few nights, but if you give the command, eventually it will follow. 

3. The more you actively remember (i.e, write it down), the more you'll remember. Even if you are barely holding on to a few thin wisps of dream content as you awaken, write them down. With each act of recording, you will remember more. A poet once trained herself to write as she was falling asleep and then waking up, eventually creating a whole book of incandescent verse from these twilight zones of consciousness. It can be done. Keep a pen and paper by your bed, or record your memories as a voice note and write them down later. 

4. Don't drink. This isn't just folk-wisdom. Sleep science has confirmed that alcohol inhibits our ability to drop into REM sleep, the cycle that produces the majority of our dreams. From sleep researcher Matthew Walker:

"Alcohol fragments sleep, littering the night with brief awakenings. [though you're usually not aware of them.] Alcohol-infused sleep is not continuous, and therefore not restorative.”

Alcohol is one of the most powerful suppressors of REM sleep that we know of. When the body metabolises alcohol it produces by-product chemicals called aldehydes and ketones, which block the brain's ability to produce REM sleep. It's rather like the cerebral version of cardiac arrest, preventing the pulsating beat of brainwaves that otherwise power dream sleep."

The cerebral version of cardiac arrest! Yikes. This sounds extreme, but I admit, does track to my own experience. If I've consumed alcohol, I rarely feel refreshed the next morning, and will often wake up at least once in the wee hours, shot through with anxiety, and have trouble getting back to sleep. Along with a host of other negative effects, including the impairment of: learning capacity, the assimilation of complex memory, and the recalibration of centres used to discern facial expression (which then influences our social-relational acumen), alcohol will also wipe out the brain's magic therapeutic dream powers. 

One has to wonder what effects a prolonged lack of healthy REM has done to heavy-drinking cultures on a collective level over time. As Walker sums up:

"It's hard not to sound puritanical, but the evidence is so strong regarding alcohol's harmful effects on sleep that to do otherwise [advising us, that is, not to drink] would be doing you, and the science, a disservice." 

5. Sleep in a cold room. The REM cycle apparently loves a more Nordic atmosphere. I find my sleep is deeper and my dreams more vivid in the middle of winter, central heating off, window cracked. 

6. This last is a more complex, not a quick-fix but an ongoing practice, and perhaps the most vital. It is to "activate the imagination," a creative process in which you 'play' as an adult with what has always had a strong intuitive pull for you. What does that mean?  Joseph Campbell describes the process through which Carl Jung began to access his own unconscious, and "seek out his own myth:"

"His process of discovery is interesting in that it was so childish. Here he as, 37 years old, and he asked himself, 'What was it I most enjoyed doing as a little boy when I was alone and allowed to play? As it turned out, what he liked to do was put rocks together and make little cities out of stone. 

So he said, I'm a big man now, I'll play with big stones. He bought himself a piece of property in a beautiful place on the lake opposite the city of Zurich. He began planning and building a house in this lovely place, Ascona, and as he worked with his hands, he activated his imagination. 

You can't do this by taking suggestions from someone else. You must find that which your own unconscious wants to meditate on. With his imagination activated, Jung found all kinds of new fantasies coming, dreams of all kinds. He began making records of what he had dreamed and then amplified it by all kinds of associations. 

He found that his dreams were becoming important to him and very rich; he began writing about his dreams in a little journal. He put down each silly impulse, each theme that came up in his dreams. He recorded the dreams so as to bring them up to his consciousness, and as he kept the journal, the underlying images began coming through. Then he would make pictures of some of the dreams, always in a very solemn way. It was his ceremonial, ritualistic exploration of the place from which the mystery of his life came."  

Now, you don't have to build a lake-front property in the Swiss hills in order to activate your imagination. The magic of this practice is that it is unique to your life, and will often seem entirely irrational. You must simply use Jung's question:

"What was it I most enjoyed doing as a little child when I was alone and allowed to play?" 

If that feels unavailable, you can also begin by following any genuine impulse toward play - even if it seems ludicrous: archery, tap-dancing, open-water swimming, sculpture, exploring the woods, forming sand into castles. Anything. Anything. Whatever the impulse, don't shut it down, just follow it. Find a way to practice and embody it. 

This is a strange, nonlinear practice, not a direct route - but it will take you very quickly where you need to go. It's likely you'll only be able to recognise its underlying wisdom in retrospect. Then, see what dreams may come, and do the work of connecting and making them relevant to your life. 

To start your dream-interpretation process, go here.

[1] Walker

[2] Falk, D. R., & Hill, C. E. (1995). The effectiveness of dream interpretation groups for women undergoing a divorce transition.

[3] Campbell, Joseph

The Mother Tongue

Women Who Run With the Wolves: Why women's initiation stories require a uniquely feminine language. 

I gave my mother a copy of Women Who Run With the Wolves for her birthday when I was 16. It was both a well-meaning and a snot-nosed, prescriptive gesture; My mother was and remains a hard-line pragmatist who once dismissed psychotherapy as a form of "crawling up your own ass," and would eviscerate any book that bore even a whiff of Self-Help. But I scanned the first few pages and realised that she could read it as she did the Joyce or Tolstoy she squeezed into her few free minutes before sleep - as literature. From the first page, Clarissa Pinkola Estes' voice established for me what Yusef Komunyakaa calls the "music of trust" between reader and writer; I trusted her language and rhythm, her obsession with style; I trusted this voice to render something deep and true - and I thought my mother might catch and ride some of this trust, too.

But she didn't venture far; the book floated quickly from my mother's bedside to a bookshelf. So I read it, and managed to cart a copy from one shitty apartment to the next all through my twenties. I would open it at random in moments of (frequent) indecision or crisis, after praying for whatever clarifying wisdom I didn't possess at the time. It was one of the few books I took with me from Seattle to London where I moved with my husband two years ago, and it was the one I poured myself into during the wild bouts of insomnia that seized me in the first month of our arrival. In the wee wee wee hours of those weirdly ecstatic and sleepless nights I saw myself as the capsizing protagonist in every story: I was the girl seduced by the shiny red shoes and dancing to her death; I was the seal woman who lives with the man who stole her pelt until she is thin and dry; I was Bluebeard's dewy-eyed and hapless wife who didn't get enough home training to spot a predator; I was the weeping woman combing a dead river with long stick fingers for the creative progeny she had drowned years before.

Liberated from the specificity of history, it is the gift of a fable to let us jump in the skin of every one of its characters. They allow us to cycle through various dream bodies and visit, for a time, a possible fate. That said, the degree to which I identified with those women and girls was pretty unsettling; as if Estes herself was flaying me open nightly to expose all my unripe and chicken-hearted parts.

On my most recent reading I was less haunted and more nourished, struck most by the how-ness of the book: how it was made and what it reveals about the uniquely feminine genius of Estes' storytelling, and how it might stretch - and exalt - our notions of what constitutes a rite of passage in a woman's life. 

The tales told and then unpacked in Women Who Run were culled from Estes' memory of childhood yarns and decades of field research and historical study. These are stories that have been spun every-which-way, and Estes, by her own admission, has done a little intuitive patch work on the holes and smudge-marks left by time and the patriarchy. Later honed through performance in her role as cantadora, Estes says that the narratives chosen for the book were meant to smoke out a sinewy little character near-buried in the feminine psyche, and serve her greater mission: to help women remember their "alpha matrilineal being." 

This thru-line of feminine vitality is embodied, says Estes, in the 'Wild Woman' archetype which  has survived through stories - usually appearing in cameos and slender fragments, or tucked into margins - but is made whole and alive in this volume, and brought to the very centre of the page.

Estes is prone to gathering a lot of shiny buttons in her beak; she effuses with ideas and images, piling one on top of the other, and drills deeper and deeper into the strata of stories to find more and more of their liquid gold, an endlessly morphing substance that might illuminate the darker passages of women's lives.

Her primary excavatory tool is Big Language Magic. Estes' voice, equally at home in the primeval campfire rootsiness of storytelling, and with the depth-psychological exigesis of those stories, becomes a grounding and unifying force throughout the text. It is a language of the body, one that employs all the senses, and is devotedly animistic:

"What comprises the Wild Woman? [...] she is the incubator [...] she leaves behind on the terrain of a woman's soul a coarse hair and muddy footprints [...]She is the smell of good mud and the back leg of a fox. The birds which tell us secrets belong to her [...] She lives on quarter notes and grace notes and in the cantata, in the sestina, and in the blues."

Flowing into the oblique, and resourcing all phenomena, Estes' language seems to make tangible what writer Ursula Le Guin, in a commencement address at Bryn Mawr in 1986, once dubbed, "the Mother Tongue," a language she describes as "always on the verge of silence and often on the verge of song."

Le Guin defines its opposite, the "Father Tongue," as the language she learned in college; it is the language of "social power and public discourse," used in lectures, speeches and debate, and whose function is "not reasoning but distance-making, a gap between the subject or self and the object or other."

The Father Tongue demands objectivity because "to be subjective is to be embodied, to be a body, vulnerable, violable." And while our public institutions - our universities and offices and the political theatre - not only banish references to subjective experience, but enshrine this banishment as law, the Mother Tongue lives on "clear as sunlight in women's poetry, in our novels and stories."

Estes exalts the subjective and crafts an associative, impressionistic language to carry it. She says that her proof of the "ineffable female numen" expressed through the Wild Woman archetype are the experiential and "intra-psychic" encounters women have in their waking and dreaming hours, and are, by Estes reckoning, entirely self-validating; gut-level knowing is proof enough. 

In many passages, especially those where she gets on a rapt descriptive roll, Estes is enacting the "relatedness" of the Mother Tongue, connecting this with that, encouraging a collapse of consciousness, asking that we let our sensing diffuse into every crack and corner - not only of the world, but of the individual and collective psyche. Here she is talking about La Mariposa, the Butterfly Woman:

"She is really big, like the Venus of Willendorf, like the Mother of Days, like Diego Rivera's heroic-size woman who built Mexico City with a single curl of her wrist [...] oh, she is very very old, like a woman come back from the dust, old like old river, old like pines at timberline [...] Her back is the curve of planet Earth with all its crops and food and animals. The back of her neck carries the sunrise and sunset [...]She cross fertilises, jus as the soul fertilises mind with night dreams. Just as archetypes fertilise the mundane world."

By bringing the whole world into the female body, and atomising a woman's feminine essence into every part of the world, Estes expands the depth and variety of initiatory possibilities in women's lives. She is offering a vast spectrum of potential thresholds for women to cross - edges that include the body, but are not limited by it.

Most traditional feminine initiation myths that herald women's developmental stages are blood-encoded: A girl bleeds at the time of her first menses and becomes a sexually viable woman; she bleeds again on her wedding night and enters partnership; she bleeds once more at the birth of her child and becomes a mother; she stops bleeding and becomes an elder.

In these stories, a woman's body does the essential work of evolution: She bleeds into her next stage of growth, inhabits the role, and her consciousness naturally follows suit.

Setting aside the fact that fewer and fewer women, in the West at least, experience all of these mythic 'stations' in their lives, the 'blood as initiation' story is in itself a myth, one that uses a biological phenomenon to uphold a social norm, and wholly ignores the interiority of women's experience of their own bodies; Many women bleed and mother without becoming true adults, and many women stop bleeding without acquiring any real wisdom. Many women achieve ultimate creative and emotional fulfilment without (or even in spite of) having children, and many more enjoy full sexual expression and maturity without the intervention of men. In the life of the feminine psyche, biology is not destiny, nor is it pass-key to evolution and growth.

Estes subverts the traditional blood-encoded myth by forwarding the often invisible initiatory moments in women's lives and wrapping them in the flesh and bones of Story: graduating from naive victim to discerning and self-preserving adult (Bluebeard), from buying in to the status quo to "hand-making" one's life and values (The Red Shoes), from bottomless grief to libidinous joy (Baubo), from fragmenting partnership to integrating solitude (Sealskin, Soulskin).

Such lessons and initiations are not celebrated in the culture; there are no showers or gift registries for the woman who has just reclaimed her erotic or creative powers and has found a way to move with maximum potency through the world. There is no Hallmark card for them - because the language is not available to most. We have no ratified "Mother Tongue" or rite for women's growth beyond the contingencies of blood: Sex, Motherhood and Menopause.

Dr Hollie Jeanne Hannan wrote in her doctoral these Initiation Through Trauma:

"In my clinical work I find that many are in search of a more comprehensive female identity and are in need of images of the feminine Self...Many of us yearn for images of the sacredness of the so-called archetypal feminine in all its richness and complexity and a lineage of the female imagination in which to reflect upon in our lives [...] Yet culturally there remains a need for myths, rituals, and a tradition of storytelling in which women can deepen their experiences, share them with other women, and pass them on to their daughters, students, and younger-generation women and men."

This is why substantive books such as Women Who Run hit so hard in the feminine psyche, and why women lap them up hungrily, like a good broth. There are so few books that artfully and consciously add to the canon of the Mother Tongue, that allow women to see all of their complexity reflected and that reveal a path through - or at least point one in the direction of the path. That doesn't mean that Women is a palliative, 'feel-good' text. Estes knows that part of her work is re-instating the terror and horror that myth and fairy tale once held before 'parenting' became a gerund and 'mothering' a competitive sport:   

"Most old collections [...]  have been scoured clean of the scatological, the sexual, the perverse, (as in warnings against), the pre-Christian, the feminine, the Goddesses, the initiatory, the medicines for various psychological malaises, and the direction for spiritual raptures."

These stories bear all the stains and stitch marks of ages past when characters in children's fables met bloody deaths, or fucked their daughters, or sent them off to the woods to die. There are real consequences, real grief. Essential pain. Estes doles out hope but reminds us: You can lose chances and you can lose years. You can lose your very soul. There are choices to be made and real horrors to be faced. And you will get cut crawling through that hole in the chain link fence when you're finally ready to escape. Good stories are inherently homeopathic, poisoning us just a little in order to trigger our own healing powers.

In delineating an array of women's initiations and showing their archetypal significance, Estes is also asking that we take radical responsibility for engaging with them, that we proactively pursue our own healing and growth. And this is no small task. As Audre Lorde writes in Sister Outsider:

"It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work. To go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society is to encourage excellence. But giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies."

I should say that on my second-to-last reading, Women Who Run didn't help my insomnia. I was coming to it after having experienced my own set of failures and limitations. I was newly married and had just moved across an ocean, but all of my carefully researched plans for our 'new life' suddenly felt, upon arrival, irrelevant and unworkable. I walked around the city in a daze. I had a recurring vision of myself with my head sheared off or my body cut in two, and was sometimes waylaid by panic attacks that left me doubled over in the street. I feared the move might have been a bad digression from my already switchback path. And worse, I feared I might have no wisdom with which to meet my life as it was unfolding. In Hannan's language, I was likely undergoing an "initiatory crisis," a crucial part of which is that "the person is uncertain whether she will survive."

When I gave the book to my mother she had lived through almost two decades of single parent hardship; years of soul-killing 9 to 5 desk jobs, and 8 to midnight service jobs, years of keeping her head down, her sights lowered. Years of peeling off chunks of herself to feed and fund two kids alone. She would spend weekends cleaning obsessively, scrubbing the corners of the kitchen floor, and break into tears when she thought of salvaging her creative gifts with piano lessons.

My mum kept herself really busy. So busy that the moments of reflection and quiet mulching necessary for transformation weren't available to her. She would have said there wasn't the time or money for such acts of self-reclamation, but as she would express to me later, there wasn't even a cohesive 'self' present to ask for or deserve such things. Maybe she rejected Wolves for the same reason I read it obsessively: the pain of recognition. 

Nourishing images of the feminine don't always come through mothers or grannies or wise aunties. So you get them from fantasies and dreams and visions. You get them from stories and strangers. But when you do get them, you hold them close and tight. Estes says "Stories are medicine," but sometimes they're simultaneously the medicine and the wound. They don't give you the ointment without poking you first, without making you bleed.

Book Review: The Radiance Sutras

Translation as Rapture: The Radiance Sutras by Lorin Roche

In the fall semester of my junior year of college I embarked on a six-month study abroad program in India. Towards the end of the trip I stayed in Varanasi, the "holiest of the seven sacred cities," where I, a Religious Studies major, earnestly gorged on as many of the city's 2,000 crumbling temples as possible, attended evening fire arthis and dawn ablutions on the great and stinking Ganges, did strenuous Yoga and pranayama, and closet-smoked mango-flavoured beedis on the roof of my hotel.

One night I attended a lecture by Kashmir Shaiva scholar-practitioner Mark Dyczkowski. He played his sitar, propped up a painting of Kali lactating blood into the mouths of tiny Brahmins, and then talked about her body and attributes, the play of the sacred and transgressive in her image and myths. Afterward, I approached him about my own research on Indian Classical dance, and he proposed I meet him at his home the next day.

He lived on Narad Ghat in a building overlooking the Ganges, capped by a massive black mural painted with a red Yantra (or a red mural with a black Yantra - I can't remember which). I'd done interviews with dancers and artists and scholars, had practiced the dance in India and with a teacher back home, and was trying to make their accounts and my experience jive with all the seductively heady theory I'd ingested from books and articles. Or, more precisely, I was trying to shoehorn the theory into the practice because I wanted so badly for it all to be true.

We sat on the floor and, punctuated by a few shouty phone calls conducted in Italian to negotiate a villa rental, Dyczkowski gave a long, layered, funny, slow-winding, relentlessly brilliant, raga-like improvisation on Tantra and the body, performance, and mystical union through rasa.

I can't recall one word or salient idea from the talk. I took notes and it all made sense at the time, but it was a kind of spiralling, intuitive 'sense' held together with the slightest of linear threads that are meant to dissolve like surgical stitches from the mind and release a deeper realisation into the heart and blood. I do remember that he gave me a copy of his translation and commentary on the Aphorisms of Shiva to borrow, and then morphed into a solicitous Englishman and offered me a ride to the hotel on the back of his scooter. I found a shop with a xerox machine where I could make an illegal copy of his book, and upon returning the original a few days later, he recommended I also find a translation of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra.

So I did. When I returned to Delhi I made a tour of the Motilal Benarsidass publishing company where I scooped the Jaideva Singh translation of the VBT, an edition ‘guided’ by Dyczkowski's own root teacher, Swami Lakshmanju, and a score of other books. It sat entombed in my luggage, along with the dozens of other books and weird Ayurvedic pills and pastes I'd collected, until the end of the trip.

The idea of the Bhairava Tantra, a conversation between lovers extolling 112 practicable and embodied pathways to the Divine was, and remains, compelling to my deepest drives and in sync with my attraction to Yoga and dance: the body as vehicle of transformation; the body as instrument to be cultivated, sensitised, and made conductive of life energy for the purposes of awakening. That journey sounded inherently erotic, and I anticipated finding some of this rasa, this 'taste' of body magic in the text.

Instead, I found the Singh translation parched and clinical, adhering to an academic idiom, and scrubbed of sensuality and the more shadowy allusions to Tantric practice. (The skull cup used by tantrikas is called a "cranium bowl.") It was hard for me to enter the verses or ground them in a practice. Harder still to find the juice. To be fair, the dryness of the Singh translation could be a product of respectability politics; so many aspects of Indian tradition have been commodified, bastardised and sexually freighted - Tantra perhaps most of all. Indian scholars of previous generations had likely learned to ‘stick to the facts, ma’am’ when presenting it to Western audiences.

I offer this big preamble to communicate some of my gratitude for what I discovered in Lorin Roche's Radiance Sutras: the power of a work whose final form is inseparable from the process by which it was made. By the author’s own account, this process was aligned with the deepest heart of the original text. It is, as Roche calls it, "Translation as rapture."

Like Dyczkowski, Roche is a scholar-practitioner. They are both also, it would appear, creatures of intense devotion. By his own account, Roche put himself into living relationship with this text, played and danced with it for decades until it was ready to live and dance “through” him. The result is accessible poetry in the 'Banter,' 'Yukti'  and 'Insight' verses, and a 'Transmission' commentary - riffs on the Sanskrit lifted from each of the Yuktis.

Other Tantric and Sanskrit scholars have balked at the sudden popularity of this text, as it is not a direct and ‘faithful’ translation of the original VBT. Roche has some mastery of Sanskrit’s lexicon, but not of its grammar; nor is he drawing from any contextualising works of the period or tradition that might offer a more direct and nuanced reading. The VBT, by most accounts, was intended for more advanced practitioners who had undergone the rigours of Tantric sadhana and could now safely apply a more creative and liberated approach.

For this reason, serious practitioners should read this as an ‘inspired’ work - one writer’s loose, contemporary improvisation on a complex philosophical text whose treasures need an informed guide to be fully revealed. Radiance is a text born out of intimacy and play, and as such, takes its liberties - but lends them as well. The primal elements of the poetry become palpable, the ‘practices,’ while not true to the original VBT, come alive. It loses in depth and gravitas but gains in charm. Radiance gives permission.

Like Dyczkowski's lecture/transmission, Roche’s work appeals to the intellect while bypassing it at the same time. It asks for another kind of attention, open and game; it asks to be read as one would read poetry or fiction, in willing submission to whatever spell it might cast. Roche’s transparency about his process helps to dissolve old binaries between theory and practice, idea and experience, between what is written and previous and what is sensed and now, between what you think you should want and what you really do. (Or between dutifully ujjayi-ing on a yoga mat and happily sucking down beedis on the hotel roof.) Roche's interpretation seems to want to make the work an expression of Devi, a feminine movement, descending down and in and through the body, instead of floating above, at the altitude of the mind's choosing.

Deep scholarship, painstaking study, diligence and proper contextualisation are vitally necessary to the tradition, and require years of dedicated work. Radiance is more like a historical novel, a fiction that tells the truth - or ‘a’ truth - sideways, through empathy and invention. It privileges and revels in the associative zone where an individual psyche bumps up against a complex - and at times fathomless - phenomenon.

In this spirit, here’s a little play on Roche’s text:

The final structure of the work as a whole is similar to a cycle of worship, wherein, as you stand before the altar, you might encounter a many-armed god or goddess. The attributes of the deity are encoded with wisdom: the arms held up and back tell you something about the nature of the universe. Bhairava's Banter verses constitute this 'backdrop' philosophy: 

"I am beyond space and time...There are no directions to me...I am the nourishing state of   fullness...I am not covered up, not even by a billion galaxies..." 

The arms placed in front, often held in a mudra or grasping some tool or instrument - a book, a mala, are showing you skilful means, or what you can do about those other arms, the immutable truths of the universe. Those hands in front Roche’s Yuktis, the instructions or practice:

"The instant a thought springs up/ Abandon it and move on. / Don't let the mind rest anywhere./ In this way gain entry to the bliss/ Of the silent depths beneath the surf."

The Insight verses are the darsan, or the loving and penetrating gaze of the deity. After you have offered your gifts and prayers, you are beheld - literally 'being held' by divine sight. It’s an intimate and personal gaze meant to develop your relationship with the deity and the private orientation of your devotion:

"The real transmutation,/ The most sacred offering,/ Is to pour the elements of your body/ All of your sensual impressions,/ Into the fire of the Great Void."

And finally, Roche's Yukti Transmissions, are the prasad, the offering that has been digested through the body of the deity and is being offered back - a plump coconut laddu or a kaju katli, a final sweet gift - to take on your journey:

"On Bhakti: Bhakti yoga says that you can be in an erotic, passionate relationship  with God; you can be friends and equals with God; you can even feel parental and protective of God. All rivers flow to the ocean."

Play invites play. Through Roche’s translation I was able to experience the eroticism of the initiating conversation between Devi and Bhairava. Aligned with the conventions of classic bhakti poetry and narratives, the Banter Verses begin with the aspirant/lover (Devi) in a state of viraha, or protracted, overwhelming desire - a metaphor for the ache of longing for union with the divine. The Shaivite myths describe the god and goddess getting down to love, but Bhakti poetry revels in elaborate foreplay. I recall one text in which Siva takes on the feminine role; he adorns himself with Devi's earrings and rouge and dress and dances for her. Devi makes a coordinate change, sitting in a meditation pose and enjoying the show. This honey-held-on-the-tongue-tip feeling is the the duende, the aliveness that comes from unmet desire. Or in the words of a sevdalinka musician, (sevdah is the Bosnian verison of duende) you are "feeling good because you feel like shit."

In more conservative translations of the text, Devi is at first a demanding student; she’s done her homework and interrogates Shiva, offers argument, demands truth - and Shiva lauds her for it. In Roche's translation Devi's initial question, "Yet still I am curious./ What is this delight-filled universe/ Into which we find ourselves born?" plays not as genuine inquiry, but erotic appeal; it’s an expression of her desire to start their play. Devi knows the nature of the universe, just as Siva is intimate with manifest creative power, or Shakti. But she's inciting him, signalling her openness by taking up the polarity - Shiva plays Master, Devi plays dumb - as a prelude to their "embrace." It is Devi's version of, "Can you help me with my zipper? I just can't seem to reach back there..."

The Transmissions, basically an infusion of Roche's own voice into the text, is framed more as the bi-product of immersive focus that spontaneously gave rise to impressions harmonious with the VBT itself. But doesn’t one need to know the rules before one can transcend them?

In a recent interview, Kashmir Shaivite scholar, Paul Muller Ortega, describes the "modes of knowing" laid out in Indian philosophical texts: the perceptual and the inferential. But he delineates a third category, bhavana, or the "knowledge reality has of itself."

This spontaneous knowing arises from the body and cannot be "born of our surface intellect or cleverness," but emerges "fully shaped." It occurs after a process of profound psychic cleansing, at which point the aspirant has created the terrain where they might "invite sequences of insight" by placing their inquiry at the "door of the absolute." This intimate spring of insight and knowledge - and its improvisatory freedom - has to be earned. It comes from committed study and years of steeping oneself in the niceties of a text or practice.

Roche’s technique seems more aligned with a technique of literary criticism that has been used in China for centuries. Yi Jing is a process whereby a writer or viewer intuitively ‘collaborates’ with another artist to unearth the true meaning of their work. Yi means 'mind or consciousness' and Jing means 'space or environment.' One first ‘records’ what is called the "pictorial environment" of a text or piece of art in the mind. Only after the work has been deeply imprinted - imbibed whole and on its own terms - does one blend into this understanding their mental reflections on the text or work. The intent is an intuitive, full-body and generous way of seeing, a blending of one's consciousness with that of the artist in order to create new forms. It’s a kind of next-level fan fiction, with some hardcore spiritual prep. Yi Jing, like bhavana, requires a great emptying and opening, a willingness to let go and be taken over.

I recently did a search for Mark Dyczkowski, and by the grace of Vimeo, there he was, white-haired now and plushly bearded, giving a teaching from his Aphorisms called "The Heart." I was listening while making a big pot of soup and my ears pricked up when he said in his ragbag accent, "We don't have this alternation between theory and practice in India. We have the alternation between attention and inattention."

Roche's method, his rapture, his particular way of attending to this work bears with it an implicit promise: if we listen openly and devote ourselves to paying attention - if we play hard and love harder - a text, like the world, like the universe, might invite us in and body forth its full revelation. In light of other scholarship of the VBT, however, Radiance invites another conversation about the distinction between truth and what - to our modern, fragmented ear - simply feels true. Right or wrong, the liberating lure of this translation is the idea that we needn’t bother with the difference.

Objects of Faith

The following is an introduction I wrote for photographer Jim Lommasson's exhibit 'Heaven and Earth,' an exploration of symbols and images used in worship.

The dash board Madonna and the snow-globe Christ, the yucca leaf and the antelope horn, the flower, bell or candle – all the objects of faith - represent and activate a lived relationship with the sacred.

As intermediaries, they are meant to create a sense of intimacy, even love. Their use is a playful, emotive and pleasurable aspect of devotion, one that arises spontaneously and naturally in the worshipper, yet is imbued with a meaning that goes beyond an appreciation of the object itself.

If they appear at first commonplace or crudely rendered, if we see the seam where the plastic halves of Mary have been soldered together, it hardly matters. The gaze of devotion is one that probes deeper, concerned less with the merely phenomenal and more with the essential nature of the object as a symbol of divine love. It is a comprehensive and transcendent vision, one that returns frequently and tenderly to the body.

Faith needs the body: to circumambulate a temple, to bow, to make the sign of the cross, to carve on the skin divine symbols. Each cut fills with the blood of devotion. Every gesture and scar has its own world of meaning and conveys a specific wish.

The devotee must first evoke the human to summon the gods. For articles of faith, as mediators between matter and spirit, embodiment is key. Simply look at the detail with which icons are rendered - the chorded neck and modestly overlapping feet of Christ, or the sensuous roll of flesh at Laxmi’s waist. Even the serene, stylized body of the Buddha has expression, a belly caught between breaths. The face God has given to humanity is in fact the same face humanity gives to God.

In so many representations of the sacred is the gesture of receptivity, an invitation to draw closer. The arms of the divine body open to the believer and ask for prayers, confessions, touch, and feeling. Devotion is externalized in gestures of intense emotion and worship becomes an advanced form of play. By performing the devotion of myth its theological implication – the transformation of earthly into divine love – is realized. If God is sublimely inconceivable, then the path to understanding is through an even greater mystery, that of love. The Vedas say, brihad karomi, “I will make myself vast.’

The endowment of body to the divine bestows with it a heart full of human qualities. It is not the boundless might of the intermediary or the knowledge of some large and exquisite plan to which we are not privy that draws us closer, but rather the body that bleeds, the eyes that weep. It is the moment of total vulnerability that invites identification. The worshipper is reminded by example that the mask is not what the gods desire but the human, mobile eyes beneath.

Idols are loved because they come unheralded and unprotected, with too much tenderness, and asking for no relief. Having suffered greatly, humanly, they offer compassion to the devotee. To seek them is to acknowledge that one cannot perfect oneself alone. Fellowship is needed, models, images, inspiration, relationship. Sometimes it is necessary to remember why we persevere in faith and seek strange, unmapped terrains to explore the edges of our passion. To be reminded that between Heaven and Earth, the heart is a potent intermediary.

Objects of faith are forged in wood, in wax and stone, and anchored in space and time with all the weight of a believer’s longing. But beyond their inherited forms, like all created things, they might still have the power to speak of their own will, one that fill us with a mixture of desire and dread and says:

Yes. Beyond these words, beyond your fashioning of me, there is something. If you are lucky, it will find you. Break yourself at its feet. Even this shattering is an invitation.

Book Review: Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom

Note: this was written before Christiane Northrup’s little detour into the land of Q.

Like the Bible, Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom, Christiane Northrup's seminal - and prodigious - volume on optimal well-being for women, begins with a Fall. But this version doesn't involve ingenuous Eve getting kicked out of God's backyard for messing with a wheedling serpent. No, she is ousted from her own Power and Embodied Wisdom after reigning supreme in a "peaceful" matriarchal society where "the arts flourished," by an influx of "violent [...] dominator tribes" ruled by - you guessed it - men. And while the nature of the Fall is different in either story, the end is the same: Man strides blithely into the patriarchy (albeit as a sweat-of-his-brow labourer) and Woman is consigned to "Know pain in childbirth."

The result of this 5,000-year tumble from Goddess Ville was a schism between mind and body and the subjugation of the Feminine. Today, rape warfare, FGM, and the generally crappy treatment of women as "second class citizens," can all be traced back to the pervasive belief systems of the masculine "Dominator System," which Northrup has distilled and interpreted through her experience as an OB/Gyn MD working for decades in the medical establishment.

These beliefs begin with the notion that the female body, and in particular her sexual organs and reproductive processes, are a minefield of weakness and dysfunction (not to mention weird smells), and end with the presumption that her condition can only be cured by medical science - and a good douche. 

The power of belief is central to Northrup's philosophy, and those of the "Dominator System," meted out on women's bodies and minds for millennia, have manifested not only in collective horrors like sex-trafficking, but individually in the severing of a woman from her own intuition and a dissociative relationship with the body.

All of the conditions from which women uniquely suffer - from genital warts (don't men get these, too?) to bad pap smears - however, are in Northrup's understanding, "the language through which our bodies speak to us," and require a holistic approach to first understand and then heal. Her healing strategy includes an incorporation of a feminine "multimodal, spiral" intelligence, "using both hemispheres of the brain," and an engagement with the "Feminine Energy System," namely the chakras and our Yin/Yang balance.

Basically, we've got issues in our tissues, and Dr. Northrup serves as our board-certified gynaecological tour guide and Wyse Womyn for a 900-page romp through the female reproductive organs, life-stages and hormonal system. (Fun fact: the etymological root for vagina means "sheath for a sword.")

But I digress. In truth, Women's Bodies is an important and necessary work that has indeed served as an alternative Bible for women seeking reliable information about their Lady Parts for over 20 years. Central to Northrup's agenda is the wiping away of the myths, baseless 'facts,' superstitions, and beliefs that have plagued women's understanding of their anatomy for centuries, and essentially 'reprogramming' the feminine psyche with equal parts solid, science-based information and more holistic musings.

Northrup systematically and methodically takes on the most culturally loaded nexuses of the feminine psychophysical experience and offers hope and comfort by reminding women that they always have more power, control and choices with their body than they might have previously thought possible.

Crucial to the perception of choice is Northrup's inclusion of the voices and testimonies of many women experiencing the same conditions. There is biographical information of the patient here, but also a cataloguing of all their fear and conflicting emotions, how they confront or evade the truth of their illness, and the time it takes to heal. Taking in a multiplicity of embodied experience - with all the vulnerability that entails - can itself become a permission structure for women to feel and introspect on what they are experiencing. These stories honour more than the linear progression of illness-to-wellness, invite in different layers of consciousness in the telling, don't bow to the authority of one voice or perspective, show women extracting meaning from their bodily experience, and encourage an empathic response. They, in short, use an inclusive, feminine means of storytelling in order to disclose a uniquely feminine experience.

Northrup also does something fairly radical: she puts erotic flourishing at the centre of the conversation about women's health - and she does it in a savvy, compassionate way. Some books, most recently Naomi Wolf's Vagina: A New Biography have also attempted to forge the link between women's psyches and their sexual expression, “The vagina is the delivery system," Wolf writes, "for the states of mind that we call confidence, liberation, self-­realisation and even mysticism in women."

Her book tries to reconcile a Yoni-massage-and-scented-candle brand of mainstream Tantric Sex with new-ish science that validates the idea that female sexual response and experience deeply impact a woman on all levels, gross and subtle. But she lacks the comprehensive knowledge and experiential background to support what remain vague, intuitive and often hereto-centric theories about feminine sexuality.

Northrup's relatively brisk treatment of the subject in "Reclaiming the Erotic" takes for granted that sex and consciousness are inextricably connected and goes about prescribing a few methods (like, uh, breathing the spirit of Salma Hayek into your left side) for women to "[become] the energy of joy or love and [gain] the essence of these ecstatic feelings."

While Wolf's book pits a hyper-sentient and uber-intelligent vagina and "clitoral system," (which, we are told, hold as many cosmic powers and quantum mechanical wonders as the swirling heavens) against the government-issue, lowest-common-denominator, blunt instrument of men's equipment and desires, Northrup acknowledges that many men also suffer under a system that limits their pleasure and intimacy, and might equally desire to witness and experience the sexual flourishing of women.

Northrup's mission is undoubtedly to serve women's thriving. At heart she is a bit of a shit-starter and provocateur - a classically trained medical doctor who went rogue and started a FUBU clinic for women with a deeply holistic orientation. Northrup is also an inheritor and purveyor of New Thought, (Her latest book Dodging Energy Vampires, is for sensitive people who feel, well, sucked dry by the world) and these two strains - of hard science and New Age belief play through every page of this book:

"Consciousness creates the body, pure and simple [...] our consciousness is the part of us that chooses and directs our thoughts. Thoughts that are uplifting, nurturing and loving create healthy biochemistry and healthy cells, while thoughts that are destructive to self or others do just the opposite [...] To improve our lives and our health and truly flourish, we must acknowledge the seamless unity between our beliefs, behavior and physical bodies."

New Age concepts, however, can become just as calcified and dogmatic as those of rigid empiricism - and do as much to prevent us from having a direct experience with the body. I am reminded of women in Yoga classes saying things to me like, "I don't get it. I do so much core work but I'm still having boundary issues."

We can get hooked by a just-so metaphor for an illness, and process this 'idea' instead of actually encountering the emotional discomfort or pain of our bodies. A blanket diagnosis, even when cloaked in 'alternative' language is still a diagnosis.

It is part of Northrup's genius to bring an expansive and holistic eye to the body, but some of her assertions feel a little facile: Can all women conceive children into their fifties when not subject to the limiting beliefs of the patriarchy and its obsession with glowing, eggy, bouncy youth? Do all women tend to "lead with their hearts," and is this indicated by the fact that our yang-y boobs "protrude from our chest?"

Can a man only open a woman sexually by "Using a slow yin approach that involves tenderness, earning trust, and praise?"

Do "independent" women always have low risk childbirths?

Is physical blindness necessarily the result of issues with your third eye?

And finally, are the conflicts in the Middle East really due to "entrenched first chakra beliefs" and, more importantly, has anyone told Jared Kushner?

In full disclosure, I absolutely do believe that collective trauma and inveterate cultural beliefs affect our reproductive health, and really, there would be no harm in cis, hetero men trying a yin (or even yin-ish) approach to sex. But, if the point of such a work is to recoup displaced feminine power by encouraging women to trust their own self sensing, then perhaps being too attached to what we 'know' is (sometimes) as dangerous as knowing too little.