Manifestations of Venus

[Jules Siegel]

Preliminary Note

I have been thinking about the difficulties created by the fact that I
read Pynchon's works so many years ago--thirty, I think, for the most
part. When I receive some copies, I will try reading them again.
Meanwhile, in order to avoid confusion, I am going to respond with what
I know about certain themes and let you all decide how it applies. I
hope that I am not doing something wrong by changing the subject lines,
but I want to start breaking these long threads down into more coherent
strands, so that I can keep better track of the ideas. I am getting
several dozen messages a day and many of the subject lines no longer
have very much connection to the content. Also, I am writing this from
memory and I have no easily accessible references, so I will appreciate
your tolerance (and correction) of any errors.

Manifestations of Venus

By Jules Siegel

Bonnie L. Kyburz <Kyburz at asu.edu> wrote: 

> I have always maintained that V. A NOVEL deals with misogyny, patriarchy, and power--across the centuries, that Pynchon reveals something of a plot to suppress information on the Goddess and cultures that worshipped her. There's a paper on the matter imbedded in Tim Ware's web page.  Also, one link to that paper on my page at http://www.cas.usf.edu/english/surfus/lenore.html.  It's called "She Lives in a Time of Her Own" (yes, based upon the Erikson song).


I agree strongly with Bonnie's points here. I think that it is important
to distinguish, however, among the various manifestations of the
Goddess, of which there are two (at least) that are relevant:

[1] The White Goddess

Extensively (and very confusingly) explored by Robert Graves in his book
of the same name, this is Leucothea, associated with the Moon and,
hence, the astrological sign of Cancer. In case she is unfamiliar to
some of you, Leucothea is white as death, has yellow hair, an aquiline
nose and is moody and changeable, like the moon. She appears in three
manifestations, virgin, nymph and crone, representing new, full and
waning moon as well as the pubescent, mature and post-menstrual woman.
Leucothea is the goddess of lunatics and poets. She makes men mad with
love, takes them off to Avalon on her white palfrey, date-rapes them
repeatedly, and then drops them back into cold reality, woe-begone and
naked. She is primarily a northern European manifestation, especially
British/Irish/Gaelic.

She is Keats' Belle Dame Sans Merci. Leucothea is the woman you fall in
love with and penetrate, being absorbed into her and dying, as the sperm
loses itself in penetrating the egg. She is water, liquid, the wetness
of arousal. She is not a very good fit with her astrological sign, as
Cancer is the breasts and Summer, while Leucothea fits better with
Spring. This may be explained by the fact that astrology began in the
Fertile Crescent, where the summer would have been longer and hotter.
Thus she expresses well the fleeting quality of northern summers,
especially the closer you get to the Arctic Circle, the strange white
light and the long, pale days, like a Swedish movie, say Elvira
Madigan--doomed love, but hauntingly beautiful.

Chrissie, a Cancer, is Leucothea, as you will see when I send out her
picture, assuming people do want to look at it. Chrissie's mother and
father were married in Avalon, on Catalina Island, California. She was
born July 15, 1948 in Tsingtao, China.

[2] Aphrodite

This is love as flesh, associated with Taurus and the planet Venus, the
number 13, and the Greek letter Delta, which is a triangle, indicating,
I think the female pubis. I don't want to offer too many versions of her
name, as I am doing this from memory, but she would be Astarte, Isis,
Ashtoreth, Venus, among others. Although the statues of Aphrodite, such
as the Venus de Milo, are white marble (as are most other Greek and
Roman artifacts), they were once painted in flesh tones and had amethyst
or other precious stones in what are now blank eyes, and were dressed in
rich costumes. Too delicate to survive were the chrystosom (I'm not sure
of the spelling any more) versions -- cedar frames covered with ivory to
simulate skin, precious stones for eyes, wigs of real hair (I think) and
beautifully ornate clothing, including underthings.

Aphrodite is Mary and if you want to get a real feeling of what she must
have been like, you'll find similar images in many Mexican churches,
ranging in size from exquisite little dolls to life-size mannequins. She
is kind and loving -- though fickle (to assure the vitality of the seed
by changing lovers) -- and is associated with the arts of love.
Aphrodite is the swelling belly, the full breasts, the mother nursing.
She is earth, flesh, not the act of procreation, with all its romance,
but the work of motherhood. The Bull (read also Cow, Horned Crescent)
ploughs the earth.

Unlike Leucothea, who abhors homosexuality, Aphrodite is pan-sexual and
orgiastic. Cross-dressing priests figure strongly in her cult. Men and
women lay together naked in mass sex orgies in the ploughed fields and 
mingled their seed indiscriminately so that no child could know his own
father. This made sure that children were not private property. They
belonged to all. The Jews worshipped Saturn, not Venus. The Bible comes
down so hard on homosexuality because it was treason in a time when
religion and government were one, but Jewish descent is through the
mother. Because my children's mothers are gentile, my children are not
Jews unless they choose to convert. The greatest ode to Aphrodite ever
written in the English language is Shakespeare's description of
Cleopatra's arrival in Alexandria to meet Antony.

Anita, a Taurus, is Aphrodite, as you can see when you look at her
picture in my website. Her mother and father were living in Floral Park,
Long Island, when she was born, May 17, 1954.

Caveat:

It is a mistake in examining the work of any artist to insist on
revealing some grand architectural structure. You can do with Escher,
because he did work that way. His original cartoons (in the technical
sense here) of mathematical transformations in analytical geometry are
easily available. Tom is not that kind of artist in the works that I
have read. Thus I think that it is sometimes better to let him just be
himself, without picking away to the underpainting of his tableaux,
because his sources are often disappointingly thin. This is not always a
result of lack of diligence. The sources themselves are surprisingly
shallow when you examine them closely with a skeptical eye, no matter
how well-embedded they are in the tapestry of conventional scholarship. 

There is a tendency among scholars to mix this stuff into a confusing
stew of names and places and cabalistic numerology and all that Talmudic
and satanic folderol that passes for erudition. We are dealing here with
many layers of myth and different dead languages and mathematical
systems, alphabets and hieroglyphics, icons and pictographs. If you look
at a single Tarot card, you will see a complete set of icons and glyphs
and Hebrew letters. Each is a mnemonic device referring to some
traditional source, itself often an encyclopedia or even a school of
thought rather than a single concept or text. We have no reason to
believe that any of the pre-Christian material that scholars confidently
analyze has been translated correctly (or even intelligibly). The Bible
has approximately 8,000 different words, of which only some 6,000 have
been definitively translated. This does not necessarily mean that 25% of
the Bible is conjecture, as some of these words may be inconsequential,
but it does mean that any attempt to define even the literal meaning of
the text (much less its poetic extensions) is doomed to endless
argument. My own impression is that conventional archaeological history
is a pastiche of sincere misinterpretation and very cynical religious
and political "truth" correction.

You will get yourself laughed off stage at any conventional academic
symposium for saying this, but it really does look as if we are dealing
with material that dates back to before Noah's flood, which I am sure
was a historical fact best explained by the theories of Immanuel
Velikovsky. At one time a vast and highly evolved civilization on Earth
that was almost entirely destroyed by cosmic cataclysms that occurred
within the historical memory of man. Much meaning disappeared along with
its physical context. Graves very convincingly argued in The Greek
Myths, his definitive translation and superb exegesis, that the Greek
myths are verbal descriptions of long-lost ancient murals. He thought
the original meanings were historical and political and that the changes
and misinterpretations were designed to rationalize (and disguise) the
transition from matriarchal to patriarchal systems.

This may very well be true, but what if the murals recorded astronomical
events rather than human history? Let's look at the charming myth of
Aphrodite's affair with Mars, the entwined lovers discovered in Vulcan's
golden net as the rest of the gods look on. Excuse me if I am mixing
Greek and Roman names here. Examine the physical descriptions of the
gods, principally Mars, who is ruddy, as is the planet, and Aphrodite,
who is hot, as is her planet. Vulcan is lame and a smith. As you may
know, there is some reason to believe that a planet called Vulcan once
existed in what is now the asteroid belt. Velikovsky claimed (to the
best of my memory) that a comet appeared out of the Red Spot in Jupiter,
nearly colliding with Mars and coming so close to the Earth that a
cosmic spark passed between the object and Earth. It settled into an
orbit around the sun and became the planet Venus. If there are any
Velikovsky experts here, I hope they will correct this scheme, but let
us accept it in broad outline for the sake of the argument.

The correct meaning of the myth, then, is a verbal description of a
mural (or other lost pictorial record) showing the planets Venus and
Mars caught in merged gravitational fields (the net) with a damaged iron
planet and the rest of the planets in the background. First it was
written down (or spoken, perhaps) in its literal meaning, which everyone
at the time understood. By the time we read it, it has been translated
several times and what were once planets have been changed into persona.

Cross-cultural translation is a treacherous business even when you can
call up a Chinese friend and check out the meaning. But across eons?

I don't want everyone to get mad at me, but I think you have to begin to
accept the fact that Tom's grasp of things that he glibly sets down as
if he were a master of the material is usually quite superficial, based
on reading anything from, say, Bible Comics to learned journals. This is
not a criticism, but a description. The effect he achieves is often
exquisite, but you are not necessarily going to get very far by
examining how he achieves it, and, in fact, will be lucky to retain the
original thrill you felt when you let his incantations charm you across
the borders of reality into his mostly imaginary landscapes.

A lot of times, I think, he is talking in tongues. Usually, that is when
he is at his greatest, whereas such highly researched sections as Malta
and Africa can be deadly. When he does get that romantic enchantment
going he is often departing from historical reality. The Heroro women
were not beautiful by our standards. They had huge buttocks --
grotesque, really, to the modern Anglo-European eye -- and were probably
the inspiration for the fabled Callipygians, which meant the people with
beautiful buttocks. This is a problem that many modern black women have
just had to live with. Their inherited physical beauty is of another
time and another culture. Ashanti women (and men) had bodies like Roman
statues -- think of Muhammad Eli, only black as coal. The Masai were
tall and thin, our basketball stars. I think it is difficult for us to
realize how physically different the various African peoples were from
each other. Perhaps Craig Clark can help us on this. Meanwhile, I feel
that in V., as in erotic literature, facts that might interfere with
romance tend to get left in the bathroom with the tube of spermicidal
jelly and the diaphragm case. And V. is in very many ways an erotic
novel, not only or merely an erotic novel, but mostly an erotic novel --
a literary equivalent of Milo Manera's dreamy illustrated novels, lots
of nakedness, no more than mere hints of penetration.

V. is an inspired work -- in the sense of Goddess-inspired -- and
inspiration does not lend itself to rational examination. I would say
that the Pynchon scholar will do best by attempting to identify what a
given item might have meant to Tom, where he got it, and what it means
in Tom's schema, to the extent that this can be identified, as I don't
think he always has a schema.

Despite this, Bonnie has the right idea, I think, but she should not
fall into the trap of taking this theme too literally or too seriously.
Pynchon is not necessarily writing about the Goddess in a organized and
literal way. He is her instrument and she is talking through him and
there could be quite a bit of static on the line. This interpretation
will help you understand the enchantment you feel again and again when
reading V. It is incantation, a word etymologically almost equivalent to
enchantment, getting you under its spell. I once asked Chester Anderson,
founder of The Communication Company, a great magician, to explain to me
how I could use Magick to make money. "Magick isn't about money, Jules,"
he replied. "It's about ecstasy." In case that doesn't make sense in the
present context, think about money as accounting. V. is about (and the
product of) ecstasy. I don't think the principles of accounting (in the
sense of rational academic scholarship) will always very useful here.

-- 
© Jules Siegel http://www.caribe.net.mx/siegel/jsiegel.htm
Mail: Apdo. 1764 Cancun QR 77501 Mexico
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