The Fall of Love by Susan Tepper

I found Susan Tepper and her excellent revision of Leda and the Swan on Fictionaut. I'm a new member, and have to say it is one of the best online sites for writers I've ever seen.  I highly recommend it.  Follow the link to learn more about her work.


THE FALL OF LOVE

Leda was named for the swan in that myth. It came to her mother while she was giving birth on acid. The entire commune watched Leda come bursting into the world. Some hippie guy, standing at her mother's head, played Blowin' in the Wind on the harmonica. A short time after, the commune had tumbled.

"What could you expect?" her mother often said over the years Leda was growing up. Her mother, May, cursing suburbia for its dull predictability, its sameness, the boredom.

May blamed the fall of love on Charles Manson. We were so happy at Fieldings Farm, she'd say, her lined blue eyes looking wistful.

Unlike her mother, Leda felt comfortable in suburbia. She liked all the little houses lined up identical except for the five different color choices. She liked when it turned pitch dark making it difficult to tell the houses apart.

Since nobody bothered locking their doors, people sometimes woke up sleeping off a drunk on the wrong sofa. Even the dogs got confused, here and there, pushing their way inside the wrong doggie-door-slot.

And that was kind of how Leda met Sam. He'd come in from Nebraska to visit his old college roommate, Charlie Mack, and didn't count correctly from the corner. Instead of counting seven houses, Sam had counted eight. Ending up in Leda's kitchen.

May had cooked some thick pea soup and they were sitting at the table, when in walked this tall guy carrying a backpack. “Heavy pack,” he said. Then, “I'm looking for Charlie Mack.”

“It could be a tune,” said May.

Sam looked puzzled taking a few steps backward.

“You came one house too many,” May explained.

He still looked confused scratching his pale chin stubble.

“The houses, they're all the same,” said Leda feeling a rush of heat in her ears. “In the dark you can't pick out the colors.”

Sam had stayed on for soup. He kept looking at Leda, then toward May as if to ask was it OK he kept looking at Leda.

That night he went to bed with both of them. First Leda. Then the swan.

Image: Leda and the Swan, 1530, Michelangelo

Strange and secret peoples

The modern bride, dressed in a long white gown, is a relatively new phenomenon, popularized in the Victorian Era and contrary to the current zeitgeist, the color white symbolized joy, not purity. Off all the bridal raiment one sees today in popular culture, the veil is the oldest of these. Wedding ceremonies have taken place all through recorded history, although the word “bride” is first used in the modern context in the 9th century in England (OED). What is a woman enacting in a couture gown in a cathedral, or a cotton sundress on the beach at dawn, what is the lure and the draw of this ritual?

One of the earliest references can be found, not surprisingly in mythology. The Celtic goddess, Brigid, according to Robert Graves in his book, The White Goddess, belongs to the trinity of the triple moon goddess, who occurred through Indo European mythology. She was one of the most widely worshipped goddesses in Celtic Britain. In the triad, she represents the maiden, and is associated with healing, creativity, wisdom and childbirth--- all transformative actions.

Brigid took over from the winter goddess, the hag, and only women were allowed at her ceremonies. She is later Christianized as St. Brigit in Ireland. In the highlands, she became St. Bride, foster mother to Jesus Christ. Is it possible that her magic, and her iconography persevered and became encoded in the Fairy Bride of the Victorian Era? Folklorists believed that her cult like devotion stretched far into the Victorian Era when we first see the bride as fairy princess.

Traditionally, the fairy bride is non human or enchanted, living beneath the sea in a magical place, but is captured by a mortal man and is transformed by marriage to him. She lives her life as a mortal being, bearing children and resigned to her fate. Yet one day she finds her garment that she shed when the transformation occurred, she slips back into it and escapes back beneath the sea, becoming once again an enchanted creature. She is then a powerful creature, perhaps her antecedent is Brigid or St. Bride, a goddess in disguise, and not subject to the laws of ordinary women.

According to Carole Silver in Strange and Secret Peoples, this fairy tale rose in prominence in the Victorian Era, just as marriage laws were being revised--- at stake the power or rather powerlessness of women. Early folklorists ignored the autonomy and strength of the fairy bride and the fairy society she inhabited, they “found the subject of fairy brides married to mortal men disturbing” (94).  Of course they did, that might imply the women were something more than decoration.

And since wives were still considered property, this interpretation was far too dangerous. Certainly if she is descended, at least in part from the powerful Celtic goddess, Brigid, and not an impoverished Catholic substitute, there was good reason to be concerned. Whether she was the Swan Maiden, the Fairy Bride, or the Seal Bride, she might really be functioning as an encoded, underground assertion of female power, through the ritual of the wedding.

It is at this juncture of fairy tales, myth and real life gender struggles that the story of the modern bride is born. There were certainly always a set of rituals accompanied by an announcement and subsequent wedding of a young man and a young woman. The rice and the bridal cake, for example, symbolized a wish for fertility, and all of these rituals worked to “effect real and perhaps long lasting transformation in the lives of the ritual participants” (Otnes and Pleck, 4).

Before the Victorian Era, women had simply worn their best dress on their wedding day. However, the idea of dressing up as a fairy princess, in a long white gown, worn only once on her special day, with a veil, was new--- and eagerly embraced. She became the living embodiment of ritual and magic fed by myth and popular fairy tales.  But who exactly is hiding beneath that veil?  And is she dangerous?

Sources:

Graves, Robert. The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997.

Otnes, Cele C., and Elizabeth H. Pleck. Cinderella Dreams: The Allure of the Lavish Wedding. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2003.

Silver, Carol G. Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Why doesn't she cut off his head?

Possible historical antecedents for the trope of the monster bride groom, most notably in Blue Beard. 

• Gilles de Rais, affiliated with Joan of Arc, 15th Marshall of France, after driving the English out of France,  retires to his estate, studies alchemy and magic, while young peasant boys begin to disappear. When at last the Duke of Brittany intervened, the remains of over fifty boys were found in his castle. De Rais was hanged and burned at the same time in 1440.

• Cunmar the Accursed, an old Breton tale, was the ruler of Brittany in the mid 6th century. The last of his wives, Triphine, heavily pregnant, enters his ancestral chapel where she is warned of her fate by blood stained ghosts of his former wives. She escapes, but he captures her and cuts off her head. Her body is found by a monk, destined to become a saint. He magically reattaches her head, and causes Cunmar’s castle to collapse down around him. Triphine delivers her child, gives it to the monk, and performs good deeds for the rest of her life. The ghost of Cunmar roams the countryside in the form of a werewolf.

What if someone told Triphine's story as an antidote to the western version where Beauty falls in love with the Beast and marries him. How crazy is that?

Illustration:  Edmund Dulac

Marina Warner

No book or blog or anthology on myth would be complete without the work of Marina Sarah Warner; novelist, critic and cultural historian.  The excerpt from this essay was published in The Liberal, "a magazine  dedicated to a renaissance in liberal politics and the liberal arts."

On Myth by Marina Warner

"WRITERS don’t make up myths; they take them over and recast them. Even Homer was telling stories that his audience already knew. If some individuals present weren’t acquainted with Odysseus’s wanderings or the Trojan War, and were listening in for the first time (as I was when a child, enthralled by the gods and goddesses in H.A. Guerber’s classic retelling), they were still aware that this was a common inheritance that belonged to everyone. Its single author – if Homer was one at all – acted as a conduit of collective knowledge, picking up the thread and telling it anew.

In an inspired essay on ‘The Translators of The Arabian Nights’, Jorge Luis Borges praises the murmuring exchanges of writers across time and cultures, and points out that the more literature talks to other literatures, and reweaves the figures in the carpet, the richer languages and expression, metaphors and stories become. Borges wasn’t a believer in anything – not even magic – but he couldn’t do without the fantastic and the mythological. He compiled a wonderfully quixotic and useful bestiary, The Book of Imaginary Beings, to include the fauna of world literature: chimeras and dragons, mermaids and the head-lolling catoblepas whose misfortune is to scorch the earth on which he tries to graze with his pestilential breath. But Borges also included some of his own inventions – The Creatures who Live in Mirrors, for example, a marvelous twist on the idea of the ghostly double."

Read the rest of this excellent essay

Image: Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), Pandora.

A warning

"Cultural myth has come through the mouths of priests and is therefore not trustworthy as the oral myth.  Cultural myth records what happened, it is fixed, static, and freezes in a pattern which is an inflexible expression of the cultural time and place.  When metaphorical surface becomes ritual, the God no longer wears a human body or speaks for itself."

--- Thelma J. Shinn,  Worlds Within Women: Myth and Mythmaking in Fantastic Literature by Women

Angelique, the archetypal bride

On my wedding day, I stood in a waist high field of flowers adjusting my veil, it was ivory lace, hand sewn with seed pearls so that it glistened like a constellation in the sunlight. It was early morning and already it a hot day--- I and my maids hung back underneath the shade of an ancient tree. They were dressed in long gowns of raw silk and fine linen. One of the younger girls pulled miniature strawberries off the vine, and another had taken off her slippers and dipped her feet into the nearby pond.

The tall grasses hummed with cicadas, the very air around me seemed to vibrate--- like the music of the spheres. My maid servant, Emily served mulled wine in silver cups emblazoned with my family crest and one small perfect sapphire. But I did not touch a drop. I was already light headed and ready to faint with joy. Soon the procession would begin, soon my groom and his men would meet us and we would walk together, process up the road to be married.

I knew beyond the valley of pomegranates, there were hundreds of people waiting in a clearing, a natural amphitheater, where red silk canopies and bowers filled with violets and ivy and daisies, were hung from the trees, and many casks of wine, for it was to be the finest wedding in the land. I vowed to remember the perfection of this moment for all time. Off in the distance, we heard the echo of bells ringing, then saw a cloud of dust rising up on the horizon, the men were arriving. I watched as Emily gathered together the silver cups on the tray while my maids straightened their gowns and placed sprigs of wild flowers in their hair.

They came into view, processing down the road, carrying standards, royal blue and scarlet emblazoned with the family crest, a mandala, and the inscription, Aurora Consurgens. A few feet behind them, my groom, my love, walked slowly and joyously carrying cut branches of dogwood and crocuses, the petals gently dropping down, littering the dirt road with bright spots of color. And behind him, a young child, a girl with golden blond hair, ringing two sterling bells. I stood tall while my handmaids draped me in long gold strands of gold and malachite, then a bouquet of violets wrapped in lavender ribbon.

As they men approached, the maids joined them in turn. I waited patiently for my lover to appear, and when he did, we locked eyes and I rushed out to join him. The procession and the music stopped while we linked arms. The child began ringing the bells again, quietly--- and we all began to process, men and women, but in a slower more stately rhythm, until we rounded a gentle curve in the road and entered into the valley of pomegranates, and then beyond a field of wild flowers where the tall grasses and stalks of milk weed brushed up against my gown, and then down into the amphitheater where the entire village waited for the ceremony to begin.

to be continued...

Note:  This story is inspired by CG Jung's memoir.  He writes about a dream he had in a near-death state: 

I was Rabbi Simon ben Jochai, whose wedding in the afterlife was being celebrated.  It was the mystic marriage as it appears in Cabbalistic tradition...I do not know exactly what part I played in it.  At bottom it was I myself.  I was the marriage...I walked up a wide valley to the end, where a gentle chain of hills began.  The valley ended  in a classical amphitheater.  It was magnificently situated in the green landscape...All-father Zeus and Hera consummated the mystic marriage, as it is described in the Iliad.

Image:  Marc Chagall