cliterature

I wonder how many people walking in the ‘Take Back the Night’marches considered how literally the idea could be taken.  I mean, if you ask most people who the most powerful god in the ancient greek pantheon was, most people would say Zeus.  (Either that or give you that “you’re crazy look” and ask if you are a Satanist.)  But anyhow, Zeus was considered the greatest of the gods.

 But consider this, when it came to deciding how long a man would live, on god and one god only determined that–and Zeus only enforced her decision.  Atropos, or as the Roman’s called her Mortis.  She was the oldest of the Fates.  Her sister spun out each mortal life, and measured it’s length, but Atropos alone determine when it was cut off.  (An old lady with an enormous pair of sheers, what would Freud have to say about that?)

And Atropis was the daughter of Night (a.k.a. Nyx or Nox–pictured above by Edward Robert Hughes).  She was, quite literally the darkness, and the darkness was feminine.  Night is spoken of rather rarely.  Her children spread her legacy.  Her named offspring are the avatars of sleep, death, darkness, day, the air, blame, toil, misery, doom, dream, retribution, pleasure, madness and strife as well as the Fates.  Some of her children had fathers of her choosing, some had no father at all as she could give birth without any contribution from a man.

Atropis, Night, Lilith… history seems to be strewn with powerful female figures.  Some draw their power from the night, and some are banished there.  But better that than to live up to the one dimensional feminine ideal that follow.  The bright, blonde, bouncy heroine, the female without a shadow.  Maybe our progress towards the balanced female hero will necessarily take us through the darkness.  Perhaps the current vogue for but kicking, sarcastic, neurotic and promosicuous heroine s is part of that assimilation.

If we are to marry Eve and Lilith it is not the blessings of Zeus that will make the union work–it is the succor of Night and the forbearance of the old lady with the scissors.  Let there be female heroes again, let them leap fully armed from our head like Athena did from the cranium of Zeus.  Or let them be born by a woman with no input from a man at all.  Let there be female heroes that follow their own path, through light and through darkness.  Let their be urban fantasy, romance, ebooks and pinups.  Let there be pornography and let it be shameless.  Let there be be mood swings, inspiring dreams, arguments, deep breaths, daybreaks and the endless toil of writing through it all.

And if it is part of the greater whole, the root of female creation: by all means, let there be Night.

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