« NYRSF Issue 303 (November 2013): Table of Contents | Main | Looking Forward to Looking Backwards (Editorial, NYRSF 304) »

02/09/2014

Bernadette Lynn Bosky
Are There Bad Guys and Good Guys?: The Benandanti and Goddess Worshippers in Elizabeth Hand’s Waking the Moon

*

This study began several years ago at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA) during a discussion of Elizabeth Hand’s Waking the Moon, a novel that presents a showdown between two supernatural groups: female acolytes of a long-dormant and very dark moon goddess and the Benandanti, an eons-old group of politically powerful alpha-males who set themselves against the waking of the moon. In that conversation, a friend referred to the Benandanti as “the good guys.” Nor is that friend alone. Most reviewers tend to see the Benandanti as the good guys, at least by default. An online review by eRIK states, “A young woman ends up teaming with a lesser-of-two-evils group to stop a powerful witch from devouring the world.” Candas Jane Dorsey writes, “Although we see [the Benandanti] performing the same kind of grisly rituals and manipulating the lives of men and women as well as the histories of countries and eras, in the end they come out as more-than-marginally the Good Guys” (15).

If the Benandanti are the good guys—as their name (Italian for “the good walkers”) implies and as they seem to believe of themselves—then the worshippers of the moon-goddess are the bad guys. A number of readers have reached that conclusion. The harshest expression is an amateur review on amazon.com by moongoddessanna: “As a Goddess worshipper, I was not delighted with the overall hostile tone of the novel towards Goddess spirituality; don’t fool yourself into thinking this is a feminist take on Goddess craft.” Even Hand writes (in an online chat in March 1997) that the woman she based the character of Angelica on, who actually had become a “pagan high priestess,” corrected the author about the goddess, “gently chiding in telling me how benevolent the Goddess actually is.” All of these reviews ignore how destructive the Benandanti are and the many ways in which the novel condemns them as well. The minority opinion seems to be that neither side is applauded. Eleanor M. Farrell writes, “The author’s handling of both the patriarchal and matriarchal forces in this struggle is equitable” (Fin de Siecle 1). Elsewhere, Farrell concludes that the conflict is “very well-balanced, so one finds sympathetic characters on each side without being fed any philosophical or religious agendas” (Butterbur’s 3). Hand tells Nick Gevers, “But do I think the world would be a better place if it were run solely by women? No, not any more than I think the solely patriarchal model is an ideal” (7).

Which view is correct? Evidence shows that the novel endorses neither group, and in fact the ending—which annoys many readers and confuses others—indicates the need for and the possibility of some less polarized approaches.

Is Waking the Moon anti-feminist or even anti-woman? Some readers who view the novel as condemning of the goddess also extend that perspective to an implied judgment of women. In an online chat, MarkW writes, “I eyed women skeptically and pessimistically for months after reading Waking the Moon” (“Author” 3). Of course, views of goddess worship, feminism, and women are three highly separable areas. Yet the three are often conflated because the moon worshippers are presented in the novel as women in search of social empowerment and because in real life the search for a benevolent prepatriarchal culture serves certain needs within some branches of feminism. (For a reference to the link between the political climate and interest in goddess worship, see Moon 67). A short review by Finder states that the novel “dissolves in an ending that reads as if it were straight from the lips of a feminism-bashing barefoot-in-the-kitchen backlash apologist.”

In an interview, Nick Gevers brings up this point: “Some feminist readers seem to have bones to pick with you ... over your not, um, entirely sympathetic treatment of the Moon Goddess in Waking the Moon.” However, while Hand’s reply is clear—“I’m an utterly orthodox feminist in the political or social sense.”—she states, regarding her treatment of myth,


I’m sure that one reason that so many Greek myths deal with terrifying, powerful women ... is that at some point in the misty past, women had a power that was terrifying—terrifying not because they were women whom men felt threatened by but because they wielded that power in terrifying rituals that almost certainly involved human sacrifice.

“This would not be a popular platform on which to base a feminist agenda,” Hand concludes, compared to the general view of “matristic cultures” by scholars such as Marija Gimbutas (7). Note that she does not say it is an invalid platform, only an unpopular one.

In any reading of the novel, the careful interpreter must always keep in mind one of the issues—not necessarily a problem—in interpreting Waking the Moon. Some ambiguity comes from the author’s use of point of view in the book, which is composed of first-person scenes narrated by the protagonist Katherine Sweeney Cassiday, and third-person scenes. Even the third-person scenes often have a limited perspective, such as Chapter 4, in which Magda Kurtz finds the goddess’s sacrificial site, clearly from Magda’s point of view. We must understand that when a work structured in this way is multivoiced, it may be contradictory. For instance, Sweeney’s highly negative view of Warnick is not groundless but is definitely influenced by her nervousness towards a demanding teacher on her first day of classes. He has “a small tight smile, more like a stoat baring its teeth” and looks at the students with “a dismissive gaze”; he says goodbye with “a mocking smile,” “his silhouette growing smaller and more gnomelike” as he leaves (41–43). On the other hand, Magda, charmed by Balthazar Warnick despite her own defection from the Benandanti, notices his “peculiar blend of wistfulness and melancholy and biting wit,” his eyes a “piercing electric blue”; they “cloud over,” “cold and parlous,” only when he begins to discuss her slip into goddess worship (99–100). The reader should see these not as inconsistencies in the novel but as its successful presentation of how subjective such judgments can be.

With that in mind, let’s take off our black hats and white hats and proceed.

One reason given by those who find the Benandanti the good guys by default is that at the end of the novel, the protagonist, Sweeney, joins forces with the Benandanti against the moon goddess. For instance, the entry on Elizabeth Hand in Contemporary Authors Online states, “When Cassidy discovers what is afoot, she must join forces with the Benandanti to confront the threat” of the goddess. However, while Sweeney does join forces with the Benandanti, that fact does not mean she aligns herself with them any more than the U.S.S.R. shared philosophies or political goals with the Allies when it joined them in World War II.

Sweeney has fallen in love with Dylan, a young man who is the son of Sweeney’s college friends, Oliver Wilde Crawford and Angelica di Rienzi—later Angelica Furiano, soon to become a complete incarnation of the moon goddess, Othiym Lunarsa. The head of the Benandanti, Balthazar Warnick, tells her that Angelica is about to ritually sacrifice Dylan (470), and Sweeney’s love for Dylan, not an inclination to help the Benandanti, is her motivation. In fact, Sweeney’s friend, Annie, ironically congratulates the Benandanti for using the ferocity of Sweeney’s love to their own purpose: “Well, guys—whoever you really are, and whatever the hell you’re doing—I think you finally got the right girl for the job” (474). One review erroneously states that Sweeney “vow[s] to thwart the transformation” of Angelica into the goddess. Rather, she vows—literally (474)—to save Dylan, and her actions toward that goal also incidentally terminate the transformation.

Moreover, even as she agrees to work with them, Sweeney expresses her misgivings about and even condemnation of the Benandanti. “I will help you,” Sweeney says, “Not because I think you’re any better than Angelica. I don’t” (471). A description of Warnick looking at Sweeney is hardly positive, emphasizing that the Benandanti may not make literal ritual sacrifices but are just as willing as the goddess to use people only as tools:


those half-feral eyes, with their mockery and menace always waiting, waiting, like a patient wolf. I saw no mockery there now, or menace; but neither did I see any warmth. Only a cool, measuring regard, as though he were looking at a heated glass and wondering if it was strong enough not to shatter. (475)

After that, Sweeney says, “I could only trust Balthazar now,” but the context makes clear that she means a highly limited trust in which she has little choice: the only information she has about where Dylan is and how to rescue him comes from Warnick (175).

Candas Jane Dorsey writes, “the Benandanti ... seem originally cruel, evil, and inhumane, but from the moment that murder is done in the name of the waking Goddess, She is seen as the much greater threat” (16). In fact, the Benandanti are completely offstage and only occasionally mentioned through most of the last part of the novel; when they are mentioned, they are often criticized. In the last chapter, Sweeney castigates the Benandanti for not helping her and her friends earlier (470), for killing ex-Benandanti turned goddess-worshipper Magda Kurtz, and for expelling Sweeney from the University, called The Divine, that is a Benandanti stronghold (471).

The killing of Magda Kurtz is the most egregious act by the Benandanti that we see, and we are reminded of it throughout the book. Her fate is harrowing, emotionally much worse than what we feel she deserves even though she is a traitor, one of the Benandanti (one of the few females) who joins with their ancient enemy, the goddess. She is for­cibly shuffled off from a reception and finally shoved through a portal into some ultimately hostile time, planet, or dimension (122–135):


There was a world beyond the door. It was the world that went with that howling, mindless noise, with the blinding leaden glow. An endless expanse of dead plain, colorless, treeless, a horrible lifeless steppe pocked with shadowy hollows and spurs of jagged stone. Overhead stretched the sky, purplish black and starless.... smaller blackened objects fell like hail or a rain of stone.... Only bare ground and stones and freezing air, and a faint foul smell like gasoline. (133)

Worse, the world is inhabited by “immense arthropods,” “huge, at least twice man-high and skeletally thin, with the outlines of ribs and thorax and skull gleaning in the silvery light,” with “twitching mandibles” and eyes that “glittered like steel bearings” (134–135). What happens to Magda is unstated but obvious.

This action is repeatedly referred to in the novel, and it forms an important part of the readers’ image of the Benandanti. When Sweeney sees Angelica on television—her first encounter with Angelica in twenty years—her montage of memories includes the death of Magda Kurtz (268). After reading a particularly bloodthirsty article by Angelica, Sweeney immediately thinks of Magda’s death, which she and Angelica witnessed (304). The reader also learns that Annie Harmon is at the university to investigate the death of her cousin, Lisa, whom Annie says was murdered by the Benandanti in an act made to look like a suicide (142–145). It is fair to say, then, that the Benandanti are not good guys. Annie Harmon speaks “disdainfully” when she translates the term for Sweeney as “The Good Walkers. Those Who Do Well” (145), and Sweeney compares the Benandati’s name to the euphemism of referring to The Furies as “the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones” (190).

One important lacuna in the novel, however, is who or what the Benandanti worship if they do worship. The reader is given numerous (as well as numinous) glimpses of the awesome and terrifying dark goddess, but we cannot judge whether the supernatural masters of the Benandanti, if any, would be more benign or not. Primarily, the Benandanti seem to be defined in the negative as adversaries of matristic goddess worship. Candas Jane Dorsey describes them as “a secret society composed mostly of men which has been in the business of goddess-worship repression for millennia” (15). The Contemporary Authors Online entry for Elizabeth Hand also defines the Benandanti only in terms of this opposition. In the novel, both Magda (27) and Angelica (164–167) think of them primarily as enemies of the goddess though, of course, they are the two characters most apt to think of the Benandanti that way.

Beyond their role as opposition to the goddess, the Benandanti seem characterized by mundane power, influence, and affluence. Oliver calls them “Another Old Boy network—they’re just very Old Boys, that’s all” (47). Significantly, in the need to do one’s duty, whether all of it is attractive or not, Balthazar Warnick thinks not of a church but of the military (16).

Both of these characteristics—opposition to the ancient goddess and mundane power—connect to the overwhelming fact about the Benandanti in this novel: they are men and part of the male hegemony. A review by CS on www.feministsf.org refers to the group as a “secretive patriarchal organization” that has “been desperately fighting the feminist traditions.” Naomi de Bruyn calls them “a covert patriarchal group which has secretly manipulated every facet of importance around the world since long before the fall of the Roman Empire. World governments, institutions, churches, all are guided by the Benandanti” (Waking 1). Concerning her version of the Benandanti, Hand states in an interview,


It is a useful construct in that we do, for good or ill, live in a world culture (in the West, at least) that is predominantly patriarchal in its hierarchies. The basic patriarchal notion that Great Forces—be they government, religion, entertainment media, manufacturers—know what’s best for us, and provide all these good things to us and for us—television, films, clothing, social services. And we, like dutiful children, accept these things without questioning them or their provenance. (7)

They are, as Hand states in an interview in Locus, “trying to run the world as they think it should be run” (“Chasing” 5). Sweeney thinks of them as “The chosen ones who for millennia had watched over mankind, benevolent sentries but also jailers, who meted out punishment and torment and death with as much care as they preserved a way of life (190). When Warnick shows Sweeney a vision of the world the Benandanti have created, it is primarily the building of cities, an image of working together and “order” (209–210). They certainly endorse reason and technology: “the scholarly and worldly Benandanti” (de Bruyn, Black Light).

The author herself often labels the group “Apollonian” (Gevers 7)—certainly in the sense that Friedrich Nietzsche developed, distinguishing between Apollonian and Dionysian cultures and impulses. The Benandanti’s magic is paradoxically anti-magic, cerebral, and practical, worshipping, if anything, order and science. Speaking of a novel she was planning at the time, Hand states, there are “niches” where the supernatural “would be hidden or revealed,” disclosing “another world.” And the Benandanti “spend their whole lives trying to seal up the cracks so that the moral order of our world—the order they have created and want to maintain—is not disrupted” (“Chasing” 72). If the Benandanti, then, are good at all, it is only for one specific—orderly, controlled, cerebral, and patriarchal—definition of “good.”

In terms of pure actions, the goddess worshippers—Angelica and her followers—are certainly much worse. One scene forms a structural parallel to the death of Magda Kurtz: Angelica orders bees and fire ants to destroy her own bodyguard, Cloud, who secretly watches as Angelica sacrifices a young runaway (290–293). The deaths of Magda and Cloud are acts of self-protection, but the mechanisms are bizarrely inhumane. Moreover, only the goddess worshippers consider human sacrifice an integral part of their religion.

Still, careful reading of the novel should prevent the view that it is generally anti-pagan. In the television appearance that Sweeney watches, Angelica Furiano (which, as a character points out, literally means “Avenging Angel” [267–268]) herself states that she deliberately cultivates only one of the faces of the goddess as a counter-reaction:


You see, we’re still trained to see women in only certain ways— ... looking at women as either nurturers or as children who need constant protection. Many of the world’s ancient Goddess religions represent the Goddess as having three faces: those of the Mother, Daughter, and Crone or Destroyer. And a number of recent books help women focus on two of those aspects: Gaea, the nurturing Mother, and her daughter Kore. And that’s wonderful.... but it’s not enough.... Because we can’t just ignore that other face of the Goddess. For thousands of years we’ve pretended that She doesn’t exist.... (265)

This more violent aspect of the goddess has been ignored and must be recognized, she continues, because otherwise women, “will never be whole. We’ll continue to be good mothers and daughters, we’ll continue to be muses, we’ll continue to be victims—but we won’t be whole and strong” (265).

As much as this appeals to Angelica’s many followers, it seems self-serving. Why can’t we ignore that face of the Goddess and skip the human sacrifices? Three interesting reasons present themselves within the novel.

First, Angelica simply has no choice. Angelica’s fate is set in motion when Magda Kurtz on an anthropological dig finds the lunula, a large crescent-moon necklace and weapon of sacrifice sacred to the goddess. It is found on the ceremonially buried body of a decapitated young man—an offering to the moon-goddess (65–70). (It also seems reminiscent of the head of Orpheus, which floated down a river, still singing, after the Maenads, the ecstatic but bestial followers of Dionysus, tore him to pieces [Hunter].) More benign goddesses exist, but the woman who is the catalyst in this conflict finds—or is found by—one with a taste for blood. Almost immediately, Magda commits murder; she is definitely not under her own control and is almost unaware during the event (71–74).

Why do others follow Angelica? The second reason to follow the goddess becomes more clear the more we see the new acolytes. They are indeed victims of or at least marginalized by a patriarchal culture. On a talk show that Sweeney sees, one of Angelica’s followers states, “My husband used to beat me, so bad sometimes I couldn’t go to work. And our children, too.” After hearing Angelica speak on “the Warrior Goddess inside of us,” she leaves her husband—and when he attempts to use serious violence to keep her from leaving, she says, “I ran over him. I—I—killed him” (262–263). This is territory that, as we have seen, the Benandanti and the goddess share: self-preservation, pursued without limits, compunction, or compassion. One is reminded of Elizabeth Hand’s short story, “Justice,” in which Circe dispenses her own style of punishment to men who have killed women and children—all of the crimes in the story, the author’s note states, come from our real world (119).

At one point, Angelica thinks of the sacrifices going on all the time in the name of politics and established social mores:


by visiting the tiny villages in Orisa and Bangladesh and Uttar, where girl children are aborted and wives are murdered for their dowries; by entering compounds in the countryside outside Gracania and Glamoc, where women were raped and forced to give up their babies to doctors and soldiers; by witnessing initiation ceremonies in Africa and New York, where girls were mutilated, and standing at the mass graves of nuns slaughtered in Central America and men and women and children in the jungles of Kampuchea. Everywhere, everywhere, she saw horror and death and brutality; everywhere she saw forgiveness, and ignorance, and endless cycles of poverty and servitude, women cringing before their masters and murmuring about love. (197–198)

The reader knows that this is a partial truth but cannot deny the facts. The only question—which Angelica never asks—is whether the world of the dark goddess will necessarily be better.

Other followers of Angelica’s are lesbians, punkish ravers, or followers of some other counter-culture. And most are young. Annie Harmon thinks, “it must have something to do with having missed that whole first wave of feminism and liberation, of growing up under the conservative cloud of the ’80s, of being desperate and cynical and incredibly naive all at the same time” (313). That is, Angelica’s followers tend to have the least to lose and the most to gain by any overthrow of the current world order—the opposite of the powerful, wealthy, comfortable Benandanti.

Finally, the new world of the goddess may have one genuine, literally vital advantage. This is handled ambiguously in the last portion of the novel. Certainly, both weather and human behavior have grown freakishly bad; Washington D. C. suffers storms (476), extreme heat, power brownouts, resultant looting and other crimes (467–469). Introducing an entire page of worldwide disasters, Sweeney thinks, “It wasn’t just me: that summer, everything was slightly skewed” (417). Baby Joe, a friend of Annie’s and Sweeney’s, states,


things really have gotten worse. There’s all these horrible little wars, there’s this horrible plague that’s killing us [AIDS] and everyone’s pretending not to notice. Things happen like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, and we’re supposed to just forget. Men go around hunting women and children like they were deer, and women fall on the men with knives. And on top of that, the whole fucking planet is sort of dying. I mean, we got earthquakes, and fires, and floods, and droughts, and blizzards and—well, everything. It’s like the pregame show for the apocalypse! (380)

The question is who is responsible. Baby Joe blames the goddess: “This is it—and whatever it is, Angelica’s not just a part of it, Angelica is it” (380). Storms often appear during the sacrificial rituals—but again, is that cause or effect? Dylan says that his mother is known for successfully predicting earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanoes (411–412). “But some of the people who’re into all her New Age stuff,” he says, “they think she makes it happen! Like in Hawaii they think there’s this goddess Pele who makes the volcanoes blow up—these people think my mother can actually do that! ... Sometimes, I think my mother believes it herself” (413). This may be true, especially since the insufferable heat wave in Washington D.C. breaks immediately after the dark goddess is defeated (491–492).

However, both textual and extratextual evidence may indicate that the Earth’s sad shape is more the fault of the longtime world order with which the Benandanti are aligned. That is, if some of the destruction is by the goddess as she awakens, much is due to our same-old same-old, business-as-usual ruination of our planet. After Angelica advocates awareness with the dark goddess as a means of personal empowerment, she states that this awareness is also needed in order to be “sovereigns of the Sacred Earth,” to be “One with Her”—meaning not the moon, but our own planet (265). Sweeney reads an article that quotes Angelica’s more explicit statement. Angelica’s book—also called Waking the Moon—


isn’t just about personal empowerment. It’s really about something much, much bigger, about all of us—women and men—reaching outside of ourselves and using that cthonic aspect of our own natures to change the world. To take a world and a race on the brink of self-destruction and shake it back to life again. I truly believe that very drastic measures will be needed if we are to survive.... but I think change is coming.... I think it is coming very, very soon. And I very much want to be a part of it. (303)

How much of this is for publicity, and how much is genuine? Angelica does seem attuned to nature through the goddess: certainly, the more Angelica becomes the dark goddess, the more she can command wild creatures—even calling each species by name, in a kind of Genesis in which Eden has an Eve but no Adam (402–403).

Some evidence outside the novel indicates Elizabeth Hand’s concern for the environmental destruction in our current culture. After Waking the Moon, she wrote The Glimmering, in which, as Eleanor M. Farrell summarizes,


a disastrous combination of ecological catastrophes result in vast rips in the ozone layer, causing flashes of spectral color that stream across the skies.... accompanied by climate changes, leading to drought and famine, as well as breakdowns of communications, electricity, and other power sources. (Fin de Siecle 2)

Farrell also mentions “economic chaos ... in a world plummeting towards the end of civilization” (Fin de Siecle 2). Moreover, in a 1997 online chat, Elizabeth Hand states, “Yes, I do actually think that what happens in Glimmering is pretty much what Mother Nature has in store for us.... I don’t believe that we have a very good track record at monitoring how technologies, even seemingly benign ones ... can impact upon our culture.”

Also relevant is Hand’s story “The Bacchae,” which in her author’s notes she says “prefigures Waking the Moon” and is inspired by the disaster fiction of J. G. Ballard (205). The Earth is in such bad shape that “solar shields” are needed to protect it, and they themselves are tearing. Nature, damaged, goes crazy, including an incident in which a bald eagle falls upon and obliterates an urban flock of pigeons (193), an incident also mentioned in Waking the Moon (150). A block party becomes a literally Dionysian revel in which the women—”more sensitive to these things than men” (190)—begin the orgiastic violence that the female followers of Bacchus are known for. Finally, they kill the male protagonist and shatter a beautiful glass fish that functions as a symbol of our current civilization. The neo-Bacchae make no case for themselves, and perhaps ultimately there is none to be made; however, their actions are a reaction to, not the cause of, a world driven off-kilter by modern and civilized values.

Thus, based on material within Waking the Moon and outside it, the danger to our Earth is indisputable, but the responsibility for it is less clear. Sweeney sees a vision of the world under the dark goddess—a primitive world of female shamans dancing around fires, ending in darkness. However, this vision comes to her through Balthazar Warnick (206–209). In fact, another incident may be seen as the goddess’s intent for Warnick in particular, or at most the Benandanti, instead of all life. When Warnick shows an orrery to Sweeney, it explodes and becomes the image of a bloody and hungry moon, which tries to actually devour Warnick until Sweeney saves him (200–201). Back on the same hand, the image, with its “dark heart,” “a spherical void, a black hole crowned by a fiery white corona” (200) is like other visions of the dark goddess, including one that Sweeney sees with Angelica shortly after meeting her (87–88). This would lend authority to the baleful visions of and predictions concerning a world ruled by the moon goddess.

So, are there Bad Guys and Good Guys in Waking the Moon? It seems clear that we have two sets of bad guys: though others can argue over which is the lesser of two evils, the similarities far outweigh the differences. The patriarchy is stupefying and controlling; the older ways represented by the dark moon goddess are exciting but, as Hand states in an interview, “dangerous,” “very threatening to both individual and social order” (Gevers 7). Magda realizes that a statement concerning the Benandanti applies to the goddess and her forces too: “They look after their own, you know. It doesn’t matter how long—they don’t sleep, and they don’t forget” (66). As Lee Kottner writes in a review of Black Light, a second novel by Hand that features the Benandanti, “they’re acting out an eternal battle between good and evil, although which side is which remains somewhat unclear” (1). Sweeney says to Warnick, “Nothing is that simple—maybe Angelica is wrong, but you’re wrong too! Or maybe you’re both partly right—” (211).

Perhaps one application of Carlo Ginzburg’s study of the historical Benandanti (The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries) to Waking the Moon is the conclusion that adversaries tend to converge with that which they oppose. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in an isolated area in northeastern Italy, the testimony of the Benandanti to the Roman Catholic interrogators began with stories unique to their shamanic tradition and came to more closely resemble the already established tales of journey to a sabbath involving a devil—although the Benandanti insisted they did not worship the devil while they were there (122). Their accomplishments drifted from ensuring fertility of the crops (6) to casting counter-spells or even persuading witches to remove spells (78–79). Whether in response to the Holy Office or to another strain of folklore, the Benandanti changed to resemble that which they confronted. In Waking the Moon, the two archenemies have more in common with each other than they do with those who go through their lives not knowing either group exists.

Some readers are now saying, “Well, that’s a bummer.” Does Waking the Moon present us, at best, with a choice between bad and worse? Perceptive critics have drawn exactly this conclusion and found it a flaw in the novel. David Lenander writes,


We have a situation where the patriarchy has suppressed Woman and the Moon for thousands of years, perhaps millennia.... And no, I’m not speaking up for monthly sacrificing of males, but the minute-by-minute sacrificing of females is not a better option. And our main characters are set up to find a middle way, something new, a new option. We don’t get it. In fact, the same old, same old is restored at the end of the book. What’s the point? (Butterbur’s 3)

There is “an opportunity” for this new way “in Sweeney and her young fellow,” Lenander concludes, “But there’s not enough to indicate much hope in that regard” (3). Candas Jane Dorsey writes, “It disturbs me that constantly and consistently, even the best and most thoughtful writers ... can see no better outcome than to reassert the status quo in terms of gender roles” (16). She seems to see this as a failure of optimism or imagination rather than endorsement of the patriarchy.

However, Waking the Moon does explicitly present three alternatives to the ages-long war between the Benandanti and the goddess, each a locus of hope.

The first alternative is that of normal people—only relatively normal, of course. That is, those who do not belong to the struggle and do what they can to stay clear of it. Some reviews emphasize the frustrated (but not altogether unconsummated) love triangle of Sweeney, Angelica, and Oliver that dominates the book, but most of the events at the Divine include a fourth: Annie Harmon, Angelica’s roommate. Annie explicitly criticizes the Benandanti in terms of power and privilege:


I guess what used to bother me ... about all of them with their secret society or whatever the hell it is, was that even if they seemed to be like us—you know, just kids in college trying to get high or whatever—well, they weren’t. They could just do whatever they wanted and not get caught, not get hurt or anything. People like Lisa, or you—they just threw you away. (448)

No fan of the Benandanti, Annie is no fan of Angelica’s dark goddess, either. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss,” she says. “This one’s got tits and a twat, that’s all” (316). In a wonderful comment on both Annie’s character and some goddess-based movements, when someone is surprised Annie doesn’t like Angelica’s books, she “glare[s]” and says, “Why? Because I’m a lesbian? Please” (378). As Mary Stolzenbach comments, Annie “is a pleasure to meet. One gal with absolutely no use for woo-woo makes a nice, earthy change from the other folks here ...” (Butterbur’s 1).

Annie goes on after college to live one of the more successful lives in the book: a well-known musician and singer, happily partnered. At the end of the novel, she tells Sweeney that she’s thinking of establishing a scholarship at the Divine, “Something for normal people, you know? For ordinary losers like you and me—” (494). The irony is strong, since both Annie and Sweeney have shown exceptional fortitude and virtue throughout the book, especially in saving Dylan at the end. Yet, the statement also rings true in that what they accomplished was done with human devices, in a human struggle, despite the overwhelming cosmic forces in play around them.

Nor is Annie the only character who opts out of the war between the Benandanti and the goddess. José Malabar, known as Baby Joe, is on the inside track to the Benandanti, but from the beginning of his days at the Divine he says “he hate[s] them” (94), and calls their work “bad juju” (170). Later, he states that he was one of that group, but “got out” (378), and instead he became a journalist and music critic. Although he eventually dies as a sacrifice to the dark goddess (391), through most of the book he risks himself to communicate with Annie and Sweeney, warning them first about the Benandanti and later about developments regarding Angelica and the goddess cult. Sweeney thinks of “Baby Joe, who had stayed in touch with me in apparent defiance of the Benandanti. Who had struck out on his own into the tabloid jungle, rather than become the brujo the Benandanti wanted him to be” (306).

Also, of course, Sweeney is herself a normal person who acts heroically. Based on the author’s college-age self (Hand, online chat 1997), Sweeney is extraordinary in her own way but has no divine heritage or secret-society ties and aid. Unlike Angelica and Oliver, she is winningly fallible and human. “Sweeney in Waking the Moon,” Peg Aloi writes, “... is believable and likable because she is imperfect; her strength and passion are tempered with ... doubt and impulsiveness” (14).

Sweeney also is involved in the second source of hope at the end of the novel: the love and future marriage of Dylan and Sweeney. (When Dylan asks her to marry him and Sweeney agrees, her acceptance is reminiscent of James Joyce’s Molly Bloom [432].) Dylan is divinely conceived during an impromptu rite in which Angelica plays the priestess or goddess and Oliver plays the sacrificial king or dying god. Like many heroes, he is raised without full knowledge of his parents—in this case, raised by Angelica to think that his father is an elderly and wealthy Italian instead of Oliver. He is associated with the rose (365, 431, 368), sacred to Aphrodite, and he is named for the Welsh god (339). However, Dylan has been kept ignorant of his heritage and considers goddess worship primarily an odd activity his mother is involved in, part occupation (Angelica earns a good living from her books and lectures) and part almost quirky hobby. Thus, both Dylan and Sweeney are normal yet also heroic—in the mythical, rather than merely admirable sense.

The novel more than hints that Dylan is also the hero whom the Benandanti have been seeking. Magda states that while they await signs of the goddess awakening, the Benandanti also are “half-hoping that when their Sign finally came it might presage not Her return, but the arrival of a Champion, a Hero, a Second Coming of a Great Good Man” (28). (The final phrase does seem to link the hero to Christ, but probably within a trans-Christian context in which the Christian sacrifice is identified typologically with that of all other sacrificial gods.) Warnick states that Dylan, a complication that the Benandanti did not expect in the battle they waged, may “grow, perhaps, to become the real, the true chosen One” (474).

In another sense, Sweeney, whom the Benandanti rejected, is revealed as something they have looked for—in a way. Warnick tells Sweeney that his group has tried to defeat the goddess by developing “one young man who might be strong enough and beautiful enough to win Her, to seduce Her and so weaken Her” (204). With the genders reversed, this is exactly what happens between Sweeney and Dylan. Before Sweeney directly interferes with the “divine marriage” with and sacrifice of Dylan by Angelica (485–491), she interferes with it by making love to Dylan, whom his mother was keeping a virgin for that rite (408–410). Dylan’s vow to marry Sweeney preempts the ritual by Angelica. Eleanor Farrell points out, “The story’s structure of ‘Departure, Absence, and Return,’ mirroring the classic anthropological initiation sequence, first creates chaos and then shapes it into a completely unexpected possibility of hope” (Fin de Siecle 1). This is also a process Sweeney undergoes to prepare her for her heroic role. In their future marriage, Dylan and Sweeney enact the happy coming together of the sexes, transcending the two warring camps.

However, the novel shows another way to go beyond the binaries of gender, the third source of hope in Waking the Moon. Many critics have missed the role that Oliver plays—for instance, it is completely ignored, ironically enough, by a review on a web page of GBLT (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered) Fantasy Fiction Resources. Yet, as shor1533 says in a review on amazon.com, “If you learn about the ancient cults worshipping Attis and Adonis, your interpretation of what happened at the end may be reversed 180 degrees ...” (5). Indeed. This mythic link is the key to Oliver’s role in the novel, often missed or misunderstood.

From the beginning, Oliver is marked by strong androgyny. He is described as “beautiful” or having “beauty” (78, 126, 150)—rather than “handsome,” which is used to describe Dylan (339). Sweeney refers to Oliver’s “fey prep school beauty” (176). When Sweeney first sees him, she momentarily thinks he is “another girl” (34), perhaps because of his long, flowing hair (172).

He is also “bisexual,” as only Candas Jane Dorsey seems to notice (15)—although de Bruyn’s description of him as a “Wildean aesthete” (“Waking” 1) may be code as well as a reference to Oliver’s middle name as given in the novel (40). Oliver takes Sweeney “dancing inside a warehouse where I was the only girl among hundreds, maybe thousands, of boys and men” (150) and is seen in “a gay bar,” or perhaps “a transvestite bar” (82–83). Annie states that she doesn’t think Oliver is very interested in women and calls him “Uno amigo de Dorothy, if you take my meaning” (155). Baby Joe calls him a “crazy bitch” (95).

All of this seems less than propitious for the intended groom in a divine marriage, the hero who is supposed to seduce the moon goddess. It may be why Balthazar Warnick calls Oliver too “weak” to succeed in the Benandanti’s plans (204, 209). However, the situation may be very different if not viewed through the categories of the patriarchy; in fact, this is the perfect preparation for Oliver’s mythic role.

While Waking the Moon is in some ways aggressively syncretistic, including chants that call on goddesses from Kali to Britomartis (324), one major influence is that of the goddess Cybele, and those that have been historically identified with her, such as Demeter (Beach 1). Instead of becoming the potent sacred king or god, Oliver chooses to become an acolyte of Cybele or an avatar of her consort, Attis. In Rome, Cybele was served by a group called the Gallae, who “castrated themselves to emulate Attis” (“Koryvandes”). This is exactly what Oliver does after having sex with Angelica in the impromptu ritual near the Orphic Lodge. Sweeney states, “I caught a flash of something lucifer-bright as his hand swept down: a slender shining blade. It fell, not upon Angelica, but upon his own groin” (192). Oliver recovers in a mental ward; when Sweeney says, “But Oliver’s not crazy,” Baby Joe replies, “Normal people don’t try to cut off their dicks with a Swiss Army Knife” (215).

In the hospital, Oliver quotes from a poem about Attis by Catullus:


There is nothing for me but misery,

What shape is there that I have not had?

A woman now, I have been a man, youth, and boy;

* * *

Shall I be a waiting maid to the gods, a slave of Cybele? (222)


The next day, Sweeney hears that Oliver has killed himself (226). After this, a mysterious woman appears, always in a helpful role. She saves Annie from being sacrificed by goddess worshippers at a rave (328) and gives Annie practical help, including Sweeney’s address (428–430).

Most importantly, the woman appears during the final rite and saves Dylan. She orders Angelica to stop, in “a woman’s voice, commanding, so loud that the stones trembled.” Sweeney thinks,


It was Oliver—the same lustrous hair, the same fine cheekbones and strong chin, the same strong long-fingered hands. But it—she, he—was a woman, too, with rounded flesh and mouth, breasts and skin smooth and white as an eggshell.

A woman.... I could hear Baby Joe’s voice, ... saying Your goddess-worshippers...the priests would go into some kind of ecstatic frenzy and castrate themselves, then live like women, like priestesses... (489).


The woman leaves with a final gift for Dylan—the clothes Oliver has worn as a man—and a kiss for Dylan to give Sweeney (493).

No wonder the novel was co-winner of the 1995 Tiptree Award for science fiction that explores issues of gender. Candas Jane Dorsey clearly understands the facts of the ending but is wrong in emphasis when she writes, “The final rescue of humanity, the decisive intervention, is made by a genetic male, a wolf conveniently in sheep’s clothing for the cameo in the finale” (16). Oliver has become a woman—like a striking though minor character in the novel, a transsexual named Justine (382–385). Justine helps Annie find out information about Oliver, whom Justine refers to only as an enigmatic, unnamed “she” (425–427). Also, Oliver’s change is prefigured in an earlier scene: at the reception at the beginning of the school year, Oliver appears in a hooded toga, made of two sheets, wearing lipstick, rouge, and eye-shadow (120). From Magda’s point of view, he holds the sheet “to his chest in a surprisingly delicate manner” (121).

The gender play in classical writing about Attis and the gallae is amazing and amusing. One source refers to Cybele’s worshippers as “transsexuals” but states that the mystery religion concerns Cybele’s “daughter, Attis” (“Cybele”). Other sources refer to the worshippers as “eunuchs” (“Cybele and Attis” 1). Cathryn Platine writes, “Dishonest translators changed Catullus’s use of ‘gallae’ (feminine) into ‘gallus’ (masculine)” (3). Also in that poem, Catullus uses the male pronoun for Attis before the castration, the female pronoun immediately afterwards, but the male pronoun again after Attis has regrets (“Cybele and Attis” 1–2).

Just as Angelica becomes the moon goddess, Oliver becomes a woman who is the goddess’s consort. This is why she is able to command the goddess worshippers and even Angelica to save her friends.

In the hospital, Oliver tells Sweeney,


I wanted to mend things.... I know it sounds stupid, but I thought—all this bullshit about darkness, and light, and different powers for men and women—all this fighting, all this, this hatred the Benandanti and the rest of them have—I thought I could make a difference, somehow. At least I thought I could escape it (219).

In many ways, Oliver succeeds. In some ways, Oliver transcends gender—being both genders or neither. In other ways, he who had been fully a man fully becomes a woman, incorporating both in her history and gaining the ability to participate in women’s mysteries.

Moreover, Oliver gains divine abilities because he accepts self-sacrifice—unlike the twin camps of the Benandanti and the goddess-worshippers, who (ritually or pragmatically) sacrifice others, often unwilling others, for their ends. Oliver makes three sacrifices. First, he offers himself during the ritual by the Orphic Lodge, taking the place of his friend Hasel Bright even though Oliver is already terrified, Angelica is drenched with the blood of the bull she has just killed, and she has just injured Hasel with the lunula. It is a selfish offering, based at least in part on physical desire for Angelica, but a sacrifice nonetheless (189). Then he castrates himself, a sexual sacrifice in identification with Attis and the worshippers of Cybele. Finally, he undergoes a period of simulated death. In a comment to this paper, Elizabeth Hand said that she intended the section-titles “Departure,” “Absence,” and “Return” to refer to Oliver’s journey; clearly, his supposed death is the absence. Most importantly, all of these sacrifices are voluntary. Like Christ, like Attis (“Cult Rituals” 1–2), he gives himself to die and be reborn.

Thus, there are good guys as well as bad guys in Waking the Moon after all. Moreover, many arguments over whether the novel is feminist or not are shown to rely on a rather restricted definition not only of feminism but also of “feminine” and even “female.” In the novel, Angelica gives Sweeney an insightful lecture about how anthropologists and people in general see what we have “been taught to see.” A rough carving taken as a phallic symbol may, upon closer examination, be a “goddess figurine,” with a sketched-in face and vulva that are easy to miss (168). Waking the Moon, similarly, challenges readers who concentrate on only the Benandanti and the dark goddess as though there were no other alternatives. *

Bernadette Lynn Bosky lives in Yonkers, New York.

Works Cited

02/09/2014 in Essay |

|

Comments

The comments to this entry are closed.

Go get our latest issue, NYRSF #356, February 2022, if it please you!

Search

NYRSF Back Issue Index

Recent Posts

How do I write for NYRSF?

Archives

More...

Subscribe to this blog's feed

NYRSF Reading Series

Categories