A society that doesn't know any longer how to observe every death with proper rituals, that does not know that death is not the end, but only part of the journey, has lost its way, has had the very heart of its humanity torn out.
Marina WarnerThe price the Virgin demanded was purity, and the way the educators of Catholic children have interpreted this for nearly two thousand years is sexual chastity. Impurity, we were taught, follows from many sins, but all are secondary to the principal impulse of the devil in the soul--lust.
Marina WarnerTags: religion lust purity chastity
The female form provides the solution in which the essence itself is held; she is passio, and acted upon, the male is actio, the mover.
Marina WarnerTags: gender feminism grammar female male
The store of fairy tales, that blue chamber where stories lie waiting to be rediscovered, holds out the promise of just those creative enchantments, not only for its own characters caught in its own plotlines; it offers magical metamorphoses to the one who opens the door, who passes on what was found there, and to those who hear what the storyteller brings. The faculty of wonder, like curiosity can make things happen; it is time for wishful thinking to have its due.
Marina WarnerTags: wonder storytelling fairy-tales storyteller
The more one knows fairy tales the less fantastical they appear; they can be vehicles of the grimmest realism, expressing hope against all the odds with gritted teeth.
Marina WarnerTags: fairy-tales
Fairy tales are about money, marriage, and men. They are the maps and manuals that are passed down from mothers and grandmothers to help them survive.
Marina WarnerCreating simplicity often makes the heart leap; order has been restored, the crooked made straight. But order is understanding that things cannot be made simple, that complexity reigns and must be accepted.
Marina WarnerAngela Carter...refused to join in rejecting or denouncing fairy tales, but instead embraced the whole stigmatized genre, its stock characters and well-known plots, and with wonderful verve and invention, perverse grace and wicked fun, soaked them in a new fiery liquor that brought them leaping back to life. From her childhood, through her English degree at the University of Bristol where she specialised in Medieval Literature, and her experiences as a young woman on the folk-music circuit in the West Country, Angela Carter was steeped in English and Celtic faerie, in romances of chivalry and the grail, Chaucerian storytelling and Spenserian allegory, and she was to become fairy tale’s rescuer, the form’s own knight errant, who seized hold of it in its moribund state and plunged it into the fontaine de jouvence itself.
(from "Chamber of Secrets: The Sorcery of Angela Carter")
The seductive invitation of metamorphosis - of turning into something other — has continued to suffuse fantasies of identity; on the one hand holding out a way of escape from humanity, on the other annihilating the self.
Marina WarnerEctoplasm is shapeless, it is “informe,” a kind of primordial paste—and to show itself as this, it annexes semiotic markers that designate intermediate spirit worlds. When looking at these fluid, inchoate forms, sometimes imprinted with a face, it is worth recalling that the word larva, used in English for the early stage of a caterpillar, meant “ghost” or “specter” in Latin, but is also used by Horace to designate a mask, such as might frighten an observer, while the verb larvo meant “to bewitch” or “enchant.” Ectoplasmic masks are indeed larval: they promise the emergence of forms, but don’t deliver them. The term pseudopod catches this relationship with the embryonic—and indeed with abortion.
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