“Medea Is Very Much Concerned With The Problem Of Woman’s Place In Human Society […] Euripides

Alexa Demie in Fairy Tales (2020) Photography: Petra Collins

american sterling silver and enamel eros and psyche relief vesta case, c. 19oo

TALES: KASHMIRI STORIES AND SONGS collected by Tilawônu Hatim, Sir Aurel Stein, and Sir George Abraham Grierson (London: Murray, 1923)

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Indian Gateways🪷~

In contemporary (post-modern) horror, the threat is “not simply among us, but rather part of us, caused by us.” Institutions (like the church and the military) that were once successful in containing the monster and restoring order are at best ineffectual (there is often a lack of closure) and at worst responsible for the monstrous. Contemporary horror also tends to collapse the categories of normal bodies and monstrous bodies; it is said to dispense with the binary opposition of us and them, and to resist the portrayal of the monster as a completely alien Other, characteristic of such 1950s films as The Thing (from Another World) (1951), Them! (1954), and The Blob (1958). This tendency to give the monster a familiar face (the monster is not simply among us, but possibly is us) is tied, in postmodern horror, to the focus on the body as site of the monstrous.

–Lianne McLarty, “Beyond the Veil of the Flesh”: Cronenberg and the Disembodiment of Horror, from The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film

merricat by angie hoffmeister / merricat by william teason

Persephone and the Springtime was written by Margaret Hodges with illustrations by Arvis Stewart.

Part 1

A cobra is dangerous only when it is coiled, ready to strike in an instant; when its body is completely erect it is quite harmless. Similarly, the kundalini is dangerous only in its form of the diffuse life energies, which fuel the unillumined person's hankering for sensory and sensual experiences, entangling him or her ever more in worldly karma. When the serpent power is erect, however, it is not poisonous but a source of ambrosia, because it is erect only when it has entered the central pathway leading to liberation and bliss. As Jayaratha explains in his commentary on the Tantra-Aloka (chapter 5, p. 358), when one strikes a serpent it draws itself up and becomes stiff like a rod. Similarly, through the process of "churning" the kundalini stretches upward into the perpendicular pathway of the sushumna, reaching with its head for the topmost psychoenergetic center. Georg Feuerstein, Tantra: The Path of Ecstasy, Chapter 11: Awakening the Serpent Power.

Trying to ignore or erase things like racism, patriarchal attitudes towards sexuality, antisemitism, xenophobia, ableism, etc renders a reading experience a lot less meaningful (and less interesting) than actually talking about it and confronting it. If you go into denial the moment you realize that Dracula is loaded with Victorian ethnic and sexual anxieties, what’s even the point? There isn’t much else to the book.

If you’re reading Dracula for the first time and you’re not acquainted with Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s book Monster Theory: Reading Culture, try reading this excerpt and seeing how it impacts your reading of Dracula: Monster Culture (Seven Theses)

The Colour of Pomegranates, 1969