Myschizlife

Morgan le Fay

Arthurian Legends, England, Folklore, Legends, Literature, Mythology, Witchcraft

Morgan le Fay first steps into Arthur’s mythos in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita Merlini, written in 1150. Here, she is the eldest of the nine sisters who rule the ethereal isle of Avalon and is a powerful healer. This Morgan could shape shift into animals, manifest as a crone or a maiden and fly. She’s also clever – a skilled mathematician and astronomer. Arthur’s men trust Morgan and take their mortally injured king to her to be healed. Geoffrey’s portrayal of her is sympathetic and he creates a strong, rounded female character.

In Chrétien de Troyes’ French romantic interpretation of the myth, she is presented as Arthur’s sister and described as ‘Morgan the Wise’. She is no longer the ruler of the island, but is in a relationship with its ruler, Lord Guigomar. And so her power starts to be subsumed, manipulated by medieval writers, reluctant to believe a woman could be knowledgeable, powerful or clever.

She remains a relatively benign character until Arthur’s tale is dramatically rewritten in the French Vulgate Cycle (c. 1210–30), thought to be composed by fundamentalist Cistercian monks. Cistercians were crusaders, dedicated to eradicating heretics. They despised women – some even argued against the existence of a female soul – and used the Arthurian tales as propaganda for the Christian religion. Morgan embodied everything that terrified them about the old forms of worship – a knowledgeable, gifted woman, unashamed of her flesh and desires, existing in a society that acknowledged a female presence. They twisted the benevolent character of Morgan Le Fay into a more sinister seductress and obsessive witch.

Using her looks and sexuality, she persuades Merlin to teach her the dark arts. She exposes Guinevere’s affair with Lancelot and later tries to seduce the knight. In the order’s later works, Morgan’s character becomes more overtly evil: she uses her powers to steal the magical sword Excalibur and its scabbard to use against Arthur and plots his downfall, only to be thwarted by the new witch Ninianne, the Lady of the Lake. However, at the end of Vulgate Cycle, Morgan is one of the ladies who escort Arthur on his final trip to Avalon.

By 1485, when the definitive Arthur book, Le Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Malory, appears, the Cistercian template is set. Malory’s Morgan is even more reductive. There is no affair that initiates her conflict with Guinevere; instead she’s just a fundamentally wicked person, malevolent, Arthur’s nemesis, a mistress of the dark arts, manifesting the medieval world’s fear of the knowledge and power of women.

In Germany, the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches) was about to be published near-simultaneously and these books helped to whip up anti-magic fervour and presaged a spike in UK witch trials. One last vestige of Morgan’s earlier incarnation remains – she is permitted to transport Arthur’s body to Avalon.

Morgan has remained a powerful figure in literature – she appears in Italian Renaissance poems, French literature and English writer Edmund Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queen. She has smouldered on the big screen, memorably portrayed by Helen Mirren in Excalibur (1981).

Her character is strong enough to bear endless reworking. The image of a sexually confident woman, clever, and gifted with magical healing abilities has been reimagined from benevolent to evil, yet still retains its power. Medieval authors turned Morgan into an evil, vengeful caricature – the only way they could deal with her independence, her power, her sexuality.

Sources: Warriors, Witches, Women

Iara

Guide to Vampires, Mythological Creatures, Mythology

An iara is a vampiric spirit or vampiric witch from Brazil, depending on the way it died. If a person dies violently, or before his time, or outside the Catholic Church, or if a body is not given a proper Catholic burial or is buried in the jungle, that person will become the vampiric spirit type of iara. However, if a living person sells his soul to the devil for power, he will become the vampiric witch kind of iara.

The iara, no matter how it came to be, can, in its human guise, sing a beautiful, sirenlike song that will lure men out into the jungle. There is a protective chant that can be uttered as soon as a man hears the iara’s song, but he must be quick, otherwise he is doomed to fall prey to it. Once the iara has secured a victim, it shape-shifts into a snake with red eyes and, using a form of mesmerism, hypnotizes its prey, after which it will drain off his blood and semen. It leaves the bodies of those it has killed near waterways.

Source: Bryant, Handbook of Death

Mount Vernon: Study

American South, Cultural Sites, Southern Culture, Travel, Virginia

After George Washington’s return to Mount Vernon at the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783, the Study became his retreat from ever-present family and visitors; a place where he could quietly and privately tend to business. Reportedly, no one was allowed in this room without Washington’s invitation. From here, he directed the management of his Estate, receiving reports from overseers, making daily diary entries, and posting his accounts.

The Study was also where Washington bathed, dressed, and kept his clothes. Each morning, he rose between 4 and 5 am and went to the study, using the private staircase that led down from the bedchamber. According to the recollections of his step-grandson George Washington (Washy) Parke Custis, he lit his own fire and dressed himself. Washington used this quiet time to write letters or review reports until breakfast at 7 am, after which he usually rode out to his farms. In the evening, unless he had a social obligation or lingered talking to visitors after dinner, he returned here to read or confer with his secretary until around 9 pm, when he went to bed.

In this room you will find a fan chair similar to Washington’s, which helped him to stay cool on hot summer’s days; Washington’s chair that he used as President, a portrait of Lawrence Washington, bookcases, a secretary, and other artifacts from Washington’s life.

Mount Vernon: Piazza

American South, Cultural Sites, Southern Culture, Travel, Virginia

The two-story piazza is the Mansion’s most distinctive architectural feature. Extending the full length of the back of the house, it also has a practical function—catching the river breezes on a hot and humid Virginia day. The Washingtons treated the piazza as an outdoor room, serving afternoon tea here to visitors and family members seated in simple Windsor chairs.

From the piazza, visitors observe a thickly wooded area which was an 18-acre deer park, a common feature on large estates of that time. Washington stocked his with tame deer from nearby and from England for the delight of family and visitors. The trees between the Mansion and the river were carefully pruned to emphasize the view of the Potomac, creating a so-called “hanging wood.”

Mount Vernon: Kitchen

American South, Cultural Sites, Southern Culture, Travel, Virginia

The Kitchen was used to prepare all meals served to George and Martha Washington and their many guests. Cooking in Mount Vernon’s kitchen was hot, smoky, demanding, and skilled work. Enslaved cooks like Doll, Hercules, Nathan, and Lucy, arose at four each morning to light the fire in the oven and prepare for the meals to be served in the Mansion. Their duties could continue well into the evening. The Washingtons placed great trust in their cooks, whose talent was evident in visitors’ descriptions of sumptuous meals.

Under Martha Washington’s supervision, cooks planned menus and selected ingredients for each day’s meals. Enslaved laborers on the estate grew and harvested most of the Washingtons’ food: wheat and corn from the fields, fresh vegetables from the garden, fruit from the orchards, fish caught in the Potomac, and smoked ham from hogs raised on site. Imported luxuries like tea, coffee, chocolate, olives, oranges, and wine supplemented homegrown ingredients.

Their role in the kitchen allowed enslaved cooks to shape the tastes of the household—and the region. Many iconic southern dishes bear the influence of West African cuisine, from stews like gumbo to ingredients like okra, sweet potatoes, peanuts, and collard greens.

The placement of the kitchen at Mount Vernon was dictated by a series of functional, social, and environmental factors. The concern for safety from potential fires, the desire to avoid kitchen heat, and the need to avoid the smell of food cooking in the household were of significant importance. In addition, there was a desire to separate domestic functions from the main house in order to reinforce the segregation of enslaved workers’ activities from those of the planter family.

Mount Vernon: Little Parlor

American South, Cultural Sites, Southern Culture, Travel, Virginia

Music played an important role in the Mount Vernon household, as it did in other genteel Virginia homes of the period. Music masters traveled from plantation to plantation, instructing the young, and their presence often inspired lively social gatherings filled with music and dancing. George Washington loved to dance, and he is reported on one occasion during the Revolutionary War to have done so for three hours.

When Washington returned home from the presidency, he decided to convert what had been a first-floor bedchamber into a music and family room, thus allowing more space for informal entertaining.

Though by Washington’s own account he could neither sing nor “raise a single note on any instrument,” he helped ensure that his stepchildren and step-grandchildren were instructed in music. Early in his marriage, he ordered a spinet for Martha’s daughter, Martha (Patsy) Parke Custis, and a violin and German flute for Martha’s son, John (Jacky) Parke Custis.

In this room, you will find a harpsichord which was purchased by Washington in 1793 for his step-granddaughter Eleanor (Nelly) Parke Custis.

Roanoke Colony (The Lost Colony)

American South, Colonies, History, Southern Culture, U.S. History

In 1584, Sir Walter Raleigh dispatched an expedition to find a suitable location to establish a settlement in North America. The expedition, led by Richard Greenville, first attacked Spanish shipping in the Carribean then on the way back to England explored Albermale Sound in North Carolina and recommended it for settlement.

In 1585, a small group led by Richard Grenville established a settlement. Grenville left Captain Ralph Lane on Roanoke Island, with around 75 men and instructions to build a fort. He promised to return with more men and supplies. Lane had poor control over his men. They fought the local Indians. When Sir Francis Drake stopped in on the colony on the way back to England and offered to take the settlers back, the settlers accepted.

A few weeks after the colonists left, Greenville returned with more supplies. Greenville found the fort intact, but with no settlers. He left 15 soldiers behind in the fort, while he returned to England to bring more settlers. 121 settlers, led by John White set sail in 1587 for the colony. Soon after landing White’s daughter gave birth to Virginia Dare, the first English baby North America. The colonists were attacked a number of times by Native Indians. They convinced White to return to England, to explain their situation and bring back additional support. White returned to England but before he could organize a relief mission, Spain attempted to invade England. Not until the Spanish Armada was defeated was White able to return. When he arrived in August 1590, he found the settlement deserted, with no signs of the settlers or of a struggle. The only clue as to the whereabouts of the colonists was the word “CROATOAN.” To this day, the fate of these colonists remains a mystery.

Food Through Culture: Bananas Foster

Culinary, Desserts, Food Through Culture, Southern Cooking, Southern Ingredients

Bananas Foster is a dessert on which a restaurant empire was built. The story begins with three New Orleans siblings in the early 1950s. John Brennan, a produce supplier facing down an excess of bananas in his warehouse, gave the bananas to his brother, Owen, who was making the family name synonymous with fine Creole cuisine at Brennan’s Vieux Carré Restaurant. Owen passed the bananas along to their sister, Ella, with instructions to create a dessert to honor a New Orleans civic grandee named Richard Foster.

Working with the restaurant’s chef, Ella devised the classic tableside preparation, which involves brown sugar, butter, a good splash of rum, a flick of the wrist, a tip of the pan, and a gleeful whoosh of fire. But the brilliance of bananas Foster is how it recasts cherries jubilee—a recipe invented fifty years prior by Auguste Escoffier in honor of Queen Victoria—with New World ingredients. And it left its imprint on a generation of American dinner-party hosts looking to dress up overripe bananas.

Mount Vernon: Front Parlor

American South, Cultural Sites, Southern Culture, Travel, Virginia

Through fine architectural features, artwork, and furnishings, the room was a means by which the Washingtons reinforced their elevated social status as a couple, as well as George Washington’s prominence in the social and political landscape.

Nearly every important politician and dignitary who visited the Washingtons was entertained in this space, from the Marquis de Lafayette to Thomas Jefferson. The space was primarily identified with the lady of the house, and here Martha Washington presided over the tea table and showed off her family through the many portraits that she had commissioned and had hung on the walls.

Origin and Tenets of the Lost Cause Myth

American South, Civil War, History, Lost Cause Myth, Southern Culture, U.S. History

“The South was not only…conquered, it was utterly destroyed…More than half [of] the farm machinery was ruined, and…Southern wealth decreased by 60 percent,”

~James M. McPherson.

There are six main parts of the Lost Cause myth, the first and most important of which is that secession had little or nothing to do with the institution of slavery. Southern states seceded to protect their rights, their homes, and to throw off the shackles of a tyrannical government. To the proponents of the Lost Cause, secession was constitutional, and the Confederacy was the natural heir to the American Revolution. Because secession was constitutional, those who fought for the Confederacy were not traitors. Northerners, specifically Northern abolitionists, caused the war with their fiery rhetoric and agitating, even though slavery was on its way to gradually dying a natural death. They also argued secession was a way to preserve the Southern agrarian way of life in the face of encroaching Northern industrialism.

Second, slavery was portrayed as a positive good; submissive, happy, and faithful slaves were better off in the system of chattel slavery which offered them protection. Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens declared in 1861 “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.” After the war, these formerly enslaved people were now said to be unprepared for freedom, which was an argument against Reconstruction and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments of the Constitution.

The third tenet states that the Confederacy was only defeated because of the Northern states’ numerical advantage in both men and resources. The Confederate Army was less defeated than overwhelmed, as their lesser resources. Former Confederate officer Jubal A. Early justified the Southern defeat by stating that the North “finally outproduced that exhaustion of our army and resources, and that accumulation of numbers on the other side which wrought our final disaster.” Early went on to say that the South “had been gradually worn down by combined agencies of numbers, steam-power, railroads, mechanism.” The lack of southern manufacturing and the outnumbered population doomed it to failure from the start. Thus, the “Lost Cause.”

“If the soldiers, according to the Lost Cause tradition, fought like hell but with honor, then the Confederate generals were gods. The greatest star in the Confederate constellation, the Christlike Lee, was without fault, without sin, a wholly perfect deity the likes of which no one had seen, ever. If the soldiers fought with honor, led by saints, the women of the South remained devoted to the cause to the very end—and beyond.”

~Ty Seidule

Fourth, Confederate soldiers are portrayed as heroic, gallant, and saintly. Even after the surrender, they retained their honor. At one reunion oration, Confederate General Thomas R. R. Cobb, who was killed at the Battle of Fredericksburg, was compared to “Joshua in his courage,…St. Paul in the logic of his eloquence and St. Stephen in the triumph of his martyrdom.”

Fifth, Robert E. Lee emerged as the most sanctified figure in Lost Cause lore, especially after his death in 1870. Lee himself became a symbol for the Lost Cause, and a “Cult of Lee” revered the Virginian as the ultimate Christian soldier who took up arms for his state. He was even called the second Washington. Lee was the most successful of all Confederate Army commanders, and after the war, Jubal Early and many former Southern officers placed Lee upon a pedestal. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson became a martyr, wounded by his men while defending the Lost Cause. Even the office building where Jackson died bore the name “The Stonewall Jackson Shrine” for decades. On the other hand, James Longstreet became a villain to Lee and Jackson’s heroes, blamed for the loss at Gettysburg and vilified for his newfound Republican affiliation and the temerity to question Lee’s wartime decisions. Even former Confederate President Jefferson Davis became a reverential figure, seen as the personification of states’ rights.

Finally, Southern women also steadfastly supported the cause, sacrificing their men, time, and resources more than their Northern counterparts. The idealized image of a pure, saintly, white Southern woman emerged as well.

Southern women played a large role in perpetuating the Lost Cause. They converted their wartime soldiers’ aid organizations into memorial organizations, to commemorate their male counterparts who fell during the war. Because women were seen as inherently nonpolitical, and memorializing was not seen as political, they were able to take the lead in memorializing the Southern cause. Ladies’ Memorial Associations were formed all across the South to dedicate Confederate cemeteries and organized Memorial Days for fallen Confederates. They would eventually unite in 1900 to become the Confederated Southern Memorial Association, and by then, their goals had expanded beyond just remembering their dead. Now, they collected Confederate relics and instilled veneration for the Southern cause in the younger generation through textbooks and educational outreach efforts.

The Lost Cause myth held that Reconstruction was an abject failure. After the secessionists’ defeat and occupation by the U.S. Army, southern states had to “reconstruct.” Ashley Wilkes says, “Reconstruction is worse than death.”

The Reconstruction-as-failure myth held that African Americans weren’t ready for freedom, the vote, or holding high office. Black citizenship proved a costly failure. In reality, African Americans served with distinction in high office. By 1877, about two thousand Black men in the former Confederate states held elected office at the local, state, and federal levels.

The Lost Cause narrative featured a racist fear of African Americans, combined with hatred for carpetbaggers and scalawags. A carpetbagger came to the South from the North with his suitcase, a carpetbag, ready to exploit the South. “Carpetbaggers will steal anything that isn’t red hot or nailed down.” In reality, most northerners who came south often tried to help African Americans, or they brought capital to an impoverished people and wrecked economy. In the postwar South, there really wasn’t much to steal.