Temptresses

by Shahrukh Husain

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Evil Women. Every culture has them. Religions have banned and branded them. Men find them terrifying and fascinating. Women secretly admire them. An eye cast over the impressive if frightening array of characters reveals baby-thief Lamia, a fertile deity from Greek mythology with a serpent's tail who seduced mortals and bred beautiful monster-children; Morgan le Fay, fairy sister to King Arthur, who according to Celtic legend tried to wrest the throne from him using her black magic powers; Medea who wreaked terrible revenge on Jason when he left her for a younger woman; Lilith, Eve, the Queen of Sheba, Delilah, Jezebel, Kali - all wicked women whose names have been with us for centuries as demons and sirens and troublemakers.

Release date: September 19, 2013

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 224

Sample

Wicked women have featured in stories since the beginning of recorded history. Every culture has them. They are terrifying and fascinating. The source of their power is the dark ruthlessness which connects them irrevocably to the Female Omnipotent. Religions have frequently branded them witches and temptresses.

Who were these women? What were their origins? Were they really as fiendish as we have come to believe? Perhaps they are the vessels of our own inner darkness, our personal potential for evil. And it is precisely because the illusion of their evil comes from ourselves that they acquire the immediacy and power that has survived through the centuries. Today when society is attempting to reassess its general attitudes, it is appropriate to look afresh at stories of demonic women.

In order to free them from centuries of exile we need to look at them in the context of the other story in which they are wound up; a long, varied and multicultural narrative which generates and frames their tales. It is the story of the power struggle between the genders. When certain men such as the Indo-Europeans and Semites of ancient worlds found their universe dominated by powerful women who were both uncontrollable and unpredictable, they invented alternative theologies which were best served if these forceful females could be made to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ – that is, to concentrate on motherhood and stay well away from all else which was now male territory. The fantasy was that, harnessed to men, wilful women would learn to defer to them and procreate for the survival of their kind. Thus female potential would be reduced to the single function of motherhood and all desire, sexual and personal, would gradually be relegated to the dominion of husband and son. A woman would participate in sex to pleasure the one and incubate the other, while her personal ambition would consist of sustaining and serving them both and preparing them for the world. The fantasy was close to being fulfilled but for the occasional wilful woman who flouted the rules and thumbed her nose at authority, subverting the establishment in the process.

I make no secret of my fascination with these subversive women. The ones in this book have been at my elbow for years, urging me to tell their stories. Four qualities loom large in their make-up: disobedience; ambition; independence; sexuality. They are the daunting, intriguing temptresses of myth, legend and religious literature. Denizens of the Bible, Romance and European fairytales, they have goaded me persistently to bring them out of their dark corners and into the limelight.

Their close link with evil is entirely illogical, apparently resting on the fact that each woman in some way makes the choice to transgress a social taboo, either because she selected, like Lamia and Granya, an inappropriate partner, or like Sheba, Medea and Morgan an unsuitable occupation, activity or alliance, or then again like Eve, Lilith or Melusine, an unbecoming course of action. By disregarding the basic precepts of society, such women often brought about destruction and in so doing bonded with death. This engendered the twofold image of mother and demon, the creative and destructive sources, in one body. Perhaps it was to escape the potency and apparent ruthlessness of such women that men like Gilgamesh, hero of the first surviving epic, set out in quest of immortality. This continual preoccupation of Man with finding a means to elude death may in turn have given rise to the concept of the soul as an eternal entity of divine or parthenogenic conception which minimised the role of woman to the mere container of the child.

Here lies the anomaly at the heart of male psychology. Men are simultaneously petrified and enthralled by woman’s dual capacity for ruthlessness and nurturing. When, in the process of confining women to motherhood, men infantilise themselves, they are left with two alternatives: they can control women by belittling them or demonise them to justify their fear. And so another set of stories is written depicting women as progressively more evil, then repeated to perpetuate their notoriety down the generations. It is time now to write them again with the benefit of hindsight and the reams of research, theory and argument that have proliferated through the centuries.

In this book I have taken the threads from various, preexisting traditions and extended, dramatised and emphasised some of them. Others I have quarrelled with or queried. Largely I have resisted invention, except in the case of Lamia where the mythos is lost and I have had to create a scenario almost from scratch. Let us take a brief look at the ‘facts’ of the individual cases. When the viewpoint changes, so do the perspectives on reality and truth.

Lilith possessed me more than almost any of the others. Her history is a long and complex one. An ecclesiastic battle was waged against her and in defence of God, which continued for centuries. She not only disobeyed his laws by demanding equality in Eden, but actually tricked him into letting her live free on earth. And like the most savage of defenders in a rape case, the holy fathers subjected her to the worst kind of defamation over the years. But, to my mind, they failed to prove their worst accusation – child-killing. During my research I discovered some folktales in which Lilith appears to be a threat to children. However, here she has obviously become cognate with local nature-witch figures since the stories have a distinctly regional, folksy flavour cut off from the richly mythic biblical one in which she originates and thrives.

Melusine has always haunted me. Even more than some of the other women in this book she seems an ‘outsider’ trapped between mortal and fairy worlds. It struck me as so unfair, when I first read her tale all those years ago, that her mother should punish her so severely and for so long simply for trying to help. I tried to imagine the impact of her mother’s ambivalence on Melusine; other than that I have followed the fairytale quite faithfully.

Sheba is portrayed in tradition as perhaps the greatest femme fatale of all time. Looking at the various accounts of her tale, it appears that she is mainly at fault for enjoying her sovereignty, for questioning Solomon’s reputation as a wise man and for being a pagan. Her testing of Solomon implies that she wanted to assert her own supremacy. That was probably what stuck in the patriarchal gullet.

Medea’s name instantly evokes the archetypal image of evil even though most of us remember her from our schooldays as Jason’s helper in his quest for the Golden Fleece. This could be because she betrayed her father and killer her brother (though most children’s versions are sanitised and do not mention the fratricide). But it is more likely because she is a skilled magician, a witch. Here I have picked up the thread when her marriage to Jason ends. Medea is another ‘outsider’ – dark, enigmatic, outlandish, she has travelled from Colchos (today’s Georgia) to the Hellenic lands of blond, blue-eyed Greeks and her ways have never quite been accepted.

Granya breaks two of the strongest social taboos when she chooses the occasion of her betrothal feast to coerce the groom’s close friend to elope with her. And once she has succeeded in sinking in the proverbial claws, she never lets go. Is it ego or stubbornness – or does she enjoy the havoc triggered by her act? She has been described as the Celtic Eve because of her lust for Forbidden Fruit – and she audaciously indulges every temptation to the very end.

Lamia was clearly a pre-Hellenic figure who won her place in Greek mythology because, like many other goddesses of conquered nations, she had somehow to be co-opted into the pantheon of the current rulers. Thus her own mythos was supplanted by the surviving fragment pertaining to her relationship with Zeus. All we know about her apart from her slightly confused genealogy, is that she incurred Hera’s wifely wrath because Zeus kept trying to impregnate her. I have tried to imagine what her life was like after she became entangled with warring divinities.

Morgan Le Fay posed a problem for most of the early chroniclers of Arthurian romance. She was originally a Celtic sovereignty goddess whose function was to keep the divinely ordained king on his toes. Sir Thomas Malory construes this as hostility and makes her a witch in his fragmentary, episodic and unsatisfying account, Le Morte D’Arthur. But he never explains the reason for either her hostility or her subsequent support. I have tried to return coherence to Morgan’s role in Arthur’s life by weaving together the strands from various traditional narratives. I hope I have succeeded in relocating her in the authentic context.

Eve in Eden always makes me think of a non-conformist living in a smug, conventional suburb. She needs a subversive friend – or a therapist – to encourage her to make the choices that will free her from her prison. The serpent was the ideal choice. It is present in many of the tales of creation and is often seen with the Goddesses of Creation at the beginning of the world. Since Eve comes from the same mould as the ancient Creatrix it seemed an appropriate confidante.

In each of these stories, the bad reputation of the woman far overshadows the extend of her deeds. But even though she is outrageous rather than truly wicked, there is no doubt that she upends the safe little patriarchal set-up. Common themes of the tales are power and defeminisation; female monarchy; challenge to male supremacy; regicide, patricide and child-killing; well-defined sexual appetites and the demand for sexual equality linked with deformity of the lower regions – bird talons, hooves and snake-tails; theriomorphism.

Wilful, in the case of such a woman, comes to mean wicked. She is believed to have lost the ability to love and nurture in her lust for sex and power. Her appearance alters to expose her inner, bestial nature, frequently that of a nocturnal creature (Lilith the screech-owl; Lamia and Melusine the snake-women). She acquires a demonic ancestry (Sheba’s mother was a jinn). Her fondness for riddling conveys her underhand character and the desire to trap and humiliate. She mothers monsters.

Her qualities and actions strike at the very core of patriarchal religion and its commitment to the survival of certain beliefs. Consequently, the traditional device of the patriarch has been to demonise and degrade such women by continuously associating them with evil. Such a woman must at all costs be disempowered, or she could, like the wild and ruthless ancient goddesses and queens, destroy the patriarchal system altogether. Degraded to a demon, she is deprived of the power to corrupt the women of subsequent generations.

But even the sustained effort of centuries could not suppress her magnetism. When we were susceptible to the propaganda we were tantalised by her: the illicit pleasure of her way of being enthralled and terrified us. Now, when we disregard the old agenda, we are profoundly inspired: she entices us to rise above preset boundaries, lures us to what we can find of her qualities within ourselves. For me, every one of these women, in her unique way, is the quintessential temptress – she draws us irresistibly.

Shahrukh Husain

Bring out the cups – you see this spell on them? It’ll keep Lilith away. Keep Lilith away! Keep Lilith away! The chant resonates, echoes, begins again. Lilith will be hovering, ready to take the child as it slips, wrenched from its mother’s womb, into the world. Beware the screech-owl condemned by Isaiah. Is she an owl, then, who carries away little creatures in the deep of night, in claws like a vice? But look she’s there again, in a picture this time – etched into the cortex of a bowl – all stick legs and scratched cheeks, hair scraggy, eyes baggy, waiting to suck you into her vortex. And here she’s twining around the Tree of Knowledge wearing Satan’s face, nudging Eve’s arm into that last little thrust that caused the sweet, plump flesh of the apple to explode against Man’s teeth and release its bud-bursting juices. Screech-owl, serpent, demon, devil-woman, bitch – which is she?

Oh, how the books confuse you, like the pictures and scriptures and tales, like birds at war, chattering and wittering and chirruping without telling anything. But through the confusions about who she really was, what she actually did, one message resounds loud and clear: she is the embodiment of humankind’s fear. Lilith is lethal. Lilith corrupts. Keep away the serpent woman. Let the child live. Keep out Lilith.

Some say that she is evil as the night. The one who visits children after dark. She tickles them and jokes and makes them laugh. Is she Lilith the secret friend? Lilith who banishes the terrifying, devouring monsters which parents create for their babes: bogeymen, night-fiends, harpies. Lilith of the Night, all naked and gold and tawny with the light from her flaming hair. She catches the wasted howls of the tormented babes in her widespread arms, weaves them into gossamer memories for the future. She comforts them and orders away the monsters, whispering that these creatures only come to fill the empty corners and stand guard over their fears. Fears, she says, are man-made – unreal: if you know that, they vanish.

In the morning when mothers come in and soothe the nape of their infants’ necks, feeling for the tangled tufts that Lilith is said to leave, they murmur: ‘It’s smooth, Lilith wasn’t here.’ And they smile smugly and pat the talisman on the baby’s cradle. ‘It kept away Lilith,’ they say. But the speechless babes know better: they crow and wink and their parents smile indulgently, putting their toothless grins down to ‘wind’.

Lilith’s laughter fills the minds of the babies. And the tone and twist and curve of the laugh becomes set in their minds so that some part of their laughter sings and harmonises with hers ever after. It says: I like Lilith. I’ll be like Lilith. I’ll summon her when they tell me to be ashamed. I’ll do as she did, up there in Eden, when the Powerful One would not give way to her. I will. And the next time Father raises his hand to me because I’ve upset my little brother, I’ll bring Lilith into me and I’ll bite his hand. Lilith wouldn’t let anyone strike her.

Lilith is the scourge of the honourable. Lilith rides men at night. Lilith is corruption. Lilith is evil incarnate. Lilith? She’s shameless.

And does her depravity disturb her? No, not Lilith – she denies she’s depraved, blames Divinity for death, exults in her banishment. She refuses, she says, to carry the darkness of others. The darkness of others! All that is eclipsed and evil and corrupt is in Lilith herself. Once, may the Devil’s ears be deaf, she even dared to outmanoeuvre the Powerful One …

It was how it had to be. But the aeons have garbled the events. Or the truth is mixed with the thoughts of the tellers: there have been so many, these prophets – each with his own view, an imagined shame to hide, a presumed crime to be punished. They pile misapprehension on misunderstanding and the misguided desire to draw attention away from a truth that might disgrace their deity. Instead of clarifying, they obfuscate, try to redirect blame. They vilify and demonise and make ineffectual efforts to transform the truth. But what do they really know of the Powerful One? Or of the beginning of his world?

They say no one can recall the exact moment of birth but Lilith remembers. She sighs, sending a sinuous movement through the trees and clouds outside.

It was a long time ago, so very long ago. On the fifth day of Creation. She was Spirit. If the substance of the Powerful One was a sea of wine then she was its ridge of waves; if he was the mighty blaze, then she its ring of flames. He was the ground, she its manifestation. He was life, she the life force. As he was the mighty androgyne, so she contained male and female within her. She detached from the Powerful One to become incarnate in all that lived and breathed and grew and moved. And in those first moments of separation she yearned for company. It was she who infused the swarms that inhabited the seas and moved about on earth. But that was not enough. She longed for other beings in her own image – differentiated like herself – who did not look to her for their lives.

Longingly, she flew to heaven and circled around, gazing into the blaze of light which surrounded the Powerful One. Slowly, she looked into the glow and distinguished around him a ring of little faces, innocent and fresh, mirrors of her own.

‘Let me live with them,’ she begged. ‘Let me stay with my own kind. I love them like myself.’

But the Powerful One told Lilith she did not know her place. ‘You were not meant for Paradise. Man, my newest creation, needs you. He is lonely and I’m not sure I like the things he’s getting up to, in Eden.’

And Lilith was forced to go down where she did not want to go. Man was no better than the animals around him. But Lilith came to see that he was very beautiful. So she decided she would do her best to obey the Powerful One’s decree.

Lilith did not know her place. She romped with Man, always as an equal. In fact, she had the attitude of a superior. Man shared sexual acts with the beasts and plants of Eden before Lilith came; she showed him how all species were created in duality, male for female, to have sex together. And when Lilith lay down in the grass and called Man to her he abandoned the animals and the bushes and pounced on her with such vigour and eagerness that he would not let her alone ever after. He ambushed her in the bushes and he mounted her in the mountains and he rushed her in the rushes that whispered and whooshed at the waterside. They were good days, those romping days, spent companionably and erotically and ecstatically. Then Man changed.

After an enjoyable morning spent wandering through trees, bathing in the cool steams of Eden, she racing, he chasing, until he caught up with her and they lay caressing and kissing, Man had one of his erections.

‘Aha!’ cried Lilith, full of fun and so quick that she spotted the change even before Man himself. Like a flame freed from the flint, she straddled Man, her rounded form a column rising from his waist. Man watched, dumbfounded, as she reared and fell, stretching her body in a taut arch, arms preceding trunk, legs folded beneath, performing an ecstatic, writhing dance of union. What was Lilith up to? What did she think she was doing?

Lilith’s being stood still inside her twisting body as she felt the surge of energy build, ready for release. Man saw her absorbed, lost. He struck, hurling his body sideways so that she was thrown askew. He grabbed her roughly by the shoulders, pinning her to the ground as he heaved his hips astride hers. He released her shoulders, held her by the hair at her temples.

‘This is how it is to be,’ he ground out. ‘This is how it was always meant to be. I will be on top. You lie below me.’

Lilith screamed with rage. ‘We’re made of the same dust, the same hand, the same urge. Without me you’re nothing. We’re equals – why should I lie beneath you? Sex is a game for two, unifying and pure. Each one has a turn. Pleasure is all.’

But would Man agree?

‘Equality!’ he stormed. ‘You are not my equal and you will always lie below me, just as you always have.’ And he thrust into her, the first thrust of debasement – handed down to mankind from that moment on.

Lilith let out another shriek, torn apart but unwilling to let Man’s act degrade her even if it was inflicted on her body. Her scream was shaped into ‘the Powerful One’ and it demanded arbitration.

But arbitration failed to come.

‘You,’ rasped Man, encouraged by the Powerful One’s reticence, ‘were made from the filth and impure sediments of my body. You are my inferior, made from my waste. You will never be my equal.’

In that moment, Lilith forgot her divine origins. In that instant she felt as repulsive as Man’s excrement. Humiliation and self-loathing overwhelmed her. It was as if lying below Man was as great an honour as she could expect. But then the little faces swam before her eyes; the cherubim, reflecting her beauty and perfection. And clearly, boldly, she flew up to Heaven and asked again if she could stay with them, the cherubim, whom she adored. But, as before, the Powerful One refused.

Lilith became still, drawing her considerable power into her body, preparing to commit an act of such volition that its impact would stretch from then on into the eternal evermore. Slowly, absolutely, her power filled her body and she channelled it into her mind and focused on the one word that must never be spoken – the inexpressible name of God. It was an act of such enormity, of. . .