Like Clifford, Anathema has no sense of self beyond her family identity. Clifford at least has autonomy over that identity, creating and controlling it through the act of writing; Anathema, from earliest childhood, finds that identity and destiny have already been written for her. Like English Civil War memoirists, she realizes that she is living at crucial historical moment and wants to understand her place within it. Rather than situating herself, however, she is situated, literally marginalized in Agnes’s history of the world. The prophecies give Anathema a community and a sense of purpose, but they leave no room for surprises or individual choices, even about the most personal matters: when Newt suggests they make love a second time, Anathema replies, “She said we only did it this once” (284).
The relationship between Anathema and Newt is key to the novel’s resolution; having struggled with her family’s history, Anathema makes peace with it through her union with Newt. While Clifford and Fanshawe emphasize the preservation of female lines, Good Omens does not overtly posit a gendered link between Agnes and Anathema. However, Anathema’s relationship with Newt Pulsifer suggests a resolution to the gendered oppression her ancestor experienced. About a quarter of the victims of witchcraft persecution in Europe and the New World were male, and men made up as many as half the accused in some continental European countries such as Germany and France. In England, however, “90 per cent or more of known witches were women” (Briggs 261). Women were believed to be more sexually uncontrollable, less reasonable, and, as Eve’s descendants, more given to temptation, and therefore more vulnerable to the Devil’s influence. In Good Omens, however, the serious subject of witchcraft persecution is reduced to absurdity. Anathema’s arrival inspires a comic parody of Agnes’s own death when Adam, Brian, Wensleydale, and Pepper reenact the Spanish Inquisition by dunking their chosen witch, Pepper’s little sister, in a pond until she confesses (135–136). Elsewhere in the story, Shadwell’s attempts at witch hunting are similarly undercut by humor. No longer able to draw ninepence for each proven witch, Shadwell bolsters the Witchfinder Army’s funds with the invention of “Witchfinder Majors Saucepan, Tin, Milk, and Cupboard,” in addition to hundreds of others, to collect additional money from Crowley and Aziraphale (181). If Shadwell is heir to a great tradition, it is also a ridiculous one: “It was a mistake to think of Shadwell ... as a lone nut. It was just that all the others were dead, in most cases for several hundred years” (191).
Just as witchcraft is Anathema’s family legacy, Puritanism, misogyny, and witchcraft persecution are Newt’s. Certainly not all historical Puritans were misogynists or witchhunters, but Gaiman and Pratchett make use of the way popular culture often associates misogyny and persecution with Puritanism. The Pulsifers, a “very religious family,” featured offspring such as Covetousness Pulsifer, False-Witness Pulsifer, and Newt’s own ancestor, Thou-shalt-not-commit-adultery Pulsifer, whom Anathema suspects “just didn’t like women very much” (207). Adultery Pulsifer, one of “England’s most assiduous witchfinders” and the force behind Agnes’s victimization, is blown to bits by the explosion at her execution and “might have felt some ancient revenge was at last going to be discharged” when Newt meets Anathema (195, 196). Despite his job as a Witchfinder, however, Newt shows no desire to actually persecute witches; he is not the type to persecute anyone. He embraces history for history’s sake: “The way Newt looked at it, it was like being in one of those organizations like the Sealed Knot or those people who kept on refighting the American Civil War. It got you out at weekends, and meant that you were keeping alive fine old traditions that had made Western civilization what it was today” (191–192). His very name is not a witchfinder’s moniker, but one traditionally associated with witches themselves (consider Macbeth’s “eye of newt,” Monty Python and the Holy Grail’s temporary enchantment victim who was turned into a newt but “got better,” and, more recently, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban’s Nastily Exhausting Wizarding Test or N.E.W.T.).
Though a Witchfinder, Newt regards Agnes not as an enemy but as a mere annoyance at most, an “elderly female relative” impeding his courtship of Anathema: “He had even been entertaining the idea of inviting her out for a meal, but he hated the idea of some Cromwellian witch sitting in her cottage three centuries earlier and watching him eat” (229). She even predicts their lovemaking “in the most transparent of codes” (284). Her involvement in Anathema’s personal life indicates how private “women’s matters” like love and sex, rather than patriarchal power, will help unify the forces that the two families represent: female and misogynist, intuition and Puritanism, marginalization and power. Near the novel’s conclusion, Shadwell has a dream of which he can remember only one phrase: “Nothin’ wrong with witchfinding. I’d like to be a witchfinder. It’s just, well, you’ve got to take it in turns. Today we’ll go out witchfinding, an’ tomorrow we could hide, an it’d be the witches’ turn to find US...” (376). Shortly after, Shadwell, the last Witchfinder, finally initiates his relationship with Madame Tracy, the novel’s only other surviving witch. This union mirrors Newt and Anathema’s, showing that power can be shared rather than abused.
Ironically, by following Agnes’s lead and rectifying the injustice done to her ancestor through her union with Newt, Anathema can now let go of her identity as a professional descendant. The past is put to rest, the bad blood between the Pulsifers and the Devices expunged, and they can move into the future together. When the “sequel” to Agnes’s prophecies is delivered to Jasmine Cottage post-apocalypse, Newt asks: “Do you want to be a descendant for the rest of your life?” (371). Anathema doesn’t answer the question, and the reader never learns whether she continues to devote her life to understanding the prophecies, or leaves the book closed and begins a new life. That the answer lies beyond the scope of Good Omens is perhaps the entire point; the issue will always remain ambiguous and undefined, with no text left to guide us.
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Doors, Vortices and the In-Between
Quantum Cosmological Goddesses in the Gaiman Multiverse
BY KRISTINE LARSEN
To say that Neil Gaiman’s works feature deities as characters is to say the Pacific Ocean has water. Some of these personages are real-world gods and goddesses “rebooted” in modern dress, such as Odin, Bast, and Anansi. Others are his own creation, but very much cast in a classical vein. A third class is the new deities of American Gods, personifications of aspects of modern society such as Media and the Internet. But for all their shiny new trappings, these are no better (and in the end no more powerful) than the old gods they seek to replace. Gaiman also creates a new type of idols, whose individuals may or may not have classical names, but more importantly have a truly modern—as in modern physics—set of powers. These include a powerful set of new cosmological goddesses, who, rather than merely representing the moon or stars, travel between dimensions and create and/or destroy entire universes. In combining ancient mythological tropes with the modern paradigms of quantum mechanics and general relativity, Gaiman puts a fresh and empowering face on the Great Mother and her reproductive powers. Gone is the Newtonian concept of a singular, linear, mechanistic universe; the universe is now replaced by the chaotic, roll-the-dice multiverse of Einstein, Guth, and Everett. Here “big bangs” occur not just once but a multitude of times, creating innumerable baby universes. Cosmological birth is a continual process, as doors are repeatedly opened to new realities and new possibilities. At the same time centuries-old idea characterizations of the nature as the female victim of the male scientist’s domination are challenged, replaced by a powerful new feminine paradigm where dichotomy is replaced by synthesis and symbiosis. On this journey through fiction and physics the reader discovers that he/she is not separate from the universe, but is rather an integral part of it. In a very real sense we are the universe, and the universe is us. Not only does the cosmos affect our actions, but our very actions have the power to shape, create, and even destroy universes. This essay will explore Gaiman’s usage of both classical and these new “quantum” cosmological goddesses (henceforth referred to as QCG) in his Secondary Worlds, the former aligning him with J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, and the latter with Philip Pullman.
While Tolkien’s works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings feature relatively few female characters, those who are included are strong women who owe much to the medieval Valkyrie tradition (Donovan 109). However, Tolkien’s great Elvish cosmology, The Silmarillion, features even numbers of male and female “deities,” the so-called Valar. While these powers are secondary to the all-powerful creator Ilúvatar, the Valar both personify and direct the workings of specific parts of the world. For example, Varda, the Queen of the Valar, creates the stars and supervises the original motions of the sun and moon. In these traits, Varda is a rather classical goddess figure, and the Valar are in general echoes of the Norse and Greek pantheons. In one of his earliest etymologies of Middle-earth, Tolkien notes that the term Ainur (the generic term for the Valar and similar beings who were created by Ilúvatar but unlike the Valar did not choose to enter the world and are afterwards bound to its fate) derives from ainu, “a pagan god” (248–489). While the strong female characters of Lewis’s Narnia chronicles (such as the witch Jadis and the Pevensie sisters) do possess the power to travel between worlds, they lack the power to create or destroy those worlds. Instead, they rely on the more traditional powers of enchantment, corruption, and warfare to affect these worlds. Furthermore, in the case of Narnia itself, the world is a flat, medieval cosmology where astrology is as important as astronomy.
In both ancient and medieval cosmologies, and to some extent even in our modern mythology, the moon is, above all other celestial bodies, connected with the feminine principle. Not only is the connection between female and lunar due to the similarity between the 29.5 day cycle of the moon’s phases and the menstrual cycle, but also due to the obvious metaphor of birth, growth, and death seen in the waxing and waning of the moon’s appearance from new to full and back again. The three major parts of the moon’s cycle—waxing, full, and waning back to new—give rise to a three-fold aspect, seen in the common triad of lunar goddesses from classical mythology (maiden, mother, and crone). However, despite the fact that this reproductive/sexual aspect has agency (in a reproductive sense), there is an inherent passivity, as the womb is a passive place of potential until activated by the active male seed. This passivity is inherent in the lunar metaphor, because the moon does not emit any light of its own, but is instead merely a mirror reflecting the light of the sun, a body that is most often seen as male in mythology (Biedermann 224).
The cosmological goddesses of Gaiman’s American Gods are, on the surface, similar to those of Lewis and Tolkien and classical lunar goddesses, and in fact are manifestations of real-world goddesses trying to survive in the modern world. Their powers appear limited and their roles very traditional. The Egyptian goddess Bast spends most of her time sleeping in cat-form on Shadow’s bed; on at least one occasion she satisfies his sexual needs (while he dreams). In the Egyptian pantheon, Bast was seen as a lunar deity, and protected childbirth and healing, respectively, reflecting the stereotypical feminine roles of midwife and nurse (Ann and Imel 79). Therefore her connections to both the night/dreams and sexuality are very much stereotypical in the novel. In a 2001 interview with Rudi Dornemann and Kelly Everding, Gaiman openly acknowledges his interest in the three Slavic cosmological goddesses known as the Zorya, and the frustratingly little that is known of their tradition. Gaiman’s Zorya are largely plucked from encyclopedias of mythology unchanged, even down to the tradition of their watching the sky all night, monitoring the evil being chained to the Big Dipper (American Gods 89; Ann and Imel 72–73). In this role, the goddesses are again depicted as passive watchers. Their only action in Slavic mythology is to open the gates for their father Dazhbog (the sun god) and his chariot at sunrise and sunset. However, Gaiman takes this mythology one step further in giving the normally nameless third sister, the Midnight Star, a name—Zorya Polunochnaya (Dixon-Kennedy 321). Once again, the reader’s introduction to this third Zorya is replete with standard stereotypical language. She complains to Shadow that she never got to see her father in the Old Country because she slept during the day, his time of activity (American Gods 89). As the midnight sister who never sees the sun, she is an obvious symbol of the full moon, and it is in this role that she gives Shadow an image of the moon (in the form of a coin) to light his way. However, she admits that this is a “much weaker protection” than the gold solar coin he had previously given away to his dead wife, because it is the protection of the “daughter, not the father” (American Gods 90). In other words, once again we are reminded that the moon is seen as inferior and less powerful/active than the male solar deity.
While
the cosmological goddesses of American Gods are very traditional despite their modern lifestyle, in Stardust the female characters take a baby step forward, straddling both the wall between the real world and Faerie, and the transitions in both science and society marked by the Industrial Revolution. Gaiman uses these boundaries to draw attention to the supplanting of the imaginative and romantic by the cold and scientific in our modern world, reminding us that “Few of us now have seen the stars as folk saw them then—our cities and towns cast too much light into the night—but, from the village of Wall, the stars were laid out like worlds or like ideas...” (41). The cosmological goddesses of this work likewise personify this transition from classical to modern (quantum) realities. Yvaine is a very traditional cosmological divinity, the personification of a fallen star. If she ventures across the boundary between Faerie and Reality she will change into the modern world’s most unromantic and scientific notion of a meteorite—a grey lump of rock and metal. On the other hand, the witches called the Lilim exist in, and can pass between, two parallel worlds: Faerie and the reality inside their mirror. However, they are limited in their powers as well, and seek to kidnap Yvaine in order to possess her lifeforce/youth. In their ability to temporarily change from young to old to young again, as well as their threefold nature, they also are reminiscent of the classic lunar triad of goddesses.
But it is not only depictions of the moon as a goddess and the sun as a god that permeate our illustrations and metaphors of the universe, but there is also the much larger engendering of the language used to discuss both aspects of nature and the natural world in toto. Central to feminist studies is the concept that language is a social construct, and like many aspects of culture is not gender neutral. Rather, in the patriarchal tradition of Western culture, the gendering of language reflects this role of male power and female passivity and is used to suppress women (Cameron 1985; Lakoff 1975). This is clearly illustrated in the history of scientific writing in the Western tradition. Nature has been depicted as a feminine force since ancient times, and as Evelyn Fox Keller explores in detail in Reflections on Gender and Science, ever since the Scientific Revolution the process of scientific discovery has been steeped in sexual metaphor and language. For example, Keller explains that in the early seventeenth-century writings of Francis Bacon, the scientist’s role is to master science, to “hound, conquer, and subdue her—only in that way is the true ‘nature of things’ revealed” (36–37). Three centuries later, physicist and best-selling science writer Brian Greene echoed this sentiment when he noted that “nothing comes easily. Nature does not give up her secrets lightly” (470).
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