The Mythological Dimensions of Neil Gaiman

by Burke, Jessica

  35 Gaiman, Fragile, 234-5.

  36 Ibid.

  37 Ibid.

  38 Ibid.

  39 Gaiman, Fragile, 235.

  40 Ibid.

  41 Gaiman, Fragile, 236.

  42 Ibid.

  43 Ibid.

  44 Ibid.

  45 Gaiman, Fragile, 15.

  46 Gaiman, Fragile, 233.

  47 Gaiman, Fragile, 235.

  48 Ibid.

  49 Ibid. Emphasis added.

  50 Gaiman, Fragile, 234.

  51 Gaiman, Fragile, 15.

  52 Gaiman, Mirrors, 32.

  53 Gaiman, Fragile, 15-16.

  The Best Things Come in Threes: The Triple Goddess in the Works of Neil Gaiman

  Tony Keen “When shall we three meet again?”1 —Shakespeare, Macbeth That Neil Gaiman is a writer steeped in mythological traditions hardly needs stating at this point.2 It is obvious from his writings over the past twenty-plus years, and is, of course, explicit in all the contributions to the current volume. This chapter will focus on one particular mythological element in Gaiman’s work, his use of the motif of the Triple Goddess.

  In many of the mythologies of Western Europe, a motif has been identified that is referred to as the Triple Goddess. This is described as a triad of related goddesses with similar aspects, or a single goddess that appears in three forms. In Greco-Roman mythology, there are many examples (what follows is not a complete list). There are the three Fates, in Greek the Moirai, or in Latin the Parcaeor Fata. They are Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. There are the Graces (Greek Charites, Latin Gratiae), Aglaea, Euphrosyne, and Thalia. There are the Furies (Greek Erinyes, Latin Furiae or Dirae), named Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. In one tradition, recorded by the geographer Pausanias (9.29.2),3 there were only three Muses, Melete, Mneme, and Aoede, rather than the more commonly found nine.4 Another related Classical deity is Hecate, sometimes depicted with three faces or three bodies.5 By 1894, Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable was referring to her as an aspect of the Triple Goddess, along with Phoebe and Diana, the latter of which was a moon goddess. Shakespeare describes her as “triple Hecate” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act V, Scene II), and she appears as the Witches’ mistress in Macbeth (Act III, Scene V).

  Other mythologies have similar figures. Norse mythology has its own version of the three Fates, the Norns, Urðr, Verðandi, and Skuld.6 Irish mythology has the Morrígan, three warrior women, Badb, Macha, and Nemain, who are sometimes one,7 and the three Brigits (or Brigids).8 The Celtic areas of the Roman Empire have produced a number of relief sculptures and small sculptural groups depicting three female figures.9 These are commonly described as Matres (“Mothers”) or, when wearing hooded cloaks, genii cucullati;10 but these are modern terms applied to these representations. Though their meaning would no doubt have been obvious to the people who created the images, there is nothing that allows modern scholars to positively identify who these characters are, or even to confirm that the female figures are the same in each representation. It can be suggested that they may represent Hecate, but this remains speculation.

  The iconographic grouping of three magical, divine, or semi-divine figures recurs throughout western art and literature. Obviously, this would happen whenever the mythological characters were being represented, but there are also further new variations upon the form. The most famous and influential of these are the three witches of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth.11

  In the twentieth century, as theories of mythology were developed, inevitably one emerged to explain the multiple uses of three female figures. The key text here is Robert Graves’ The White Goddess (1948), who was drawing upon earlier work by James Frazer (The Golden Bough, 1890) and Jane Harrison (Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 1903; Themis, 1912). This theory identifies the three female figures with three ages of woman, Maiden, Mother, and Crone. It has been enthusiastically adopted by Neo-paganism, and can be seen in the works of D.J. Conway.

  Despite the writings of Conway and Marija Gimbutas, much recent work on the theory of myth has tended to raise questions about the Maiden-Mother-Crone version of the Triple Goddess.12 The Triple Goddess actually covers a wide variety of depictions of female divinities, which do not always fit into the neat divisions offered up by the MaidenMother-Crone version. For instance, few of the Classical divinities are differentiated in age. One can make an argument for the Fates, where Clotho spins the yarn of an individual’s fate at birth (thus might be the Maiden, symbolic of youth), Lachesis measures it out (thus might be the Mother, symbolic of a life of experience), and Atropos cuts it at the end (thus might be the Crone, symbolic of old age and death). But other Greco-Roman examples fit less well with the most systematized versions of the Triple Goddess. The Graces are all the same age. The Furies were, in origin, not three. When the Athenian playwright Aeschylus put them on stage in the Eumenides of 458 bce,13 he envisaged there being fifteen of them, as was standard for the Greek tragic chorus of the time (this is, of course, a multiple of three).14 Only with another playwright, Euripides, some forty years later, did they become three in number,15 and their names did not appear in literature until the time of Virgil’s Aeneid, in the first century bce,16 although other evidence, from vase painting, etc., shows that the names were evidently known from the fourth century bce.17

  It could be argued that these discrepancies are the result of a particular distortion of the Triple Goddess in Greco-Roman myth, but similar questions arise in connection with the other mythologies. It has been, for instance, suggested that the idea that there are three Norns is an importation from the Greco-Roman Fates.18 Whether the Morrígan is all three of Badb, Macha, and Nemain, or merely one of them, or none of them, varies from text to text. At least one Romano-British relief shows the three genii cucullati and a separate mother goddess,19 and such depictions can be found elsewhere in Celtic and Northern European folklore. It could be argued that the fourfold depiction represents a sequence of Maiden, Warrior, Mother, and Crone, in which the Warrior merges either with the Maiden or Mother; this presupposes a society in which women typically went through a warrior phase.

  It may well be that the Triple Goddess is less the representation of an original prehistoric deity, as Gimbutas argued, and more a pattern imposed by nineteenth and twentieth century scholarship upon a wide range of different, but often cross-fertilizing, traditions. Regardless of this, the Triple Goddess retains considerable power as a literary device.20 For fictional accounts it is not necessary to actually believe in the idea to make use of it.

  “Well, I can donext Tuesday”21: The Triple Goddess in The Sandman22 The Triple Goddess is exactly the sort of primal archetype that one would expect to appeal to Neil Gaiman, with the strong sense of mythological heritage that is displayed throughout his work. The fact that the notion has been recognized across different mythologies suits well his interest in the pan-pantheon.23 It is important to state right from the beginning that in The Sandman Gaiman is creating a mythology, and Gaiman is well aware that all mythologies have many inherent contradictions.24 Why should Gaiman’s mythology be any different?25

  Gaiman first introduced The One who is Three, who come to be referred to as The Three,26 in the second issue of Sandman (18-22). They are, in the first instance, drawn from the pages of DC’s continuity. At this point, Gaiman was still doing much of the world-building of The Sandman out of preexisting elements of the DC Universe.27 The Three are Mildred, Mordred, and Cynthia, who were created as “hosts” for a horror/mystery anthology series, The Witching Hour, which ran from 1969 to 1978.28 The use of these characters fits with Gaiman’s general theme in this issue, where he introduces into his mythology a number of hosts of DC’s anthology series.29 These include Lucien, who first appeared in Weird Mystery Tales 18 (DC, May 1975), Eve, who first appeared in Secrets of Sinister House 6 (DC, August–September 1972), and Cain and Abel, who were the hosts of House of Mystery and House of Secrets.30 In this, Gaiman was following his friend and mentor, Alan M
oore. It had been Moore who had brought Cain and Abel back, in Swamp Thing 33, and had introduced the motif of Cain repeatedly murdering Abel, a motif Gaiman used throughout the run of The Sandman. At this point, by his own admission, Gaiman had yet to find his own voice.31 His early comics work was considerably under the influence of Moore.32 This is hardly surprising; it was, after all, Moore’s work on Swamp Thing that had brought Gaiman back to reading comics, and Moore who showed Gaiman what a comic script looked like.33

  Right from his first introduction of them, the Three are much more than the three DC witches who are their immediate source. Dream, the Sandman, meets the Three in a place that resembles the “blasted heath” of Macbeth, Act I, Scene I,34and the witches are stirring a cauldron. Gaiman introduces them as the Hecateae (18.3).35 As noted above, Hecate is a possible Triple Goddess, associated with the moon; appropriately Gaiman has the Three emerge when Dream shifts the Dreaming into moonlight.

  The witches eventually (19.7) tell Dream to refer to them as Mildred, Mordred,36and Cynthia (which is an epithet of the Moon-goddess Artemis/Diana).37 But before this point is reached, Dream refers to one of them as the Fate Atropos, and to all three as the Graces, and the Three say that they could be referred to as the Morrígan, or Alecto, Magaera (sic), and Tisiphone. Lucien previously (16.5) refers to them as “Urth, Verthandi and Skald” (i.e., the Norns). Here, in a characteristic (for him) blending of mythologies, Gaiman gets across the idea that the Three can take on a wide range of personae, and the reader is presumably not expected to think that the names that they have been given so far are the only ones that could be applied. These personae can overlap, and some will be more important at certain points than others. They may even contradict each other. This is a world of fantasy, and importantly, as noted, of mythology. Like everything in The Sandman, the Three have their own internal logic—“dream-logic” if you will—but their logic is not susceptible to the more hard-and-fast rules that the reader might attempt to impose.

  One of the Three also says “Might as well call us Diana, Mary, Florence and Candy” (19.5). This, of course, is a reference to the original line-up of the Supremes, Motown’s leading girl group of the 1960s: Diana Ross, Mary Wilson, and Florence Ballard. “Candy” is perhaps an erroneous reference to Cindy Birdsong, who replaced Ballard in the Supremes in 1967. Birdsong and Ballard overlapped as members in the Supremes for a while, though not performing together. This may be why the Three mentions all four of them. This line is, of course, a joke. But there may be other messages carried along with it. First, that the Three are not necessarily infallible. Secondly, that the Three may not necessarily always be Three—perhaps they can be Four (which would reflect the possibility found in Celtic representations of four deities). The paradigm can shift. Thirdly, possibly the Supremes are a manifestation of the Three. It is possible for ordinary humans to manifest as aspects of the Three. Indeed, the next time the Three are seen in any form, in “24 Hours” (16), they are manifesting through three mortal women, Judy (Maiden), Kate (Mother), and Bette (Crone), in a diner, being mentally manipulated by John Dee (the supervillain Doctor Destiny).38

  Two other points need to be made. First is that Dream has no power over the Three, who are older powers than he is; nor do any of the other Endless, except, as we shall see, Death. In this respect, the Three carry resonances of the position of the Fates in Greco-Roman mythology, where sometimes (though not always), the gods themselves, even the all-powerful Zeus/Jupiter, have to obey the Fates.39 The other point to note is that the Three shift their personalities from one to another. When the Three first appear (18.2), Mildred is on the left, Mordred in the middle, and Cynthia on the right. In the next panel, Mordred is on the left, Cynthia in the middle, and Mildred on the right. In the three panels on page 19 in which they appear (19.3, 19.5, and 19.5), they are Mildred-Cynthia-Mordred, then Mordred-Mildred-Cynthia, then Cynthia-Mordred-Mildred.40 Clearly, the reader is meant to think of the Three remaining in one place, but each changing her aspect. It is worth noting, also, that on pages 18-19, each member of the Three goes through the changes in the correct order of Maiden, Mother and Crone, representing the natural progress through the three stages that all women will make. However, though the aspects continue to change on page 20, they no longer do so in the correct order, and the strict order to the changes is not seen in any further appearances. Indeed, when the Three next appear as themselves, rather than manifested as mortals, in Sandman 10 (19-20), their aspects do not change in this manner at all, though they do when they appear in Sandman 17 (9-10)— but again the changes are not in order. It is difficult to say whether or not Gaiman intends this to indicate the possibility of disruption of the natural progress through Maiden, Mother, and Crone

  The general point, however, is clear. The Three, and everything the reader might think they know about them, are constantly in flux. There are rules, but we, as readers, are not privy to precisely what those rules are. Gaiman himself no doubt has some idea how those rules work, but he may well not apply them consistently himself. This inconsistency is part of the mythological aspect of the work that has already been identified.

  The Three appear semi-frequently in the early issues. In the first part proper of The Doll’s House storyline (Sandman 10), Rose Walker encounters them in a broom closet in a nursing home in England, where they give her advice; Rose is already unwittingly playing the Maiden in a human trinity, with her mother Miranda playing the Mother, and her newly discovered grandmother Unity Kinkaid as the Crone. In Part 6 of The Kindly Ones storyline (Sandman62, 6-7), Rose returns to the nursing home and enters the same broom closet, only to discover that it is merely a broom closet. She then immediately encounters three women, Helena, Amelia, and Magda, who on one level are simply three more residents of the nursing home; but on another level they are the Maiden, Mother, and Crone, and Amelia and Magda have a visual similarity to Mildred and Mordred in “Imperfect Hosts.”41 There is also a further paradigm shift, in that the three are Maiden, Mother, and Crone only in relation to each other; in relation to Rose they are all old women.42 Moreover, the Maiden here is herself a mother. Indeed, Helena is—though this is not made explicit in the text— Helena Kosmatos, the mother of Hippolyta (Lyta) Hall (née Trevor),43 and the former superhero called the Fury. Helena herself was a superhero called the Fury, and has, as she tells us (19.1), spent two decades of her life pursuing a blood feud. Here is a link back to another aspect of the Three, the Furies, an aspect which is extremely important to the storyline of The Kindly Ones, and which is reinforced for those with a broader knowledge of the DC Universe by the fact that Helena Kosmatos received her powers from the mythological Fury Tisiphone.44

  In “Calliope,” the first of the Dream Countrystories (Sandman17, 9-10), the Three appear as the Muses recorded by Pausanias (mentioned above), Melete, Mneme, and Aiode (sic).45 In Gaiman’s mythology they are the mothers of the Nine Muses,46 of whom Calliope is one. In Season of Mists, the Three appear at the beginning of the story (Sandman 21, 2-3), warning Destiny of the Endless of what is to come. They function through many of these stories as oracles (the role also that the three humans manifesting as the Three play for John Dee in “24 Hours”). Nevertheless, despite their largely inactive roles, as observers rather than participants, they are important. This is shown by Gaiman’s script for Calliope (as reprinted in Dream Country). Gaiman writes (page 14 of the script): “Now we’re playing with a running theme in Sandman, of the Triple Goddess.” Gaiman would slowly build up the importance of the Three through the subsequent issues, ultimately leading to their central role in The Kindly Ones.

  It would take up too much time to go through every manifestation of the Three in the eight-year run of Sandman, and would not be necessary for the purpose of this chapter. However, there are a few that are worth pointing out.

  The first is the Three’s manifestation in A Game of You, and more particularly, the way in which they manifest. By this point in the narrative it has already been established
that the Three are associated with the Moon, albeit that this has been shown indirectly, through the use of certain names (e.g., Cynthia, Hecate) and iconography (encountering the Three when the sun is down and the moon is up in “Imperfect Hosts”). It should therefore not be surprising that when the witch Thessaly draws down the Moon in Sandman 34 (entitled “Bad Moon Rising”), the Moon turns out to be a Triple Goddess, whom Thessaly names Gorgo, Mormo, and Ereschigal (18.4), 47 nor that the Moon manifests as three faces and three voices blending into one (19.1, 19.3).48

  What is perhaps a little more surprising is the way in which the Three are manifested in Thessaly herself. When she looks at the Moon (19.2, 19.4) we see the Moon reflected in each lens of her round glasses. Her own round face makes the third of the Moon’s three faces. With the pregnant Hazel and Foxglove, who is a lesbian (and therefore a virgin as far as sex with men is concerned),49 Thessaly then forms a Maiden-MotherCrone group, and it is this group that sets out on the Moon’s Road to find their friend Barbie.50 In Sandman 36, Dream says to Thessaly, “There were more of you then.” In Greek and Roman times, the area of Thessaly had been seen as a home for many witches,51 and Dream’s comment may be no more than a reference to that. However, the reader can be forgiven for wondering if in fact Dream means that the last time he encountered Thessaly, she was perhaps accompanied by two more, making her part of another mortal representation of the Three.52

  The other particularly interesting example is Eve. As already noted, Gaiman introduced Eve as an inhabitant of the Dreaming in Sandman 2, when he established that a number of the hosts from DC’s 1970s anthology titles were to be found living there. But Gaiman actually created the Eve of The Sandman by combining two separate hosts from DC horror comics. Eve had appeared as an old woman with a raven in Secrets of Sinister House, where she was been named as such; but an unnamed young woman with a raven had appeared in The Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love (DC, October 1971). Gaiman formed his Eve by merging the two characters,53 and so she is a woman with a Raven who sometimes appears old, and sometimes appears young (for examples of her changing her age over a few panels, see Chapter 3 of Season of Mists, Sandman 24, 18.4-7, and Chapter 1 of The Wake, Sandman 70, 13-14).