The Mythological Dimensions of Neil Gaiman

by Burke, Jessica

  Because of the desire to “dominate men” and “usurp power,” according to Malleus witches would steal a man’s penis, often while he slept.89 On one very obvious level, the idea of female sexual organs with the ability to consume men, is a continuation of the fear rooted in traditions of the succubus, the lamia, the first witch-women, Bilquis and Lilith.

  Beginning as the first wife of Adam, Lilith was created “not from Adam’s rib, but from the earth, the way Adam himself was made.”90 As tradition goes, a fight ensued when Lilith wanted to be in the dominant position during intercourse.91 In Fables and Reflections, Gaiman tells the story of Adam’s wives.92 While Lilith doesn’t consume with her vagina, she is cast out and her womb becomes the source for demons.93 Gaiman tells us that:

  Lilith was expelled from Eden. And she planted her own Garden. They say she copulated with Demons, or with the Sons of God. She had many children….And Lilith gave birth to the Lilim, the children of Lilith, who have haunted the nights of the Sons of Adam ever since. Mother to so many, then and now….94

  According to Gaiman, Lilith was perhaps the first witch since she copulated with the Sons of God—the angels—and the offspring, while not demons in the form of cloven-hoofed creatures with forked tongues and tails, were Fallen, semi-angelic creatures. Her female children we meet later in another of Gaiman’s tales, Stardust, in the form of the Lilim, cannibalistic witches preying on the hearts of fallen stars.

  Gaiman’s portrayal of the vagina dentata with Bilquis is grotesque but non-violent. Her clients are not torn to pieces. The act of consumption, for the consumed, is “blissful.”95 Far from the castrating witch from Malleus or the vampire from medieval scientific texts, this image links to the herojourney, the symbolic death-life return. Eliade notes “all heroic adventures in which triumph over tribulation is signified by penetration involve the symbolism of the menacing female/mother, the destructive womb, [and]… the castrating vagina.”96 The male hero is literally transformed by the experience and is allowed “access to a transcendental state.”97 Bilquis is “the quintessence of all things.”98 The consuming vagina is a continuation of the “monstrous hell-mouth” which:

  …conveys the relentlessness of change, and dissolution, the devastating power of time, the inevitability of death….But the absorption of the body by another suggests a grotesque and perverse postmortem continuation of the self within as a part of another, a monstrosity, not of mixed natures, but of confused existences. Without autonomy, without identity or even consciousness, the formless self continues as an imprisoned particle of the other.99

  Because Bilquis runs contrary to what the new order of gods desires, because she straddles the division between god and human, and because she “represents a woman of intellect and will who demonstrated to cope with any patriarchal and hegemonic societies…”100she cannot survive to fight the war between the gods.101

  Witches, women who transgress gender, and the vagina dentata are central to “Snow, Glass, Apples,” which reverses the traditional female roles in “Snow White.” The Queen is set up as “Wise, and a witch” while Snow White is a vampiric “thing.”102 The Queen’s only appetite stems from her sexuality and her intent for revenge. She foretells the future in “dreams and in reflections”103 and while it can be argued that she succumbed to the King out of a lust for power, it is more in tune with her character that she fell in love with him during her “sixteen years of dreaming of him…”104 Despite being a fairy tale creation, the Queen is unlike the stereotype of women in that she enjoys sex with her husband and uses magic only to help others and for the security of her people. The Queen represents Luther’s “bad wife” because she uses magic for protection, but as noted earlier— Luther’s definition of witch encompasses all of Gaiman’s female characters, and indeed most women.

  The detrimental female image in “Snow, Glass, Apples” is undoubtedly the Princess. Aside from being a vampire, she commits matricide and ultimately patricide. Killing her mother at birth can be perhaps forgiven as it was a commonality, however, the same cannot be said for the manner in which she murders her father. She doesn’t merely feed from him, as would most vampires since close family were, in all practicality, the first victims. She—like the vampiric, cannibalistic women discussed in Malleus and medieval scientific texts—takes his manhood, his ability as leader, and asserts herself sexually, raping him.105 The Queen’s intent is toward vengeance, because Snow White, like the witches of Malleus, virtually castrated her own father and denied the Queen sexual privilege with her own husband:

  My husband, my love, my king sent for me less and less, and when I came to him he was dizzy, listless, confused. He could no longer make love as a man makes love…. Soon he was a shadow of the man I had met...106

  Unlike the propaganda and lies about the Queen spread by the Princess— the familiar “Snow White”—the Queen was not fooled by the heart of an animal, nor did she eat the Princess’ heart. This we know because we know the Queen in Gaiman’s tale—not Snow White. The Queen is the familiar; she is both witch and every woman—in her desire for her husband, her ability to make mistakes, and her skill at caring for her community. The Princess is the demonic, unknowable Other with truly monstrous, socially destructive appetites. She barely speaks and after her exile to the forest, she exists “like an animal: a bat or a wolf.”107

  Unlike Bilquis or even Wututu, the Princess’ appetite—represented by her vagina dentata—is violent, destructive, and perhaps a primary means by which she feeds. As the Queen seeks answer to the plea for help from the Lord of the Fair, she observes the Princess in the infamous mirror and we are witness to the Princess feeding on a wandering monk. Not only does she prostitute herself, accepting his tossed coin, she drinks his blood orally, and vaginally.108 We know the source of the scars on her father’s genitals could have been from either orifice.

  As the Queen resolves to make the forest and her kingdom “safe once more,”109 Gaiman shows us the Queen’s magic. Rather than merely telling us she enchants the notorious apples, he reveals her glory as a witch in the spell she casts with her body and her own blood.110 When the Princess takes the apples, she is naked and the “insides of her thighs [are] stained with wet black filth.”111 That is the same animalistic image of the Princess as she lies “naked beneath the glass” of her coffin.112 Displaying her normal sexual appetites, the Queen cannot take part in the Prince’s necrophilia and yet she describes the bizarre union between Princess and Prince ‘Charming’ as “fancy.”113 The Prince and Princess take both the kingdom and the Queen by force, storming into her room, declaring she would “be with them on their wedding day.”114 The Princess’ appetite as vampire isn’t contained. Her husband, the Prince, has most likely been made into a vampire. Alluding to the tradition of cannibalizing accused witches in the Pacific Islands,115 the tale ends with the Queen’s own people—having been fed a diet of propaganda against her—“singing, jeering, and banging on the sides of the kiln”116 as the Queen roasts, seasoned with “goose grease” and possibly fattened through the autumn on apples.

  The sorceress Lady Indigo from InterWorld stands apart as she is more vampire than witch, picking up where Gaiman’s vampiric Snow White, left off. Of all Gaiman’s female characters, Lady Indigo is both the most distant and the most evil. Even the Furies in The Kindly Ones have more compassion. They destroy because Dream was a kinslayer. They are the penultimate witch in the eyes of Martin Luther because they are fierce protectors of family.117 Lady Indigo has nothing but Ego and the glory of providing energy to power the trans-dimensional ships of Hex. She isn’t a patriot, rivaling Lord Dogknife for control of Hex. She is reminiscent of Tolkien’s dark, witch-like Queen Berúthiel—with a little of Lord Sauron thrown in for good measure:

  And there were eyes in the middle of the darkness. The darkness formed itself into a shape. It was a woman. Her hair was long and black. She had big lips….she was small and kind of thin, and her eyes were so green…They looked like a cat’s eye
s.118

  The Lady Indigo functions as a solitary agent, taking pleasure in hunting and capturing the Harkers. Tolkien’s Queen Berúthiel, merely a footnote in The Unfinished Tales119 was controlled by her own appetite for knowing everything “that men wish most to keep hidden.”120 She uses spellcraft, her cats, and her ability to read the minds of men—and her slaves—to feed her hunger. One could imagine, had Tolkien written more of Queen Berúthiel, she wouldn’t have been so different from the Lady Indigo, perhaps minus the fluffy pink bath towels. Both women are last seen disappearing adrift at sea. Queen Berúthiel is literally on an ocean-voyaging ship, with her cats on the prow, set to wander the seas under the light of a “sickle moon.”121 While the Lady Indigo, snared by her own spells used against her by Joey Harker, is trapped within a “crimson whirlwind”122 moments before her ship, the space-time traveling Malefic, explodes. Joey’s observation as the Lady Indigo apprehends him, that her perfume was “a sort of mixture of roses and rot”123 blends images of the living, the dead, the seductress and the vampire. Lady Indigo, like Gaiman’s Snow White, is a ‘wicked witch’ because of her uncontrolled appetite literally for the life energy of Joey and the other Harkers. She is betrayed by her appetite—but at no time is she presented as a compassionate, humane entity. She gives a glimpse into a kind of witch presented in Gaiman’s worlds—a vampiric witch grounded in the Malleus—the strigoi vii.

  Other malevolent, evil witches in Gaiman’s worlds can be seen in the Lilim and the Other Mother. However, unlike the Lady Indigo, they are not wholly unredemptive. The Other Mother and the Lilim are Luther’s extreme, similar in kind to The Kindly Ones, with an inappropriate love of family—and in this familial bond, no matter how perverse, we can find shards of redemption.

  Coraline’s Other Mother isn’t a stereotypical witch and she certainly isn’t human. Like the strigoi vii—living witches—of Eastern European folklore,124the Other Mother is cursed to live between the worlds.

  …the source of the “curse” is an incomplete transition from one world to the next. …They are restless spirits, unwilling or unable to cross completely from one world to the next. Caught in a state between the living and the dead, they exist outside of nature, and therefore exist beyond the bounds of natural laws. Bereft of a life of their own to sustain them, they must naturally seek out the life force contained in blood or milk or even fertile fields.125

  As Gaiman warned us in “Instructions,” the Other Mother is betrayed by her appetite. Yet, she serves as a counterpoint to the magical females seen in Coraline and Misses Spink and Forcible.

  Coraline, the journeying female hero, is witch-like in that she has a cat as familiar, helps to save her parents’ lives and souls, and frees the souls of the trapped children, helping them to cross over into the afterlife. Coraline sets her world right by ending the Other Mother’s world. Miss Spink and Miss Forcible are clueless, frivolous, men-less women who provide Coraline with the magical tool to help in the girl’s quest—“a stone with a hole in it.”126 More hero than witch, Coraline travels through Campbell’s hero’s journey—and the has-been actresses are an integral part of Coraline’s success. They are to her as the Zoryas are to Shadow. Without the stone, Coraline would not have found the stolen souls. While Miss Spink and Miss Forcible do foresee doom in the tea leaves, they dismiss their warning as “unreliable.” The evil witch in the story is the Other Mother.

  The ghosts of the children behind the mirror call the Other Mother the Beldam.127 An antiquated term, meaning grandmother or ancestress, it reflected the time beyond memory that these ghost children have been kept in their bleak prison. However, in Middle English, the term meant specifically a “loathsome old woman…a furious raging woman”128—or, a witch. When we first meet her, it’s through Coraline’s perception—and is Bildhauer’s construction of ‘other’ as object of fear129:

  It sounded like her mother. Coraline went into the kitchen, where the voice had come from. A woman stood…with her back to Coraline. She looked a little like Coraline’s mother. Only…her skin was white as paper. Only she was taller and thinner. Only her fingers were too long, and they never stopped moving, and her dark red fingernails were curved and sharp….And then she turned around. Her eyes were big black buttons.130

  As opposed to the strigoi vii or even Queen Berúthiel, the Other Mother does not use cats as her familiar spies; she detests them. In Gaiman’s worlds cats, like crows and ravens, are the shamanic link to magic, to humanity, to creativity, and to the Goddess.131 Instead, the Other Mother uses the rats, converse to the life-affirming white mice of the Mouse Circus.132 But, true to her function as a strigoi vii, the Other Mother operates outside our normative reality. Her reach, however, extends into Coraline’s world—to kidnap her parents, and, like the reputed cannibalistic child-eating witches from Malleus, to steal lives from children. As Coraline learns from the ghost children trapped behind the mirror:

  She left us here…She stole our hearts, and she stole our souls, and she took our lives away…. she forgot about us in the dark…. we could not leave here, when we died. She kept us, and she fed on us, until now we’ve nothing left of ourselves, only snakeskins and spider husks. …She will take your life and all you are and all you care’st for, and she will leave you with nothing but mist and fog. She’ll take your joy. And one day you’ll awake and your heart and your soul will have gone. A husk you’ll be, a wisp you’ll be, and a thing no more than a dream on waking, or a memory of something forgotten.133

  Not unlike the serpentine Duessa from Spenser’s Faerie Queene or Grendel’s mother, the Other Mother is the monster the hero must best. As the story climaxes, the Other Mother is more grotesque—her hands more spider-like, her hair more Gorgon-like, “her mouth full of black beetles.”134 The Other Mother does attempt creation—of a kind. She is outside our world, but creates her own—to possess and to destroy. The Other crazy old man articulates the Other Mother’s plans:

  “Nothing’s changed. You’ll go home. You’ll be bored. You’ll be ignored. No one will listen to you… They don’t even get your name right. Stay here with us…We will listen to you and play with you and laugh with you. Your other mother will build whole worlds for you to explore, and tear them down every night when you are done. Every day will be better and brighter than the one that went before…. whatever you desire. The world will be built new for you every morning. If you stay here, you can have whatever you want.”

  Coraline sighed. “You really don’t understand, do you?” she said. “I don’t want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted? Just like that, and it didn’t mean anything. What then?”135

  The Other Mother is linked in this fashion to another witch-like image, from Good Omens—the Antichrist—and as Aziraphale tells us, “the Antichrist is more than just a witch. He’s…THE witch. He’s about as witchy as you can get.”136 The Antichrist Adam explains his own views on the creation of a world for himself—and his friends, of course—that would be full of “other” versions of their mothers and fathers, and “new cowboys an’ Indians an’ policemen an’ gangsters an’ cartoons an’ spacemen an’ stuff…”137 But, like the Other Mother and the Other crazy old Mr. Bobo—Adam fails to understand that when play was complete, when the heroic journey was done, “you could stop…and go home.”138

  Another form of the strigoi vii and a reverse Triple Goddess, Stardust’s Lilim are individuals, but they’re also a singular being with a tripartite function. We first meet them in the fairy tale witch’s cottage:

  In the middle of a wood … was a small house, built of thatch… which had a most foreboding aspect. ... The only thing in the house that was clean was a mirror of black glass, as high as a tall man, as wide as a church door. … The house belonged to three aged women. … the Lilim—the witch queen—all alone in the woods.139

  Like Coraline’s Other Mother, there are “three other women in the little house. …in the black mirror
.”140 As the last of the previous star’s heart is consumed by the eldest of the Lilim, the ancient woman in the cottage is replaced by her younger self from the mirror.141 After failing to capture Yvaine’s heart, the Witch Queen communes with her sisters in a mirrored pool of unicorn’s blood spilled into “a rock hollow” on the roadside142 —a perverse version of Galadriel and her mirrored pool.

  The Lilim are the head of their Sisterhood and little is known of their origin. As noted earlier, according to Gaiman’s rendition of the tale of Lilith, the Lilim are the daughters of Adam’s first wife. Yet, when the eldest sister—Morwanneg—shares a meal with Ditchwater Sal, the Witch Queen reveals “When you knew me last… I ruled with my sisters in Carnadine, before it was lost.”143 Gaiman doesn’t explain the reference, yet in Tolkienian fashion, this gives the Lilim deeper history than Faerie—or even than Lilith.

  Carnadine, an antiquated term meaning red or fleshly,144related to carnāle or carnārius145—belonging to the flesh—is associated with another similar term: charnel. Charnel may be related to Charn, the point of origin for Lewis’ own Witch Queen, Jadis. Charn is a planet orbiting around a red giant sun and as Jadis explains to Polly and Digory, after the last battle, before Jadis herself destroyed her planet, her people, and all form of life with the “Deplorable Word,” Charn “ran red.”146 Jadis ravaged Charn simply to oppose her own sister. She claims to have done to Charn what she did to other worlds,147 and it’s a wonder if she had other sisters to oppose as well.

  Connections between the Lilim and Jadis don’t end there. After looting parts of London, Jadis commandeered a hansom cab,148 riding it like Boadicea. When Tristan travels by candlelight, he sees Morwanneg traveling by cart, with her mismatched billy goats looking “the way Boadicea was drawn in history books.”149 Jadis is more animal than Morwanneg or her sisters, and—like The Kindly Ones—the Lilim are all about family. Even though Morwanneg says her sisters will be cruel at her loss of the Star’s heart, even though they chastise her for not seizing it at the first opportunity, at no point in the tale do we see them warring against each other. Despite the Lilim’s dominant nature, they use life and have a bizarre esteem for it. They don’t value human life—or that of a unicorn—but the simple life of a snake, Morwanneg calls friend.150 It’s hard to believe the Lilim would use their magic to destroy all life in Faerie, or indeed on Earth. When Madam Semele poisons Morwanneg with truth-telling lembas grass, the Witch Queen doesn’t kill the “harridan” on the spot: “I swore by the compact of the Sisterhood, that I would do you no harm.”151 Her sisters—even those by oath—are important, if in name only. Later, before her encounter with the Star, the Witch Queen waxes maudlin on her spent youth when her chariot doesn’t immediately transform into an Inn at her spell: