![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptPrompt 3 for the Sunshine Challenge is the Goddess Who Knows What You Did In The Dark: Hekate
There's a certain amount of "Child, you are talking about things that I lived through" that happens when you see certain takes being recycled for a new era, with new trappings and dressed in the words that were supposed to be used as language of liberation instead of oppression. Some of those things are not things that I had personal experience of, but observing those who did has certainly given me an opinion about who should catch hands because of their role in it.
So when I see some of the Disk Horse racing about proclaiming that fandom is solely the domain of the young and that certain ideas are beyond the boundaries of acceptability, I know that the first thing that I will want to say or write will be "Child, get your research hat on and go see what the arguments were about the Satanic Panic, about the corrupting influence of 'race music', about why The Premise was referred to by that name, and the things that are happening right now about bathrooms, about therapies, about whose bodies are acceptable to police and destroy and whose bodies are to be protected, and the concerted campaigns underway to try and prevent you from learning your history accurately." So much of the terrible legislation and action in the world today is undertaken because someone else is taking the moral high ground and asserting that they know what is best for children and how to protect them, which totally coincidentally aligns totally with their prejudices about race, religion, sexuality, and who should be allowed to exercise power and autonomy. I recognize that there will always be a little bit of "you're a Fandom Great Old One, what you talk about and think about is incomprehensible to the state of Fandom now" as time passes along, but in this day and age, the things that the Fandom Old Ones were complaining about are still relevant, even if you can write slash and have other people find it more easily these days, and there are places now upon the Internet where moralistic purge campaigns won't result in entire swaths of history disappearing.
Hekate is described in the text above as a triple goddess, and the accompanying illustration showcases that visually. What's interesting about the concept of the triple goddess, at least in the neopaganism materials that came to my attention and reading to me some many years ago, is how much that conception revolves, at least to some degree, around menstruation. "Maiden, Mother, Crone", as I usually see it rendered, usually depicts a youngish, but pretty clearly post-pubescent woman, someone who menstruates, as the Maiden, a middle-aged, sometimes visibly pregnant, sometimes not, woman in the role of the Mother, someone who may still menstruate, but is now also involved in the work of child care and raising the next generation, and then a wizened, sometimes stooped, old woman as the Crone, someone who is very clearly post-menopause and whose children have grown into either Maidens or Mothers themselves, whose work now is to pass on the wisdom they have collected, and to be revered as someone who has succeeded at making it through the tumult of the previous two roles. I specifically use the word "woman" here because a whole lot of that material was specifically focused on the Divine Feminine, sometimes with the idea on mind that practitioners would be helping to rebalance the otherwise highly patriarchal and God-Him monotheism that was the unmarked default cultural context of most of the readers. With wisdom and experience, memory reminds me that while there was at least some material there about how to do your paganism when you're not heterosexual, there was far less of it about how you might go about it if you didn't identify with the gender you were assigned at birth. So I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of that neopaganism revival space got really TERFy in the intervening time (if it wasn't already there). Memory also tells me that what I was looking at had a very "written for a white audience, and don't be too concerned about appropriation" vibe to it, as well, even as it made gestures at legitimacy and lineage from much older times. (There has already been much ink spilled on these matters, and by writers who are much better in their research and argument than I am. Again, grab your research hat if you're interested, and I can certainly recommend Seeking as a good jumping-off point about religious witchcraft if this does interest you.)
To that end, even sometimes the Triple Goddess concept would be three distinct deities into the same concept, sometimes cross-pantheons (with, at least, the understanding that Greeks and Romans often had similar deities, even if not with an understanding of how Romans were not really too fussed about what gods you worshipped religiously, so long as you also performed the civil religion alongside). At least, in those materials, you might see the idea of Aphrodite (or Artemis) as the goddess to meditate on when considering the Maiden aspect, Hestia as the one for the Mother aspect, and almost always Hekate as the goddess of the Crone aspect, despite being a triple in her own right. (If this seems weird, remember that my context is the early era of the Internet and where many of us get our information through published books. Waldenbooks, for example, still exists. Also, a good chunk of my professional training hasn't happened yet.) The works available couldn't quite settle on whether they wanted to make the deities archetypal and all aspects of a single Divine Feminine or whether they were entities in their own right and that practices should take into account which deities they wanted as their personal worship matters.
For the purposes of this story, though, it was something that had risen to prominence and had attracted the attention of the Moral Guardians, who were looking for something to latch on to after it turned out that Jack Chick was going to be a comedy star rather than a man with his finger on the pulse of the moral consciousness. Well, also, the software industry had reacted swiftly enough to the threat of regulation by creating what would eventually be called the ESRB and the music industry had applied the oft-mocked "Parental Advisory - Explicit Content" sticker to the work they were producing. So, along with movies like The Craft and Practical Magic coming out, shows like Charmed, and then the phenomenon that would be Harry Potter, there was a crossroads point about whether the interest in fantastical magic (and the fervor generated by conservative groups concerned for our immortal souls) would produce a similar interest in the less flashy (but potentially equally life-changing) religious practice. (It didn't, at least not in the sense that we have even token representation of paganism-the-religious-practice in our shows, even as we still continue to have plenty of flashy effects-laden magic on the screen.) Add in some prominent court cases about religious freedom of expression, some very public bigots being very publicly bigoted, and the understanding that some things are necessarily secret by oath, and it's not surprising that despite the apparent interest, there were very mixed opinions about whether being visible would ultimately be a good or terrible thing.
History does not repeat, but it certainly rhymes. The increased visibility of Fandom and the ease in which fen can communicate and squee with each other is certainly in contrast to the guarded language and self-preservation outlook of previous eras, with litigious authors looking to crush or control the space of acceptable fandom and social attitudes that thought the possibility of two men (really, one human and one Vulcan) having a deep relationship that might have romantic or sexual aspects was far beyond the pale. And yet, how long ago was it that a concerted group of trolls decided they wanted to get rid of a particular pairing, or get certain kind of works taken down, or invoked the spectre of raising a lot of noise about the content on a particular site to the advertisers that sponsor the site to induce a purge or new rules that ban "female-presenting nipples," as if only one gender's nipples were inherently sexual? How quick are the calls to create spaces that are friendly or "safe" for children by excluding anything but the most anodyne content, or by declaring anyone over a certain age, or of a particular presentation or identity, or even someone who offers a whisper of the possibility of adulthood, to be inherently untrustworthy?
It's certainly a far cry from my own context, which was the era of the World Wide Web coming into being. The Internet precedes the Web by decades, of course, but the Web, and the various applications built to take advantage of the interconnectedness that provided, opened up avenues of communication that were otherwise unheard of. (Here's where I mention The Internet Girlfriend Club, a zine about the experiences of growing up and coming of age on the Web as a taste of what it might have been like at the time.) What was interesting about the Web at that particular moment was that the consensus seemed to be that the Web was the kind of crossroads and liminal space described as Hekate's domain above, a place of magic, of ghosts, of dogs heard but never seen, of the crossroads at night, where someone might call upon the unseen, or speak the truths they dare not say during the day or when anyone they knew might be around to hear them. We agreed, when we ventured out on the Web, that it was not a safe place, that there was always an element of risk involved, but despite having been given directions (
The Archive of Our Own, while integral to the mission of people finding themselves and their stories, has a different purpose than the early Web did. AO3 is for protecting things against purges and for making sure that there is a place for works to exist, even if other places wouldn't carry them, a space free from advertisement pressure and sponsor dollars making decisions. The Organization for Transformative Works is there to try and preserve the history and context that goes with the works and to protect our ability to tell our own stories from encroachment by those same moneyed interests and from people who are concerned for our fannish souls when we show interest in things they think are immoral. (This elides, as above, the very real responsibility that practitioners have to avoid appropriation of other experiences, to resist propagation of stereotypes about those experiences, and to listen to those people who have the relevant experiences about what is harmful, what should be kept secret by oath, and who is trustworthy in these matters, if anyone. Better writers than I take on these matters regularly.) Or when others attempt to divorce the product (the Archive) as worthy of admiration from the context that the product cannot exist, nor be as impressive, without all the people who have put the work into it, both on the technical side and in the work creation side.
That's the thing I miss the most about the Web that was - before it became corporatized and sanitized, turned into a panopticon for advertisers and monetization, there was the feeling of potential in it, where everyone had their own crossroads and goddesses to draw upon for their journey, and that there was a place for everyone, potentially, to call home. (Plug for NeoCities, an attempt to call back to those early days by providing space for people to build simple websites, for experimentation or niche interests or other things that won't need to be monetized, or even necessarily put in front of the whole eyeballs of the Internet.) I guess, if I were to try and describe the way I'd like the Web to work for future generations, I'd like it to work a little bit like how it worked for Ariane Emory II in Cyteen. Ariane Emory I set up conditions for her PR (clone's close enough for this story) to gain progressively greater access to control systems for the place she lived over time. Ari II, based on the experiences she had, started asking questions that indicated to the system she might be ready for more access and control before the time Ari I had expected it. But rather than lock Ari II out and tell her to come back when she's older, or refuse her outright, the system checks to make sure she wants it, then lets her have greater access, since she's demonstrating the curiosity that greater access will be able to satisfy. I kind of would like the Web to act that way. Not by any government fiat or parental control software, but if there were some way of essentially prompting someone that "this information requires a higher level of access. Do you want to proceed?" and giving someone the option to go "nope!" either at that point or later on, if they thought they were ready for it and they really weren't. I feel like this would probably require some amount of agreement among everyone about keeping the spaces for kids really for kids, rather than claiming a child-friendly space but not screening stuff to make sure that the cartoon uploads don't have someone in the middle of them giving children advice about effective self-harm methods. I'd also require it so that if there has to be some sort of parental notification about a request for greater access, that it is only informative and general ("Ari II is currently on Level 7") without revealing anything about what search unlocked the higher access, nor giving the notified any power to refuse the access. Instead, they'll have to adjust to the possibility of some new conversational topics in their space, when the kid is ready to talk about them. It won't quite be the mystique of discovering all the new territory out there and finding your kindred spirits through hard work and webrings and recommendations, but it definitely seems like it might provide a little bit of that excitement of discovering something new and the feeling of treading carefully in a space where so long as you can pretend to be the right age and maturity, the residents will let you stick around. And if people want to stay in the lower levels, because that's what they are comfortable with, then they can do so.
I know the idea won't work, not least because of censorius elements, commercial elements, and that every denizen of the internet has a different idea of where their content and everyone else's content should be placed, level-wise. But in some world where we have general artificial intelligence that makes sensible decisions, it's the closest I can think of to replicating the feeling of discovery and freedom that came with being on the early Web, where the entire space felt liminal. Before all the old grievances caught up, before the commercial interests colonized it and set their advertisements everywhere, before it was just part of a school's information that they would be monitoring off-campus behavior online of their students as well as all their on-campus behavior, before an entire generation that has apparently chosen to adopt the discredited arguments of the generations before, reinstating the shipping wars and policing everyone else for the presence of shibboleths like "think of the children." Our triple goddess seems to have a lot of people focused on the Maiden aspect, of innocence, and not nearly enough on the other two, of listening to those who are going through the experience and are trying to get the next generation through safely, and of asking the Great Old Ones about how it was when they were younger and taking those lessons to heart, either to emulate…or as a warning of what not to do.
Otherworldly and mysterious, Hecate is best known for her association with magic, ghosts, and the night. If you hear the baying of hounds in the dark, she's likely near as they were ever at her side. She is traditionally depicted as bearing two torches to light her way or as a triple goddess of the crossroads. In mythology she is known for helping Demeter search for her daughter Persephone, a theme that ties her even more to the Underworld and spirits she is associated with. Today she is often considered a representative of those liminal places where reality bends and all manner of events may unfold...
There's a certain amount of "Child, you are talking about things that I lived through" that happens when you see certain takes being recycled for a new era, with new trappings and dressed in the words that were supposed to be used as language of liberation instead of oppression. Some of those things are not things that I had personal experience of, but observing those who did has certainly given me an opinion about who should catch hands because of their role in it.
So when I see some of the Disk Horse racing about proclaiming that fandom is solely the domain of the young and that certain ideas are beyond the boundaries of acceptability, I know that the first thing that I will want to say or write will be "Child, get your research hat on and go see what the arguments were about the Satanic Panic, about the corrupting influence of 'race music', about why The Premise was referred to by that name, and the things that are happening right now about bathrooms, about therapies, about whose bodies are acceptable to police and destroy and whose bodies are to be protected, and the concerted campaigns underway to try and prevent you from learning your history accurately." So much of the terrible legislation and action in the world today is undertaken because someone else is taking the moral high ground and asserting that they know what is best for children and how to protect them, which totally coincidentally aligns totally with their prejudices about race, religion, sexuality, and who should be allowed to exercise power and autonomy. I recognize that there will always be a little bit of "you're a Fandom Great Old One, what you talk about and think about is incomprehensible to the state of Fandom now" as time passes along, but in this day and age, the things that the Fandom Old Ones were complaining about are still relevant, even if you can write slash and have other people find it more easily these days, and there are places now upon the Internet where moralistic purge campaigns won't result in entire swaths of history disappearing.
Hekate is described in the text above as a triple goddess, and the accompanying illustration showcases that visually. What's interesting about the concept of the triple goddess, at least in the neopaganism materials that came to my attention and reading to me some many years ago, is how much that conception revolves, at least to some degree, around menstruation. "Maiden, Mother, Crone", as I usually see it rendered, usually depicts a youngish, but pretty clearly post-pubescent woman, someone who menstruates, as the Maiden, a middle-aged, sometimes visibly pregnant, sometimes not, woman in the role of the Mother, someone who may still menstruate, but is now also involved in the work of child care and raising the next generation, and then a wizened, sometimes stooped, old woman as the Crone, someone who is very clearly post-menopause and whose children have grown into either Maidens or Mothers themselves, whose work now is to pass on the wisdom they have collected, and to be revered as someone who has succeeded at making it through the tumult of the previous two roles. I specifically use the word "woman" here because a whole lot of that material was specifically focused on the Divine Feminine, sometimes with the idea on mind that practitioners would be helping to rebalance the otherwise highly patriarchal and God-Him monotheism that was the unmarked default cultural context of most of the readers. With wisdom and experience, memory reminds me that while there was at least some material there about how to do your paganism when you're not heterosexual, there was far less of it about how you might go about it if you didn't identify with the gender you were assigned at birth. So I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of that neopaganism revival space got really TERFy in the intervening time (if it wasn't already there). Memory also tells me that what I was looking at had a very "written for a white audience, and don't be too concerned about appropriation" vibe to it, as well, even as it made gestures at legitimacy and lineage from much older times. (There has already been much ink spilled on these matters, and by writers who are much better in their research and argument than I am. Again, grab your research hat if you're interested, and I can certainly recommend Seeking as a good jumping-off point about religious witchcraft if this does interest you.)
To that end, even sometimes the Triple Goddess concept would be three distinct deities into the same concept, sometimes cross-pantheons (with, at least, the understanding that Greeks and Romans often had similar deities, even if not with an understanding of how Romans were not really too fussed about what gods you worshipped religiously, so long as you also performed the civil religion alongside). At least, in those materials, you might see the idea of Aphrodite (or Artemis) as the goddess to meditate on when considering the Maiden aspect, Hestia as the one for the Mother aspect, and almost always Hekate as the goddess of the Crone aspect, despite being a triple in her own right. (If this seems weird, remember that my context is the early era of the Internet and where many of us get our information through published books. Waldenbooks, for example, still exists. Also, a good chunk of my professional training hasn't happened yet.) The works available couldn't quite settle on whether they wanted to make the deities archetypal and all aspects of a single Divine Feminine or whether they were entities in their own right and that practices should take into account which deities they wanted as their personal worship matters.
For the purposes of this story, though, it was something that had risen to prominence and had attracted the attention of the Moral Guardians, who were looking for something to latch on to after it turned out that Jack Chick was going to be a comedy star rather than a man with his finger on the pulse of the moral consciousness. Well, also, the software industry had reacted swiftly enough to the threat of regulation by creating what would eventually be called the ESRB and the music industry had applied the oft-mocked "Parental Advisory - Explicit Content" sticker to the work they were producing. So, along with movies like The Craft and Practical Magic coming out, shows like Charmed, and then the phenomenon that would be Harry Potter, there was a crossroads point about whether the interest in fantastical magic (and the fervor generated by conservative groups concerned for our immortal souls) would produce a similar interest in the less flashy (but potentially equally life-changing) religious practice. (It didn't, at least not in the sense that we have even token representation of paganism-the-religious-practice in our shows, even as we still continue to have plenty of flashy effects-laden magic on the screen.) Add in some prominent court cases about religious freedom of expression, some very public bigots being very publicly bigoted, and the understanding that some things are necessarily secret by oath, and it's not surprising that despite the apparent interest, there were very mixed opinions about whether being visible would ultimately be a good or terrible thing.
History does not repeat, but it certainly rhymes. The increased visibility of Fandom and the ease in which fen can communicate and squee with each other is certainly in contrast to the guarded language and self-preservation outlook of previous eras, with litigious authors looking to crush or control the space of acceptable fandom and social attitudes that thought the possibility of two men (really, one human and one Vulcan) having a deep relationship that might have romantic or sexual aspects was far beyond the pale. And yet, how long ago was it that a concerted group of trolls decided they wanted to get rid of a particular pairing, or get certain kind of works taken down, or invoked the spectre of raising a lot of noise about the content on a particular site to the advertisers that sponsor the site to induce a purge or new rules that ban "female-presenting nipples," as if only one gender's nipples were inherently sexual? How quick are the calls to create spaces that are friendly or "safe" for children by excluding anything but the most anodyne content, or by declaring anyone over a certain age, or of a particular presentation or identity, or even someone who offers a whisper of the possibility of adulthood, to be inherently untrustworthy?
It's certainly a far cry from my own context, which was the era of the World Wide Web coming into being. The Internet precedes the Web by decades, of course, but the Web, and the various applications built to take advantage of the interconnectedness that provided, opened up avenues of communication that were otherwise unheard of. (Here's where I mention The Internet Girlfriend Club, a zine about the experiences of growing up and coming of age on the Web as a taste of what it might have been like at the time.) What was interesting about the Web at that particular moment was that the consensus seemed to be that the Web was the kind of crossroads and liminal space described as Hekate's domain above, a place of magic, of ghosts, of dogs heard but never seen, of the crossroads at night, where someone might call upon the unseen, or speak the truths they dare not say during the day or when anyone they knew might be around to hear them. We agreed, when we ventured out on the Web, that it was not a safe place, that there was always an element of risk involved, but despite having been given directions (
Mother said, 'Come what may / Follow the path and never stray'), we knew there were things to be discovered and shared if we were willing to go at night, or to step off the path and risk getting lost (or meeting those things that we heard baying in the night). The Web was dangerous, but it was the danger of diving too deeply or stumbling through the fairy ring, or accidentally letting slip your True Name to someone who you weren't entirely sure could be trusted with it. It was a place for forging new stories and deciding whether they fit or not, and for discovering others who were using the same materials to craft their own stories, to come into themselves as storytellers, rather than accept what narratives others have created for them.
The Archive of Our Own, while integral to the mission of people finding themselves and their stories, has a different purpose than the early Web did. AO3 is for protecting things against purges and for making sure that there is a place for works to exist, even if other places wouldn't carry them, a space free from advertisement pressure and sponsor dollars making decisions. The Organization for Transformative Works is there to try and preserve the history and context that goes with the works and to protect our ability to tell our own stories from encroachment by those same moneyed interests and from people who are concerned for our fannish souls when we show interest in things they think are immoral. (This elides, as above, the very real responsibility that practitioners have to avoid appropriation of other experiences, to resist propagation of stereotypes about those experiences, and to listen to those people who have the relevant experiences about what is harmful, what should be kept secret by oath, and who is trustworthy in these matters, if anyone. Better writers than I take on these matters regularly.) Or when others attempt to divorce the product (the Archive) as worthy of admiration from the context that the product cannot exist, nor be as impressive, without all the people who have put the work into it, both on the technical side and in the work creation side.
That's the thing I miss the most about the Web that was - before it became corporatized and sanitized, turned into a panopticon for advertisers and monetization, there was the feeling of potential in it, where everyone had their own crossroads and goddesses to draw upon for their journey, and that there was a place for everyone, potentially, to call home. (Plug for NeoCities, an attempt to call back to those early days by providing space for people to build simple websites, for experimentation or niche interests or other things that won't need to be monetized, or even necessarily put in front of the whole eyeballs of the Internet.) I guess, if I were to try and describe the way I'd like the Web to work for future generations, I'd like it to work a little bit like how it worked for Ariane Emory II in Cyteen. Ariane Emory I set up conditions for her PR (clone's close enough for this story) to gain progressively greater access to control systems for the place she lived over time. Ari II, based on the experiences she had, started asking questions that indicated to the system she might be ready for more access and control before the time Ari I had expected it. But rather than lock Ari II out and tell her to come back when she's older, or refuse her outright, the system checks to make sure she wants it, then lets her have greater access, since she's demonstrating the curiosity that greater access will be able to satisfy. I kind of would like the Web to act that way. Not by any government fiat or parental control software, but if there were some way of essentially prompting someone that "this information requires a higher level of access. Do you want to proceed?" and giving someone the option to go "nope!" either at that point or later on, if they thought they were ready for it and they really weren't. I feel like this would probably require some amount of agreement among everyone about keeping the spaces for kids really for kids, rather than claiming a child-friendly space but not screening stuff to make sure that the cartoon uploads don't have someone in the middle of them giving children advice about effective self-harm methods. I'd also require it so that if there has to be some sort of parental notification about a request for greater access, that it is only informative and general ("Ari II is currently on Level 7") without revealing anything about what search unlocked the higher access, nor giving the notified any power to refuse the access. Instead, they'll have to adjust to the possibility of some new conversational topics in their space, when the kid is ready to talk about them. It won't quite be the mystique of discovering all the new territory out there and finding your kindred spirits through hard work and webrings and recommendations, but it definitely seems like it might provide a little bit of that excitement of discovering something new and the feeling of treading carefully in a space where so long as you can pretend to be the right age and maturity, the residents will let you stick around. And if people want to stay in the lower levels, because that's what they are comfortable with, then they can do so.
I know the idea won't work, not least because of censorius elements, commercial elements, and that every denizen of the internet has a different idea of where their content and everyone else's content should be placed, level-wise. But in some world where we have general artificial intelligence that makes sensible decisions, it's the closest I can think of to replicating the feeling of discovery and freedom that came with being on the early Web, where the entire space felt liminal. Before all the old grievances caught up, before the commercial interests colonized it and set their advertisements everywhere, before it was just part of a school's information that they would be monitoring off-campus behavior online of their students as well as all their on-campus behavior, before an entire generation that has apparently chosen to adopt the discredited arguments of the generations before, reinstating the shipping wars and policing everyone else for the presence of shibboleths like "think of the children." Our triple goddess seems to have a lot of people focused on the Maiden aspect, of innocence, and not nearly enough on the other two, of listening to those who are going through the experience and are trying to get the next generation through safely, and of asking the Great Old Ones about how it was when they were younger and taking those lessons to heart, either to emulate…or as a warning of what not to do.
no subject
Date: 2021-07-10 05:13 pm (UTC)