Tag Archives: virgin mary

Romancing the Goddess

Romancing the Goddess: Three Middle English Romances about Women by Marijane Osborn, a 1998 paperback from University of Illinois Press, is part of the collection at the Reading Room.

Marijane Osborn Romancing the Goddess from University of Illinois Press

“Take three exciting medieval romances, translate them—two for the first time—into modern English verse, and you’ll have only part of Marijane Osborn’s Romancing the Goddess.

Osborn introduces and translates the three tales, all dealing with women cast adrift upon the northern and Mediterranean seas, then shows how the stories forge a hitherto missing link with worship of a savior goddess in the distant past.

Arguing that the idea of the woman cast adrift can be traced to an ancient Mediterranean legend connecting aspects of the Virgin Mary and Isis as ‘sea goddesses’—protectors of those at sea—Osborn then explores the image and idea of ‘the Goddess.’ The romances and the author’s discussion of that ever-popular female figure will interest feminists, women readers generally, medievalists, historians of religion, and the many others interested in the mysterious figure we call ‘the Goddess.'” — back cover

The Comedy of Agony

Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Comedy of Agony: A Book of Poisonous Contemplations by Christopher Spranger from Leaping Dog Press:

Christopher Spranger's The Comedy of Agony from Little Dog Press

 

This slender volume of aphoristic meditations can be read in a variety of ways. One possibility is to consider it to be instructional scripture by Tyler Durden. Another would be a rich mine of sigfile quotes guaranteed to offend the pious and conventionally-minded. I think this one may need to go in my Christmas cards: “Had she only miscarried, the Virgin Mary could have saved the world.”

Spranger’s religious reflections presume a Biblical-Miltonian narrative, although his atheology has a wide scope, including admiration for the metaphysically sadistic aesthetics of Asian Buddhism. There’s no indication of familiarity with Aleister Crowley’s work, but Spranger’s strong affinity for and constant allusion to Nietzsche (who, unnamed throughout, is referenced once as “a certain leg-puller”) makes him a close cousin to Thelemites, at any rate. In particular, his piece on “The Attractions of Rage” makes a fine complement to Crowley’s chapter on love in Little Essays Toward Truth, and he makes some insightful remarks on the Thelemically-vexed term “compassion”: “Men to whom agony is unknown have grabbed a hold of this concept and perverted it completely, reducing it to something low and effortless, when in fact compassion requires risk and presupposes rank.”

Spranger is evidently resigned to embodiment, attachment, strife and sorrow, but he writes that like it’s a bad thing. One wonders what the return of Saturn has in store for the 28-year-old author. [via]

 

 

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