Carmen, a Gypsy Geography

CHAPTER THREE Mythic Space and Ancient Carmen

Mythic Space and Ancient Carmen [69] from any human or chronological dimension, dislocating her to the world of ancient myth. A myth provides psychological space, at times spiritual. Mythic power rests not on intellectual consciousness but rather on the dissolution of the subject/ object divide—the ability to inhabit both seen and unseen worlds. As we trace the contours of this space, we approach the possibility of the impossible: a Gypsy geography. Ultimately, the Gypsy—Carmen—is stripped of physical geography and left only with exile and the space of displacement.4 From one perspective, this is impoverishment, from another empowerment. Gypsies retain a mythic core or infrastructure somehow resistant to “history.” As we watch her on stage, Carmen’s power to embody a paradoxical geography emerges from the idea that, while she is without a center, she nevertheless returns us to our own center. This will also appear in flamenco soleá and cante jondo: the repeated centering and re-centering of the dancer, mapping her identity in space until she reaches a perfect, life-centered place, a virtual performative geography.5 While most analyses of Carmen are rooted in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Romantic and Orientalist literary texts, I wish to return to the world of the ancient Mediterranean. I unearth in this period an archeology of Carmen’s power. I trace the development of a consciousness lying at the heart of a society that would see Carmen’s power as wicked rather than good, a human being whose modern symbolism resonates with and calls into question our relationship to our ancient past. Studying the transference of mythological and societal power from the mother goddess to the male warrior gods in the ancient Middle East and throughout the emerging city states of Asia Minor and Europe helps us to trace a reversal in the mythology of women. The advent of patriarchal mythologies commences in the third millennium BCe with the evolution of agriculture, land ownership, and inheritance.6 Ancient Carmen The worship of the female principle began with celebrations of spring, fertility, birth, and rebirth after the long winter of Ice Age Europe.7 It can be seen in the worship of the moon goddess Astarte and in the worship of Isis, goddess of the Nile, whose great flood each year irrigates and fertilizes the land. Worship of the moon and the lunar cycle reflects the twenty-eight-day menstrual cycle. The new or quarter moon is the sign of the rebirth of the moon; therefore the symbol of [70] Carmen, a Gypsy Geography the female goddess Astarte is one of the bull’s horns that resemble the quarter moon. Astarte, wearing the curved horns of the moon above her head, embodies a fusion of the male and female, the matriarchal and patriarchal, as agricultural society with its property and land ownership supersedes the hunter-gatherer culture of the pre-agricultural epoch. From roughly 30,000 BCe in the Paleolithic and Chalcolithic periods, archeological data such as clay, marble, bone, copper, and gold from over three thousand sites in southeastern Europe (the site of the Romantic birth of Carmen) testify to a “communal worship of the Mother Goddess.”8 Seminal historian Gerda Lerner describes an earth mother figure who mediates between the human and supernatural worlds; multiple symbols of the navel, the vulva, the squatting position in childbirth, the moon, and pregnant woman decorate archeological shards as evidence of the fertility cult and the power given women in daily life. “The fertility cult,” writes Lerner, “became firmly established in the religion of the Ancient Near East with the rise of agriculture in the Neolithic civilization in and after the fifth millennium BCe.”9 The figurines’ heads and bodies are decorated with bulls’ horns and heads, symbols of male virility, procreativity, and the lunar cycle. They have been discovered in Russia, Iraq, Anatolia, Nineveh, Jericho, and southern Mesopotamia.10 Images of female goddesses, as well as those of trees, snakes, birds, and eggs, on pottery and walls are evidence of the idea that an earth mother was worshiped by ancient humans. Belief in the mother goddess is a tradition that has continued to the present day. The great goddess embodied a unity of earth, stars, humans, and nature.11 In Sumer she was called Ninhursag; in Babylon, Inanna; Kubab and Ishtar in Phoenicia; Astarte in Canaan; Anath in Greece; and Hekate-Artemis in Rome. Early on, her sexuality...