Artemis and Diana are the Greek archetypal Amazon. “She is pure Apollonian ego, glinting with the hostile separatism of Western personae. She is assertion and aggression, followed by withdrawal and purification through self-sequestration.” Ferocious, dauntless, fearless, war-lustful, living without men, man-subduing, flesh-devouring, are some of the adjectives Paglia quotes the ancient Greeks as using to describe Artemis and Diana. An Amazon was a real and deadly challenge to men – only the greatest of Greek heroes ever married (subdued) one. The fate of the Amazons has followed the same trajectory of how civilization has subdued women: Amazons were “remote and intimidating, offering nothing for fantasy. As an independent female impulse, she [Artemus] seems [after the Greeks] to have triggered a persistent negativity among male artists, who turn her swift and sudden action into fleshy passivity.” Suggesting that artists who followed the Greeks were somehow lesser men. “Greek art never shows the Amazon as a hulking Gorgon. She gained grace and dramatic dignity through the code of arete, [excellence] the Greek quest for honor and fame. The Amazon was later vulgarized by sex.” The Amazons were, in Greek mythology defeated and subjugated by Athens as were all women thereafter in a motif that is repeated again and again to the present time: a strong, independent, and competent woman in the male world marries (ideally some man greater than her) and becomes a mother leaving the male world behind. “Ovid makes her [the Amazon] a woman of fanatical sexual refusal laid low by man’s phallic sword. Pope uses the idea in The Rape of the Lock, where spiteful Amazons make a drawing-room charge on a pack of foppish beaux. The Amazon’s sole moment of real distinction after Greek art is in Renaissance epic, in the woman warriors of Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser….the English Renaissance too subdued the Amazon to social frames of reference….Judeo-Christianity has nothing like her except Joan of Arc.” Dread is the proper response to the Amazon but western art has feminized and pacified her – leaving the persona underrepresented in a world where femininity has been systematically purged all original Amazonian traits. Today, the Amazon persona is more often used by women who want to be subdued by someone worthy – a social strategy to weed out the undesirable beta males. It is a lonely strategy for women because it is still a dread inspiring persona for men in especially in our “Me Too” era.
“Lord Henry, with the four young lovers of The Importance of being Earnest, belong to a category of sexual personae that I call the androgyne of manners, one of the most western of types. The androgyne of manners inhabits the world of the drawing room and recreates that world wherever it goes, through manner and speech. The salon is an abstract circle where male and female, like mathematical ciphers, are equal and interchangeable. Personality becomes a sexually undifferentiated formal mask.” The androgyne of manners persona is the stylization of selective opposite sex mannerism to create a fluidity of gendered manners. “The androgyne of manners – the male feminine in his careless, lounging passivity, the female masculine in her brilliant, aggressive wit – has the profane sleekness of chic.” Smoothness in appearance, speech and action is an adjective that commonly defines the androgyne of manners. Fred Astaire with his smooth forehead, sleek combed back hair and on screen wit and dance moves was an androgyne of manners. “Smoothness is always social in meaning: it is nature subdued by the civil made second nature.” The androgyne of manners is a slave to ritual. “…the ceremony of social form is stronger than gender, shaping personae to its public purpose and turning the internal world into the external.”
Using P. B. Shelley’s poem The Witch of Atlas, as a reference, Paglia introduces us to a type of androgyne she calls the android or manufactured object. The android is an androgyne because sex is unimportant in the persona. What is important is the presentation of torpidity and slow movement emphasizing the tools and techniques that “use Apollonian light to temper or sweeten chthonian mysteries.” Mannequins or to appear as a mannequin is the ideal sought….David Bowie used the mannequin style in his transvestite period…” High fashion models on the catwalk are manufactured objects or androids especially when their face becomes a steady mask. “The android is nether male nor female because it is a machine made of synthetic materials. In a wonderful commercial for Camay soap, the radiantly amiable Luciana Avedon turned her surgically altered face to the camera and addressed the viewer in a slow robot voice that stretched the phrase ‘coconut-enriched lather’ to impossible hypnotic length.”
The sycophant or flatterer Paglia calls the court hermaphrodite who is “history’s most repellent androgyne” and who always hangs out with wealth, power or fame. “He is in governments, corporations, university departments, and the book and art world. We know the professional sycophant from the Hollywood flack or yes-man. He is the celebrity hairdresser, the boudoir confident and lounge lizard, the glossy escort….Flattery and malice come from the same forked tongue. The sycophant is an androgyne because of his pliability and servility….self-sculpture becomes slavish plasticity to the ruler’s whim and will. Identity is self-evacuated….He is purely reactive, a parody of femininity, each word and deed a cloying mime of the ruler’s desire. The phenomenon may be a perversion of male bonding, a social spectacle of dominance and submission….The court hermaphrodite has no gender because he has no real self or moral substance.” Hamlet’s friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are some examples of the court hermaphrodite.
The dandy, as the name implies is someone, usually a man, who is concerned with style, charm, and fashion. Describing the dandy, Paglia quotes Baudelaire as “a Romantic ‘cult of the self’ arising from ‘the burning need’ to create ‘a personal originality.’…‘a new kind of aristocracy,’ a ‘haughty and exclusive’ sect resisting ‘the rising tide of democracy, which invades and levels everything.’” In the decadent stage the dandy often becomes arrogantly elitist and “loathes the new mass culture which he identifies with mediocrity….Baudelaire’s dandy is an Apollonian androgyne, drawing a sharp line between himself and reality. The dandy with ‘aristocratic superiority of mind,’ aims for ‘distinction above all things.’ Distinction is aboveness and apartness. The dandy’s vocation is elegance, incarnating the Platonic ‘idea of beauty’ in his own person. He is an artificial personality. The self, sculpted by imperious Apollonian contour, has become an object or objet d’art.” The dandy is a creative soul, a self-made self (not necessarily a person) who follows no rules but the rules of aesthetics. When one hears the expression “but they wore it well” one is speaking of a dandy.
The Dandy taken too far becomes the decadent aesthete, “like the court hermaphrodite repellent for its narrow egotism…the occupational disease of the depraved aesthete, [is] a neurasthenic sickliness covered by ghastly cosmetics.” “The Decadent aesthete is in the ambiguous position of having to be inactive yet also glutted by worldly experience. Sexually, he has acted or will act, but he must ever be seen to be acting.” The majesty or regality of royalty is the aim of the decadent aesthete.
Alchemy and astrology are minor topics that Paglia weaves throughout her book but topics that have large significance to western art history. In modernity, their work has often been trivialized and scorned as naively pre-scientific when trying to transmute lead into gold; or as trying to find the elixir of eternal life; or in trying to develop the universal solvent; or in trying to systematize human characteristics in a zodiac. Modern people imagine alchemists and astrologers as seeking these for the sake of profit, or power, or utility – as if there could be no other motivations than those we have today. they were not stupid as moderns often believe; they just did not have the concepts we have. “Alchemy, like astrology, has been stigmatized at its worst rather than remembered at it its best. It was not just a mercenary scrabble for a formula to turn lead to gold. It was a philosophical quest for the creative secrets of nature. Mind and matter were linked, in the pagan way. Alchemy is pagan naturism….‘alchemy’s spiritual aim was ‘the achievement of ‘inward silver’ or ‘inward gold’—in their immutable purity and luminosity’….The alchemical process sought to transform the prima material or chaos of mutable substances, into the eternal and incorruptible ‘Philosopher’s Stone.’” Alchemy has influenced the development of chemistry and psychology (with its primal symbolism) as well as “prefiguring all scientific and anthropological ‘concepts of development and evolution.’” As such alchemy (which began in ancient Egypt) is a style of the apollonian that introduced the notions of liner change, transmutation, and evolution within the head magic of western civilization. It also had no trouble mixing divination, values, and the scientific method. While we in the west have dropped divination and allegedly dropped values from science we have done so to our poverty of meaning even as we leap ahead in scientific knowledge. Alchemy and Astrology are the repositories of the entire potential signification that is missing from scientific knowledge. The “why?” of a scientific question really only answers the “how” and “what” and is therefore always incomplete because one can continue to ask those kinds of questions indefinitely. Alchemy and astrology can provide the end of “why?” and as such can complete the knowledge of science in a much more personally satisfying way.