Thursday, January 10, 2008

DiaNA

The Diana Myth - or the symbolic D(ia)NA archetype of a goddess

TimePix photos of Lady Diana from Time and Life Magazines and other sources will be shown when approval has been attained from them.

by James Travers-Murison - has a diploma in journalism, a degree in history/psychology and a Law degree from Monash University, worked for international law and accounting firms and has travelled extensively around the world. In London he encroached upon the hallowed precincts of Buckingham Palace.

See TMMAG for more 

This is a social and political comment on the mythical death of Diana with a twist of irony like all ancient Greek tragedies.



My parents separated when I was 12 in a messy blameful divorce full of recriminations and backbiting. Thinking of those lonely days, it is Diana's children who I really feel sorry for on the wedding day of the eldest son of the Princess of Wales, for the rest of their life they will have no mother and for that they will have to find a substitute hopefully in their nation. And hopefully after so many years we will now find a substitute to fill our magazines, which has a bit more substance than Diana, but knowing human nature I think it is highly unlikely especially given all the focus now on Kate Middleton, the new 21st C but different Lady Diana Spencer. Yet perhaps beneath all the glitz there is a story to Diana. The owner of Harrods thinks so with the coroner's enquiry revealing startling evidence over the drunk and provoking nature of the driver with the paparazzi before they headed off that night, and a letter of Diana's reveals she feared her husband would cause her death through a motor car accident.

On the last day of August 1997 Princess Diana died with one of her boyfriends and an extremely drunk driver. They were speeding, unseatbelted under a tunnel being chased by paparazzi photographers. It crackled over the radio as I woke up and I thought in a way what a relief. She had to be written out of the script, she had just transgressed too many boundaries to remain in this world, taken too many liberties with the royal family, her own children and even her nation. Years later I read some book on astrology, the idiot's guide. It had a section on Diana's death. A massive Solar eclipse, a blocking of Earth's pumping heart, the Roman Christian's Sol Invictus, by the feminine Moon - the symbol of Islam, occurred the day after she died conjuncting with her birth Pluto in her eighth house - all death. Hale-Bopp comet associated with royal deaths had just passed leading to the Hale-Bopp cult suicide deaths. Regulus, the Persian star for royalty and revenge is conjunct her north node at birth in Leo 29´and on that day it lay like a knife towards her heart.

It appears they just avoided ramming into some poor Fiat that was probably toddling through the tunnel before they slid out of control and hit a pylon. That is unless there was an MI5 conspiracy. Would one have any sympathy if it was not Diana? Any lesser mortal would be held in disgrace and certainly the driver would have been charged with reckless driving.

After a few days I actually began to feel quite sad, because somehow there was a sense of death in the English world's collective consciousness. She somehow represented that lost innocence of the young princess swept off her feet by the older prince, who in the end was just as flawed as the rest of us. Her marriage fell to bits like most marriages do nowadays. She was sucked into the whole consumer society with its endless need to gratify the senses and in the end she was, like all of us, forced to control her spending. Finally she was effectively exiled from her homeland and her weakness to keep on consuming took her to the hands of a millionaire Muslim playboy.

Perhaps it had to be the son of the owner of Harrods, the most elite super market in the world, that Diana had to seek her affections. Harrods, taken over by Arab oil dollars largely gained by strangling the Christian Western economies. In a world where oil energy is the most sort after commodity, controlled largely by Islamic nations, yet manipulated by the Christian industrial base, their romance had to symbolise the current juxtaposition of the two great Western faiths. Islam the source of the spiritual energy and Christianity the user of it.

And the archetypes had to obliterate themselves in a Parisian tunnel, being chased by the greatest consumers of all - gossip. It had to be a black Mercedes driving into a huge automobile tunnel, because these are the symbols of the ultimate ejaculation of the Teutonic technological "phallic" male dominance.

Paris was the Greek hero who held the apple that was the goddess's prize for being the fairest. He refused to give the apple for the reward of wisdom and authority offered by Hera and Athene. Instead he was seduced by Aphrodite, the goddess of love and gave it to her. Paris, who absconded with then sought to keep Helen in Troy yet failed, had to be the city where they had to die just as Diana had been seduced away from her proper place and taken an apple that was not meant for her but for the wise and fair. It had to be in France, because that is the country of the great romance, the furthest battle ground into Christian Europe by the invasion of the Islamic world, where Charlmagne finally defeated the Muslim invaders in the 9th century and now as a result of France's African colonial past has a huge Arab population.

Diana had to be the Roman goddess of hunting and chastity who was bent on remaining single. She was a fertility mountain and wood goddess of animals, dance and frivolity, imps and elves come to mind. She was the goddess for the slaves who had a holiday on her annual day of worship. Diana is commonly believed to have come directly from the Greek goddess Artemis, the Romans borrowing much of their mythology from the Greeks. Artemis was the daughter of Zeus and brother of Apollo. She was no lightweight goddess, however she always appeared as a maiden, resembling a boy in her strength and wildness. She was the virgin huntress as well as protector of animals.

Artemis the "huntress," in "Diana " by Jean Renoir, (1867).

She was a jealous nature loving goddess, who was often lewdly attacked by those gods desiring her chastity. Her response was always that of a wild animal. When Actaeon spied on her bathing in the wild brooks, she turned him into a stag and had him torn to shreds by her own hounds. Even Hercules came across her on one of his many quests when he pinched one of her sacred deer, the Cyprian hind, she made him promise to release it unharmed. In the end her lover Hippolytus died at the hands of Poseidon's sea monster as a result of a curse by Zeus that went terribly wrong. The myth becomes reality when one envisages Zeus's curse as the Queen's reaction to Dodi.

John Waterhouse's painting of Aphrodite, finding the wounded Adonis
Diana of Ephesus

Dione is the other root of Diana, the feminine form of Zeus, and another name for the great love goddess Aphrodite. A giver of oracles, she was worshipped at the oracle of Dodona equally with Zeus, a spring goddess and a water goddess. To be sacrificed on the last day of Europe's summer, the giver of oracles at the ancient place of Dodona, strangely enough dies in Paris with Dodi.

Roman statues of Diana ---------- JOHN STILLWELL–AP

The cult of Diana in Aricia, Rome barred men and was known for being direct, cruel and scornful, if not savage towards men. The single male priest having to fight in mortal combat to gain his place, possibly human sacrifices were involved. She was patroness of witches and the moon and regarded as a demon by early Christians. Pope John xxii in 1318 accusing some of his court in Avignon of copulating with demonesses called "Dianas".

The real Diana was no angel, spoilt, arrogant and jealously guarding her privacy, which in the end was her undoing. The rich little girl, who seemed to have everything, yet was miserable. She could not surrender to royal responsibility, yet loved her charities. She had a heart, but did she have wisdom, because her failure seems to be in a simple lack of common sense and in way recklessness. She married young into tremendous wealth and responsibility to become the future Queen of England, and to a man whose father was of course from the Greek royal family - which had probably no Greek blood in it.

PATRICK DEMARCHELIER–CAMERA PRESS LONDON

So Diana had to be the oracle, the wild pagan goddess of chasteness and nature, of female immaturity and frivolity, who had to die with the Christian consumer wealth of a Muslim lover, Dodi (even the name conjures up the thought of the first species known to be made extinct by man). He had to buy her with Islamic oil dollars to satisfy her consumer lust for jewellery and dresses, because that is the myth this current world lives in - the mass exploitation of nature's unconditional wild and untamed love. The Islamic faith, arising in response to a corrupted Christian world, had to be the faith corrupting her and dying with her. And the media had to bring together all the wonderful, beautiful hypocrisy of the whole Diana myth so that the mass of humanity could experience it. Perhaps that is why in the end I did feel some sympathy, as one feels sympathy for a big furry rabbit that just sits there and stares at your headlights before you can brake and you can only wonder what on earth possessed it to run in front of you in the first place - untamed love.

PATRICK DEMARCHELIER - CAMERA PRESS LONDON

In a collective way she has acted as an archetype for our generation of housewives and secretaries, and plenty of new age men, who never really understood what a credit card was and certainly not what the interest accumulating at the bottom meant, other than as some kind of hidden injustice to be blocked out of one's thoughts until it was eventually paid off by a doting husband or wife. The throw away Christian Western society finally threw away their greatest source of consumption, untamed love, in a death with Islam's wealth in a tunnel in Paris. Perhaps it is fitting that the media killed the goddess of our wild nature with a Muslim millionaire, as well as martyring her and condemning itself and flashing as many close-up pictures of crying mournful royals as it could get its hands on. Strangely enough and befitting of the role of mysticism that still has its part to play in modern society, all my camera equipment was stolen out of my car the very hour she died as I was praying in an Assembly of God Church in Richmond. I took it as a sign to give up being a paparazzi photographer.

A final Concorde had to be met as the price Paris had to pay for defying his betters and taking Helen to Troy, so slaying the heart of the wood goddess. Rich German barons were the agreed sacrifice to be made by Air France as atonement to the British in the mid-Summer of the eve' year of the third millennium to finally free Diana. And maybe it was her last word on the poverty and Western sponsored wars in the third world that had her direct Islam to send the twin pheonixes of the New World into the forbidden Apple. Perish they did into the twin giant thin rectangular phalluses that symbolise the mark of the beast, and reveal the coming of the anti-Christ's New World Order. A third to breach traversity under the pentagon, and a fourth to never reach its fate. For heroes would rise to protect their god, and see an end to peace, Zeus has called for the end of time and judgement day in his "infinite justice". Then alas the harlot of Bhagdad had to be tamed and invaded, and rebel in the Biblical prophecy that the Babylonians must be bought to heel for their evil ways. So the star of Zion could rise again, and King David's temple rebuilt such that the Messiah could return and end this world by bringing judgement day. And a decade on such a star may be in the form of a Catherine of the middle ton. A sort of resurrection of the Princess to the English middle way and maybe also to allow Charles' Buddhistic path to rest in peace and let ghost's of the past be finally freed.

"The Sacrifice to Vesta," by Jose de Goya, 1771.
Comforting amputees January 1997 in Angola, while holding 13-year-old Sandra Thijica, who lost her left leg to a land mine in 1994 JOAO SILVA–AP

So to quote from the gods, "Long live Artemis, Diana, goddess of the hunter and the hunted! Dione has made her sacrifice to Zeus at the oracle of Dodonis on the last day of summer. So let the beginnings of love's maturity flow for innocence has given its sacrifice! Let the festivities begin even a decade on as the truth will be revealed as to who killed Diana! For it was Regulus, the Persian star in the heavens of royal revenge."

But just remember it was spring in Australia.

further reading C.S. Seltman, The Twelve Olympians (Max Parirsh); W.K.C. Guthrie, The Greeks and their Gods (Methuen); M.Grant, Myths of the Greeks and Romans (Weidenfield); Idiots Guide to Astrology.
With thanks to People Magazine and Anthony Orr Clarke, Ph.D., 2000 for photography.
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