Nor Hall, Those Women
PREFACE
The red of Dionysus belongs to women. So dark it is almost black, it calls up old wine, deep wounds, and the marbled walls of the womb itself heavy with twisted veins reaching inevitably toward the heart. At the heart of the Mystery chamber that anchors these pages in Pompeii there is an unabashed love of women. Especially experienced women like the Domina who sits at the far end of the room as if at the far end of our book’s trajectory welcoming newcomers to her thiasos, the company of women who “have been through it” and survived.
Wreathed in red and weighted by soulfulness, she is an image of the Roman Mater Matuta—mother of maturation—assessing the ripeness of a process eloquently described in Linda Fierz’s analysis of feminine ritual activity on the walls of a unique Mediterranean Villa. It was C. G. Jung’s idea originally that Fierz go south to Italy. His inspired match of cool, extraordinarily intelligent Swiss woman to hot Dionysian topic resulted in the revelation of an initiation practice that comes as a great gift to contemporary women left bereft by a culture that has virtually nothing to offer them.
By “nothing” I mean no rites, no ecstatic tradition, no crimson-garlanded, full-bodied Mater Matuta waiting to
embrace them when they have passed through the extreme states of a
woman’s life onto the plateau of aging. Maturity means crossing the world horizon at dawn’s new beginning like the ripe globular red sun—having
suffered through deadly darkness, searched the ancestry of your arrival
moment, and found it “good”(from maturus, knowing the favorable moment, mane, morning, manis, goodness, and familial ancestral spirits, manes).
Every book comes trailing a long history of obsession.
The first time I saw the dazzling frescoes I was nowhere near recognizing the God of Rage and Rapture, much less comprehending the frightening spiritual demand Dionysus issues to women in mid-life. Nonetheless the red pages, displayed to me by a prescient librarian at the Analytical Psychology Club’s New York library, kept haunting my studies in college and graduate school until finally compelling a radical acquisition on a late, mizzling night in San Francisco. It was more than thirty years ago at the height of the free speech disturbances on
on California campuses, when three friends and I drove under cloud cover on a mission to “liberate” Linda Fierz’s Pompeiian material from the C. G. Jung Library. We had a key, thanks to Joseph Wheelwright, elder analyst and thesis advisor. He expected me to use it appropriately during the day—which I also did. But it happened that one of our group worked as a legal secretary and had a key to a copy machine in an adjacent building. My friends let me read Women’s Dionysian Initiation in one frantic sitting. By flashlight, so our presence would be undetected.
They watched the corridors, guarded doors, ran back and forth across the street, turned out lights in the other building, and reshelved the copy of the manuscript as if untouched. By dawn we’d made the equivalent of the maenad’s mad run up Mt. Parnassus and down again. A risky maneuver but it is why you hold this particularly rare text of women’s mysteries in hand.
It is a curious quality, often mentioned, of these frescoes, that people think they were painted just for them. A nineteen-year-old Paul Klee, barely painting yet himself, saw red and green field Pompeiian frescoes on his European travels in 1902 and exulted: “When I entered I was profoundly moved … the colors, I take all this personally. It was painted for me and dug up for me. I feel invigorated” (The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898–1918, par. 391).
Gods arrive differently in every age according to its necessities. James Hillman, whom I hadn’t heard of yet, was rewriting Dionysus precisely at the time of our midnight run. Four years later on one remarkable fall day I found two neatly bound copies of the Fierz manuscript crammed in the mailbox — one from the analyst Kay Bradway on the West Coast and one from Doris Albrecht the sympathetic librarian on the East.
That night I happened to meet Hillman at a gathering in the Midwest and pleaded the case for publishing the book on Pompeii. Women needed it and wanted it and why hadn’t it ever been done?
Now that I am as old as Linda Fierz when she was sent on her mission to the Villa I wish I knew more of the personal story behind her search. What I have gathered is included in these pages along with parallel stories of poets and scholars who have been enamored of the same mythological material.
We have left intact the original appreciative and protective notes by Heinrich Fierz and Esther Harding because they prove the nature of the work as legacy —something of essential worth that has been handed down to us in trust. The archetypal core of the initiation drama remains so vibrantly infused with eros
that it promises to serve generations of souls starved for images of beauty, particularly subtle erotic beauty between women that gets erased in concrete sexual cultures.
The world needs to see this side of Pompeii. Not the fine, closeted phalluses or the secret pay-per-view bathhouse friezes but rather this recessed women’s chamber hidden in the open. As the articulate Sufi angel (surely related to the dark-winged angel in Scene 7) says: “I have been showing myself to you for so long and you haven’t seen me … ” ~Nor Hall, St. Paul, 2004 ~Nor Hall, Those Women, Page 5-7
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