Original Cindy and Original Sin

Last week we/the public were inundated with the tail end of the latest episode in the Will & Kate ‘lapping it up, loving our status otherwise we’d be Z-list celebs’ show regarding their Tour of India and then flooded with the results of the buildup for the highest profile birthday on the planet, well one of her birthdays, the mater herself. Then we heard about the deaths of dark mother figure ‘ninth wonder of the world’ Chyna and ganymede Prince (the daughter in modern son form). All the world’s a stage.

I wrote a farewell post for Chyna and since we’ve learned that her death is considered an ‘accidental overdose’ – at least they didn’t say suicide which would have been beyond insulting; that woman knew how to be fit and healthy, an icon of what you can achieve with consistent physical effort, paying close attention to her diet and health, preparing her healthy food business and planning to spend time with her family that she was looking forward to and for some time she hasn’t been afraid to show the world her non-star self. She wasn’t suicidal, although I get the impression she may have known something was ending.

In that post I mentioned the [awesome] tv series Dark Angel (2000-2002) and two of the main characters. There were many great characters in that show, some very likable like Max, of course 😛 . Today I thought I’d write a bit about her best friend, Original Cindy. Some of the fist things that come to the modern mind could be Sindy, Barbie, dollies, toys but there’s more to it than that. What we’re talking about here is the Original, Cindy. The original Mother figure always has herself in parts for assistance, close companions, bodyguards etc – something that goes beyond a sidekick, it’s not necessarily an affectionate bond, it’s more solid than that, rock solid, true devotion to another being that is beyond whatever happens between them because ultimately they are/are like one person. A kind of bond that surpasses time and space.

Original Cindy is Black and a lesbian, she represents the Dark Mother (showing the original feminine here). Max is Brown, hetero but cautious and can’t touch her beau – she is the Daughter; the Dark Mother and Daughter aren’t known for creating, all three parts Mother/Daughter/Dark Mother are warriors so there is crossover but generally the Daughter is the mediator/the link between the Mother and creation and the Dark Mother is the destroyer. In Dark Angel we see Original Cindy’s partner Diamond who poignantly had broken out of prison and unknowingly had been infected with a fatal disease as part of an experiment on prisoners. ‘Daimon’ (looks like Damian or daemon doesn’t it) refers to the spirit in later culture referred to as the holy ghost. Remember that the modern names for the ‘devil’ (that word in itself being a demonization of the Devi i.e. Mother Goddess) include Lucifer and Satan; both of which again don’t really refer to what we consider nowadays. Lucifer for example being the holy light, even the morning/evening star Venus (or lighter matches if you remember the 1830’s). Satan can be seen in differently too – type of djinn, plural not individual but remember that the d/jinn consider themselves smokeless fire, pure, and are an elder race. No wonder really why the the giant diamond in space was called Lucy [in the sky with diamonds] in 2004 after the Beatles [scarab = gem/ornament cut in the form of a beetle] song.

Then there’s original sin. Original sin in the latest installment of the official story is Eve, billed as the original woman but there was a Mother figure before her, billed as Adam’s first wife Lilith. Eve was given awareness, was awoken from a semi-consciousness by eating an apple from a sacred tree (we often see it as red for its own reasons, maybe I’ll fit that in somewhere later). The tree and and the snake are sometimes seen as one, sometimes as two i.e. a snake who just happens to be in a tree but it’s not clear whether the tree (and trees were sacred to root peoples who knew their importance for them, other animals and land/environment) is separate from the snake since the snake also symbolizes renewal/the cycle of life and later the two symbols became the winged staff used in medicine. Either way the snake is similar to the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland (and like many authors Lewis Carroll put his beliefs into his writing), helped Eve and Eve in turn gifted knowledge to humanity. How shameful. Before that they were living in a garden/micro-environment/lab experiment presided over by ‘God’ and his helper/worker/descendant races, nowadays we only think of them as ‘angels’. Due to her crime Eve and all her daughters/women were forever punished with pregnancy/childbirth/afterbirth (if they survived and lived long enough after year upon year of it from childhood themselves). Also of course the sin of being born of a woman which has to be cleansed via a water ritual as if babies don’t come out of a fluid sac. I’m surprised no one’s thought of using soap in the ceremony. Interestingly it highlights that apparently humans weren’t created/born in the way we think if this is punishment. I would have preferred to come out of a plant or down on a moonbeam personally *ahem*.

Alright let’s take it back further, whilst Adam is the original man of the combination of the elements Eve is the eve – the cusp – as aforementioned Lilith came beforehand and later became known as the mother of monsters due to genetically modified/mixed species children she apparently had, though ‘God’ had the same. What got Lilith demonized and replaced? Wanting equal rights. Predating the Hebrew we associate Lilith with the serpent and the tree which may be why in some artworks the snake is depicted as part woman, the goddess with the intel who wanted to tell Eve the truth.

What is sin? Sin is an old word for the moon; many gods and goddesses have been associated with the moon (same goes for the sun) and we often see crescent moons on goddesses (and the crescent has its own connotations); in terms of the Mesopotamian pantheon the moon deity was male. The moon has become associated with wisdom.

What is Original Cindy? ‘Normal’ (the name of the guy most of the main characters work for as bike messengers/couriers) insults her (he insults everybody, and they’re not exactly the most reliable staff either) when she returns from trying another job maybe she isn’t the ultimate/almighty ‘goddess of the universe’ she thinks she is, but ironically that is part of what she represents, is covering for and helping to help everybody in general. It’s similar to how Max always gets blamed for escaping from Manticore and apparently deserting everybody there making things worse for them plus called a loner who looks out for herself (whilst she looks after everybody around her, helps both when asked and not asked) yet if she hadn’t escaped with her unit, they wouldn’t have been able to return to destroy the place and free the inmates. Max also refers to her cat heritage early on “because it’s the Egyptian goddess Bast, the goddess who comprehends all goddesses, eye of Ra, protector, avenger, destroyer, giver of life who lives forever” when Logan Cale meets her (Cale being 1 part of the triple goddess – the triplicate – the power of 3 – the highest divided form of the Mother – Mother/Daughter/Dark Mother which later became know as Faith, Hope and Charity; things that Logan is trying to accomplish with Eyes Only – Max has special eyes that are unique out of her unit and ‘donated’ from an earlier dead woman).

Original Cindy talks in third person and often in verse, characteristic of the ancient epics. Something she seems to have learned from Diamond, but claims not to. She’s also a fan of Xena: Warrior Princess 😛 another dark mother figure and paired with another daughter figure. The original Mother in Dark Angel was a native girl who was captured and raped by three invader males who bred her until they had a child they were satisfied with, they buried her and the dead babies. Their remains were found by Sandeman and he started his genetics experiments, later taken over by the government and he disappeared (remember the old stories of the sandman talk of a creature that forced children to sleep, beat them and sometimes fed them to his own children). The rape of the indigenous girls and women is commonplace in invasions to ensure the conquerors have a ‘valid’ claim on the place via genes. The use of the native girl is similar to the back story of the ‘First’ in slayer lineage Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The First was a local girl three men did ‘black magic’ on possessing her with a shadow demon to make her strong enough to fight demons, to slay them; like the ‘polluted’ Eve in the Gnostic Sophianic story, and as Buffy says “I didn’t come here to get knocked up… You violated her”, Buffy herself being a daughter figure, her mother Joy/ce dies and her sister Dawn is pure energy and not a normal birth.

Ironically the Breeding Cult in Dark Angel are trying to achieve the same thing as Manticore just via selective and what they consider normal sex, they too discard the ‘breeding partner’/victim after they have a child they’re satisfied with. They’re obsessed with purebreds, how many were inbred? We assume that they didn’t include other animals in their practices though they do use snakes in their initiation rituals and have amazing strength and pain tolerance. They hate the ultimate pure bred produced by Manticore, Max (triple mother, matrix), and try to make her into a villain for the public so that they hate her and don’t realize she could offer hope/knowledge/help.

Max is the daughter figure because it is through the Daughter that creation learns about the Mother, particularly necessary after having been under the spell/dream of the usurper workers who made themselves into God/s and lorded it over creation. Even in the Devi Gita – which is still a patriarchal cradles of civilization version of older narrative – but due to its antiquity is still revealing admits that the ultimate gods/the ruling pantheon/the strongest of the strongest/the firsts etc etc etc were not the creators, they themselves and they cosmos they knew were created by the Mother Goddess/Devi/Vidya/Hrim – the name is not mentioned but ‘Lalita Tripurasundari’ is the ultimate/complete Shakti, the Matrika whose sri yantra contains the other goddesses. Where they put their stamp in was at the introduction of the caste/class system and when there’s been a cataclysm or perhaps ‘demon they couldn’t definitely beat’ they call for Mother, like praying on their deathbed after a lifetime of doing sh*t to everybody, warring with each other and feeling punished by natural disasters.

What you thought there were only the Bhagavad-gita, Mahabharata and Ramayana? Well I can see why – the Devi Gita is rarely talked about and harder to find, even the copiously educated, beautifully intellectual and genteel ladies of mother-god.com hadn’t included it in their articles until Mum told them about it. So here’s a version of it for reference:

View this document on Scribd

Also for reference: the Lalitopakhyana

Click to access lalitopakyana.pdf

The problem is that despite the magnificent descriptions we know that patriarchy and the male triad plus Indra took over so unlike the gods/God of later religions the Mother isn’t omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent plus she’s generous and loving to a fault so she’s subject to being tricked, trapped, hurt similar to the rest of us. In that sense we can identify with her much more and probably part of why she was/is so precious to indigenous peoples and even modern people who feel the need for something better than pack mentality to believe in. Something beloved. She’s almost like a bigger version of the Earth Mother, something Earth and Earth’s children can look to. It left a scar on people and their culture when she disappeared/was conquered, I can see why her image has endured in our beliefs even though twisted. We lost more than we bargained for in her demise.

Like James Cameron puts in Avatar where he mixed/twisted narratives but at least we knew the bad side was the bad side i.e. when people desire something that belongs to someone else we make excuses and add to incidents to go to war and justify resource grabbing/genocide. “We killed our Mother” [and look at the state of us]. Signourney the Weaver (Fate/Spinner/Time) has portrayed the Mother/Dark Mother role well both in Avatar (and very interestingly via cloning and dream out of body experience/travel technology in that film – and again there’s an episode in the series Charmed that has the dream technology theme with dark mother figure Prudence playing lead – Shannen Doherty, Shannen representative of goddess Sionen, the flowing water and wisdom – the cosmos is the sea/ocean) and as Elle-n Ripley in the Alien series, the second film ‘this time it’s war’ also written/directed by James Cameron, a series in which the ancient narrative is aptly put.

In Avatar we also see the sacred trees and people with snake like hair which gives them knowledge through telepathy and they live on Pandora (an earlier parallel of Eve). Pandora was the first and complete woman, a great work that then became associated with sin, i.e. knowledge and hope. I’ve never liked hope personally, I’m a cynic and find it extends pain, the same with knowledge so much of it takes a lot of searching for ‘truth’ but then in the long run with enough effort sometimes, just sometimes… :-).