“These love queens have existed throughout the recorded history, although seldom celebrated by the official culture. Social mavericks and mold breakers, many have vanished into semiobscurity or been distorted beyond recognition. […] They strike terror into the insecure male heart; under their black magic all hell can break loose. A man can be pitched into testosterone storm, driven from home and country, led into love bondage, and zapped from a mogul into a mouse. Yet paradoxically, seductresses are often the best thing to happen to a man. Contrary to fable, they are usually femmes vitales who put air in a man’s tank, conferring growth, creativity, happiness and authentic masculinity. (For starters, their speed dial orgasmic capacity allays male performance and penis size anxieties.) Most of all, though, the great charmeuses are a gold mine for women. They are a secret sorority, a never studied group, with a priceless fund of inspiration and seductive wisdom.”
- “Seductresses”, Betsy Prioleau
In my life, there have not been too many things that I have been loyal and committed to — I have betrayed religions, gods, philosophies, my personal catechisms and maxims, styles, passions and God knows what else. I have betrayed lovers, deceiving myself as I am deceiving them (while fully aware of my own self-deception) and I have left behind the acquaintances that I no longer found amusing or useful (the only ones I never gave myself the permission to betray were friends). But one thing that I could never betray or renounce my commitment to, was Life; its beauty, intensity and terror.
“There is a religious element to this commitment, a sacrifice of the self”, is a thought that comes across my mind these days as I walk around the city in shoes that are aesthetically suitable for my outfit but not necessarily comfortable. I come back home to my painful, calloused, bloody feet, soak them into oiled and perfumed water and I think: “Ah, the pains are worth only for the experience of this balm.” — the intensity of pain and relief, brought to the extremes of their individual polarity, provide me with immense pleasure and satisfaction. It is religious because I see in my own ritual, an element of a monk or a nun who engages in sin only to enjoy the pleasure of penance.
I mention this personal experience, because I find, that in this religious fervour, in the willingness to destroy, deceive and betray even one’s own self, is the heart of the Femme Vitale. Femme Vitale is different from the Femme Fatale — even if the Femme Vitale herself may manifest as the fatale or destructive in a man’s life. But it is the difference between fire and void — to the fire one sacrifices themselves, into the void, one is dispersed and reduced to nothing. Fire offers a chance for rebirth — the Firebird, the Phoenix, the Huma bird, the solar Bennu bird of Egypt. Fire melts the raw metal that is to be shaped into the most precious of forms. Femme Vitale is perpetually setting herself on fire, and so, is perpetually, both destroyed and created.
Many women, if asked, will confess to exist in a state that is almost opposite to the one of the Femme Vitale — relating to the previous article “To Break the Glass Coffin”, there is a lot dryness, coldness and frozenness. Instead of openness towards it, there is an active terror of life. The commitment is given to the cultural, social, religious or political creeds and not life as such. If you are religious or spiritual, Life is God and to reject it and embrace idols instead, is to reject God for the idol of “time and space”.
Woman, when fully immersed in the idolatry can never truly be satisfied because it betrays the Virginal aspect of the Feminine, in which the outer forms are “played with” but never submitted or yielded to. To be open to everything and to play with everything and yet to yield to nothing but the Divine is where the Virgin and the Whore come together.
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