SOLANGE
she lit my way
when, eyes tightly closed,
I was in fear looking for a place
To rest my eyes
again she told me
when I lay obediently down on the rails
that only after my hopes
had been poisoned
could I start hoping again
she is my mother and my daughter
– limit and infinity –
she hasn’t yet been shown to me
her story is by no one told
her story is by no one written
I knew entirely her tale
even before I came out here.
Solange with skull -- Saturno Buttò
ReplyDeleteSolange ["solemn"], a Frankish shepherdess, consecrated her virginity at the age of seven and gained a reputation for healing and exorcisms. In 880 the son of the count of Poitiers abducted her after she spurned his advances, but in her struggles she fell from his horse. Enraged, her abductor pursued and beheaded her. Her severed head then invoked Jesus three times before she picked it up and carried it to the church in the village of Saint-Martin-du-Crot (modern Sainte-Solange, Cher), where she died. Immediately, a cult surrounding her grew up, many miraculous cures were attributed to her intercession, and her severed head was preserved as a relic. In times ofdrought the locals would form a procession through Bourges with the reliquary head before them to invoke her aid. In 1281, an altar was erected in her honor at the church of Saint-Martin, which began to call itself the church of St. Solange, and a nearby area where she prayed was called the "Field of St. Solange." She is the patron saint of shepherds, rape victims, rain, the province of Berry, and its capital Bourges. (In 1790 the provinces werre replaced by départements, and the Berry is now the départements of Cher, Indre, and parts of Vienne.) France has 134 cephalophores, saints depicted as carrying their own heads.
The Kalikula sect of Shaktism, the goddess-centric tradition of Hinduism, worships Chhinnamasta ("She whose head is severed") as a nude goddess who has decapitated herself to feed her attendants; usually standing or seated on Kamadeva ("sexual desire") copulating with his wife Rati ("sexual intercourse") on a lotus or cremation pyre, she holds her severed head in one hand and a scimitar in the other, while her head and two female attendants drink the three jets of blood spurting from her bleeding neck. One invocation to her calls her the sacrifice, the sacrificer, and the recipient of the sacrifice, with the severed head treated as an offering, thus signifying the entire cycle of creation, dissolution, and re-creation. Depending on interpretation, she is a symbol of sexual self-control and spiritaul self-realization and an embodiment of sexual energy and the awakening of the kundalini (spiritual energy), representing life and death, immortality and temporality, and re-creation and destruction.