Synedoche, Kennings and the Kick Ass Moon Girl

Katniss Everdeen; Kick Ass Moon Girl

Arguably, the most beloved character in  Western mythology is the Kick Ass Moon Girl. A close runner up is Kick Ass Moon Man, but we'll get to him in a future post. Since KAMG is well known to all, she serves as a good set of concepts to meditate upon.

The Katniss Everdeen character in the Hunger Games series is a recent well known edition of KAMG. Katniss has dark hair pulled away from her face, is a wild child, a virgin, at home with creatures of the forest, and opposed to the strange, corrupt, and perverse city dwellers.

Waxing Crescent Moon Among The Trees

KAMG is a set of concepts associated with the young crescent moon, shown at left (a great photo [I'm not the author]). There's no This=That equivalence in mythology. There's no dictionary. There's no canonical meanings, rather, there's a network of associations that are inside us. They exist inside the wilds of our imagination. By meditating on these characters we explore that landscape. Furthermore by meditating on these concepts, writing about them or making art about them, we change them and add to them.

Women are associated with the moon because the duration of the lunar cycle is approximately the same as the duration of the menstrual cycle. (One of the strong messages in the mythology is that cycles govern all.) Coincidentally, the duration of the orbit of Saturn is about 29.5 years, while the lunar cycle is about 29.5 days.

This pairing of women with the moon is a poetic association. It forms nodes in a web of information and mythology "facts" that only make sense within that web. It's like Synedoche, poetic kennings or even  Cockney Rhyming Slang. If the moon is a woman, then the young moon, the waxing Crescent is a young woman with dark hair pulled away from her white face, and maybe she's carrying a bow. If she's got a bow, then she's a hunter, or more generally kicks ass.

Scarlett Johansson as KAMG in Lucy

Like many other mythological characters male or female, KAMG's at home in the frontier. She abandons, or is plucked from her boring day to day life to kick ass and possibly to change the world. However, unlike male god or hero characters whose journey takes a more linear trajectory, change is an essential component of KAMG.

Two recent works play on this aspect of her. The movie Lucy uses the Persephone-Demeter story as the base theme for the plot. In the movie, Lucy goes through a mega cycle, and her character rapidly transforms again and again, and her consciousness and knowledge expand until matter and time yield to her mind and she reaches back to implant her wisdom in the hominid Lucy, the mother of all.

Tatiana Maslany portrays Clones in Orphan Black

A second, more comical take on this theme is Orphan Black where the main character is a series of clones all portrayed by the talented actress Tatiana Maslany.

One interpretation of the of the goddess characters in mythology is that they are all representations of some underlying polymorphous substance. In this aspect, they resemble the Earth from which plants grow, or the formless waters. There's some archaic, barely expressible concept nestled in this web of associations: perhaps at one time the world was undifferentiated for our most ancient ancestors (maybe pre-human, pre-mammalian even). All was one.

KAMG Lagertha and Cold Venus Aslaug from Vikings

However, there are distinctions among the goddess characters. KAMG, for example, is quite unlike the Venus character. KAMG is beloved, arguably the most beloved god in the pantheon. She's loved by all: men, women and children. The TV show Vikings even includes a joke about this aspect of her. Aslaug complains that everyone loves Lagertha while she's not accepted by the people.