Ordinary People. George Eliot. The Greatest Victorian Novelist. The Voice of a Higher and Independent Culture. The Original Outlaw. Amera Ziganii Rao

BBC Daniel Deronda. George Eliot

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Ordinary People. George Eliot. The Greatest Victorian Novelist. The Voice of a Higher and Independent Culture. The Original Outlaw. Amera Ziganii Rao

George Eliot and the art of realism. George Levine

By the time George Eliot died on December 22, 1880, she was celebrated as the greatest of contemporary English novelists. But unlike the most famous of literary Victorians, Charles Dickens, whose popularity – if not his literary reputation – survived the sophisticated ironies of literary modernism, George Eliot fell into the disrepute that attended almost all things Victorian in the early twentieth century. The two great writers were, in most respects, polar opposites; Dickens the great popular entertainer, George Eliot the voice of a higher culture, learned, self-reflexive, tormented by her own aesthetic and moral aspirations. It was her deep seriousness and determined pursuit of respectability that, ironically, turned modernist writers – many of them, clearly, her direct literary descendants – away from her.

Dickens survived their condescension because his popularity never flagged, his comic and melodramatic energy seeming almost to transcend their wide appeal. But George Eliot – half refusing that kind of spectacular popularity, hoping that it might be achieved without compromising her strenuous moral and aesthetic standards – became for almost half a century something of a monument to an era whose name, Victorian, is almost synonymous with prudishness and humourless solemnity.

The distance of time and enormous social changes have made it possible for readers in the last half of the twentieth century to rediscover the pleasures of George Eliot’s fiction and the Oedipal inevitability – and inadequacy – of modernism’s rejection of her.

Since the end of the Second World War, critics – and readers, and viewers of Masterpiece Theatre, that American rebroadcast usually of BBC dramatisations of Victorian novels – have been discovering that her modern reputation belies the formal brilliance and intellectual depth of her fiction, and that the respectability she herself sought and for which posterity had seemed to condemn her was an aspiration rather than a fact. The case may now reasonably be made, even despite the massive energy and genius of Dickens, that George Eliot was indeed the greatest of Victorian novelists. It is yet less controversial that MIDDLEMARCH is the greatest of Victorian novels. Looking back, we can now recognise that her art anticipated the modernist experiments of writers like Henry James and the epistemological scepticism of postmodernism. If George Eliot the woman was susceptible to the conventions and comforts of respectability, George Eliot the writer built her art from a refusal of such conventions, in resistance to the very kind of moral complacency and didacticism of which she has often, in the years following her death, been accused.

Certainly, she disguised it, compromised it, resisted it; but George Eliot created her art out of a cluster of rebellions, particularly against reigning social, moral and aesthetic conventions. In England she was the single most important figure in transforming the novel from a predominantly popular form into the highest form of art-in the tradition that Henry James was to develop. (This, perhaps, for the most recent critics, is a point against her since while for modernism the notion of high art was highly valued, in post-modern culture high art is under suspicion, its ‘cultural capital’ spent, its superiority to popular culture an effect of power and class.)

She was a romantic organicist, opposed to revolution, disturbed at any sudden tear in the social fabric, and she dramatised the dangers of political violence often-in ROMOLA, FELIX HOLT and MIDDLEMARCH. In particular: she was, as she thought of herself, a conservative-reformer. The foundation for this position was sharply articulated in her essay on the anthropologist Wilhelm Heinrich von Riehl: “What has grown up historically can only die out historically, by the gradual operation of necessary laws”. But she also saw clearly enough to represent with great force the grounds and the temptations to violence.

Again, although she would not formally support the feminist cause, she was a model for women’s achievement; although she did not portray successful women who resisted the conventions of their culture, she brilliantly and sympathetically traced their defeats. Although from her first stories forward she wrote about the church and clergy with a compassionate knowingness, she built a powerful case against Christianity; and while she constantly celebrated the value of childhood experience, traditional community, and traditional family structures, she almost bitterly portrayed the failures of community and family. Against the judgments of a complacent society, she wrote of the unnoticed heroism of those it defeated.

She could not be buried in Westminster Abbey in the ‘Poet’s Corner’ where the great English writers had frequently found their hallowed place, although as the famous scientific naturalist John Tyndall claimed, she was a “woman whose achievements were without parallel in the previous history of womankind,” and many of the leading intellectuals of the day agreed. But George Eliot had lived out of wedlock with a married man, George Henry Lewes; she had, as the young Mary Anne Evans, renounced Christianity. She had translated two books central to the rejection of Christianity by the intellectual avant garde. David Friedrich Strauss’s LIFE OF JESUS, the key book in the Higher Criticism of the Bible, which in its quest for the historical Jesus naturalised Christianity; and Ludwig Feuerbach’s ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY, which argued that Christianity worships what are in fact entirely human ideals. The Deity is projection; the reality is the human ideal.

Even after an enormously successful career in which she fought to regain the respectability that scandal had cost her, George Eliot, it seemed, deserved no place in Westminster Abbey although Charles Darwin, of all people, was buried there two years after her death. T.H.Huxley, a friend of Lewes and George Eliot, and renowned as a soldier in the wars against the clergy, rejected the idea of burying George Eliot in the Abbey. “One cannot,” he wrote, “eat one’s cake and have it too. Those who elect to be free in thought and deed must not hanker after the rewards, if they are to be so called, which the world offers to those who put up with its fetters.”

The degree of George Eliot’s sins against society can be measured by the fact that Huxley warmly supported Darwin’s interment in the Abbey, although Darwin’s name even now remains anathema to fundamentalist Christianity. “But”, write Darwin’s biographers, “Darwin had not lived openly in sin as Eliot had.” Like good Victorians, both Darwin and George Eliot aspired to public respectability and wanted to be buried in the Abbey. It seems though, in the end, George Eliot was the greater sinner.

We are a long way from the scandals of mid-Victorian Britain. What matter now are the works of those who might have been objects of scandal, though it is worth remembering the degree to which what we value now was contentious then. We care about George Eliot now because of her novels, but it helps to keep in mind that in her moment, she took great risks and worried constantly about them. She has left a legacy that is badly distorted if we look at the novels as ‘classics’, frozen in time, rather than as works created by an imagination that was deeply informed by the nitty gritty of social engagement, of contemporary controversy, of anything but a pure life.

The scandals and personal crises were transformed in the novels in ways that have left their mark on the history of English fiction and on many generations of readers.

It is worth noting that Marian Evans (the exact shape of whose constantly changing name is traced in Rosemarie Bodenheimer’s chapter in this volume) only began writing the fiction that made her famous as George Eliot in 1856, when she was already thirty-seven years old. Surely, a condition of her writing was just that living openly in scandal that, ironically, was also to keep her out of Westminster Abbey. Although Marian Evans was by then well established among the London intellectual avant-garde, her elopement with Lewes had cast her out of respectable society. It was Lewes, nevertheless, who gave her the encouragement and the time to turn to the writing of fiction.

She had long prepared herself for the move. Her dazzling and ironic essay, “SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS” (1856), in which, in effect, she separated Marian Evans from the run-of-the-mill “lady novelists”, laid the ground for the kind of novel she was to write and might serve as a useful introduction to her fiction. A “really cultured woman”, she argues, is distinguished from those run-of-the-mill lady novelists, by being “all the simpler and the less obtrusive for her knowledge; (true culture) has made her see herself and her opinions in something like just proportions; she does not make it a pedestal from which she flatters herself that she commands a complete view of men and things, but makes it a point of observation from which to form a right estimate of herself. She neither spouts poetry nor quotes Cicero on slight provocation; not because she thinks that a sacrifice must be made to the prejudices of men, but because that mode of exhibiting her memory and Latinity does not present itself to her as edifying or graceful. She does not write books to confound philosophers, perhaps because she is able to write books that delight them. In conversation she is the least formidable of women, because she understands you, without wanting to make you aware that you CAN’T understand her.”

Although this was written before Marian Evans had created George Eliot, it clearly creates-or attempts to create-the George Eliot who was to write the novels we now remember. As her career advanced, critics of the later novels, from ROMOLA on, might have felt that Henry James did about that book: “it is overladen with learning, it smells of the lamp, it tastes just perceptibly of pedantry.” Starting her career, George Eliot worked effectively to be “edifying and graceful,” to write novels that “delight”.

She invented the name (a good “mouth filling name”, she explained) in order to protect her anonymity when she published SCENES OF A CLERICAL LIFE in 1856. The essay on silly novelists revealed a strong sensitivity to the kind of condescension frequently showed to women novelists, a condescension that assumed their natural inferiority. “By a peculiar thermometric adjustment”, Marian Evans wrote, “when a woman’s talent is at zero, journalistic approbation is at the boiling pitch; when she attains mediocrity, it is already at no more than summer heat; and if ever she reaches excellence, critical enthusiasm drops to the freezing point.” Marian Evans was not going to be condescended to. The essay snaps with irony and anger, qualities that George Eliot could repress but could not and did not entirely eliminate from her great fictions.

But of course, there were other reasons for the pseudonym. Her scandalous life and her avant-garde writings would probably have damaged quite seriously the reception of her first novels. So George Eliot was born, characteristically for her, out of a mixture of motives, as a defence of her respectability, out of a desire to become a popular success, out of her refusal to be “a silly novelist”, and as an ideal to which Marian Evans aspired and which, one might say, she almost became.

Although it is hard not to think of George Eliot as the sage and enormously respectable woman, sympathetically presiding over solemn Sunday afternoons to which distinguished visitors and your idolaters were regularly invited, the George Eliot who wrote the novels we are still reading was an amalgam (and attempted purification) of the multiple facets of a deeply intelligent and troubled woman. She was at one and at the same time the avant-garde intellectual, the learned, ironic, witty, and even caustic reviewer, the translator of heavy but intellectually radical German philosophy and history, the young provincial woman who had nursed her father through a long illness and revered the Midlands countryside, the sophisticate who risked scandal and suffered the consequences of her desire, and an enormously learned aspirant toward an ideal of intellectual and moral excellence that threatened throughout her career to cripple her emotionally.

George Eliot Translation

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The degree to which this remarkable amalgam, summed up in the name “George Eliot”, had prepared herself for her vocation as novelist is evident in the essays she wrote during the years she was closely associated with the Westminster Review. The ironies of “SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS” are no mere occasion for easy hits against bad novelists; they are part of George Eliot’s determination to make art “true”.

Her essays are often polemical, severe, brilliant attacks on falsification, distortion, sentimentality, pomposity, and their rhetoric is distinctly polemical. But like her novels, they are directed at problems that plagued her own life, turning the private experience into a way to insist on higher standards, both of morality and intellect, that she thought popular audiences were prepared to accept. Her stunning attack on the evangelical preacher, John Cumming, exposes the heartlessness and stupidity of intellectual pretension, the inadequacy of doctrine in relation to the particularities of human life and feeling-a theme that recurs through virtually all of her novels. She has no patience with this man of “moderate intellect”, with “a moral standard not higher than the average,” who condemns in righteous anger sinners who fail to adhere to the letter of doctrine: “he insists on good works and signs of justifying faith, as labours to be achieved to the glory of God, but he rarely represents them as the spontaneous, necessary product of a soul filled with Divine love.”

The critique of Cumming here is paralleled and dramatically developed in the rejection of Maggie Tulliver in THE MILL ON THE FLOSS by the community of St. Oggs after her reluctant elopement with Stephen Guest. Cumming was certainly a “man of maxims,” someone whose moral judgments are “not checked and enlightened by a perpetual reference to the special circumstances that mark the individual lot”. The anger of the Cumming essay filters through all of the novels, and the narrator of MIDDLEMARCH will say, many years later, “There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men”.

George Eliot’s implicit defence of Marian Evan’s scandalous behaviour is similarly articulated in the Riehl essay: “The more deeply we penetrate into the knowledge of society in its details, the more thoroughly we shall be convinced that a UNIVERSAL SOCIAL POLICY HAS NO VALIDITY EXCEPT ON PAPER”.

In the novels that follow the essay (as in her life, in which she was condemned for her relations with Lewes), George Eliot and Marian Evans appeal to authenticity of feeling, to the higher morality “of a love that constrains the soul, of sympathy with that yearning over the lost and erring which made Jesus weep over Jerusalem.” Morality and dogma without mercy and love are no morality and only bad religion. Focusing on the tension between private experience and social constraint, these early essays suggest how George Eliot defined her work against the distortions that pass in the culture for truth and justice.

The tension between abstract reason and concrete feelings is one of the core subjects of both Marian Evans the essayist and George Eliot the novelist. She sought always to bring together intellect and feeling. In the days in which she renounced Christianity and thereby offended her father – the “Holy Wars,”, she called them in a letter – she retreated from the apparently necessary consequences of her intellectual rejection, for what mattered in the end was what she called the “truth of feeling,” a truth that allowed her to return to church without believing in its doctrine, for the sake of her love of her father.

In the essay on Cumming, she was to talk of the “cooperation of the intellect with the impulses,” a cooperation only available to “the highest class of minds”. “So long”, she would argue, “as a belief in propositions is regarded as indispensable to salvation, the pursuit of truth AS SUCH is not possible, any more than it is possible for a man who is swimming for his life to make meteorological observations on the storm which threatens to overwhelm him”.

But if, in the essay on Cumming, Marian Evans is severe about the way in which general ideas miss the particularities of feeling, in her essay on Young, she condemns his “radical insincerity as a poetic artist.” Here the problem is not a heartless imposition of ideas in moral judgment of living humans, but the determination to produce “a certain effect on his audience” rather than to say “what he feels or what he sees”. The separation of feeling and intellect takes another shape here, but it too produces falsification. If Cumming lacks compassion and thus misses “truth of feeling,” Young falsifies by failing to consult his own perceptions and feelings. The two produce different versions of untruth, and are both, then, unrealistic.

The energizing principle of George Eliot’s art was realism. And realism is a mode that depends heavily on reaction against what the writer takes to have been misrepresentation. Thus, even for those “realists” whose politics might have turned out to be “conservative”, it is a rebellious mode. It is rarely, and certainly was not for George Eliot, simply accuracy in representation of things as they are, although it is always that, too. (like the modernist writers who followed her, she has..quite complicated notions about the possibility of such representation.)

It is also and necessarily a kind of authenticity, an honest representation of one’s own feelings and perceptions; otherwise accuracy of representation would itself be impossible. Thus, she claims, “The fantastic or the boldly imaginative poet may be as sincere as the most realistic: he never breaks loose from his criterion – the truth of his own mental state”. As Lewes put in a review he wrote two years later, “the antithesesis” of Realism is not “Idealism, but Falsism”. “Art”, he claims, “always aims at the representation of Reality, ie, of Truth”.

The resistant element in George Eliot, in her life and her art, is closely linked with her chosen literary method. Realism has always been a contentious programme. George Eliot was self-conscious enough about it that in each of her first two fictions, SCENES OF A CLERICAL LIFE and ADAM BEDE, she paused within the narratives to explain and justify that method. Representing the world adequately means representing its very ordinariness, and the moral project of realism is-in resistance to conventional art-to dramatize the value of the ordinary. So, with her first profoundly inadequate protagonist, Amos Barton, George Eliot pauses to show that she is quite aware of his inadequacy: he was, the narrator says, “in no respect an ideal or exceptional character; and perhaps I am doing a bold thing to bespeak your sympathy on behalf of a man who was so very far from remarkable”.

The strategy of what has been called George Eliot’s “moral realism” is deliberately Wordsworthian, to evoke the romantic side of familiar things, but the project is moral as well as aesthetic. To represent the ordinary honestly is to represent what is hidden from those like Cumming or Young – the richness of human feeling, the grandeur of what we take for granted. So, she continues in “Amos Barton”, “Depend upon it, you would gain unspeakably if you would learn with me to see some of the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and the comedy, lying in the experience of a human soul that looks out through dull grey eyes, and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones”.

George Eliot’s most famous justification of her realism comes in chapter 17 of ADAM BEDE. There she develops more fully the arguments sketched in “Amos Barton,” but that she had earlier made in the essay on Riehl. The aesthetic and the moral were for George Eliot entirely intertwined: to treat art lightly, to indulge mere triviality, to allow the exaggerations and pretensions of the silly novelists or the poet Young, was to fail not only aesthetically, but morally.

And in a now well-known review of Ruskin’s MODERN PAINTERS, volume lll, she wrote: “The truth of infinite value that he teaches is REALISM-the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature, and not by substituting vague forms, bred by imagination on the mists of feeling, in place of definite, substantial reality.”

George Eliot

Unquestionably, her theoretical arguments for realism and the weight of significance she imposed on the practise in her art give to some of George Eliot’s work a quality of high seriousness-perhaps solemnity-that can help account for the way in which modernist artists rejected her. Yet this solemnity was an aspect of a mind that was extremely agile, subtle, learned, and if she was uneasy with popular entertainment (though sheh took any lapse in her own popularity as evidence of her aesthetic failure), she was equally opposed to moralising didacticism. Everything depended on getting her art aesthetically right (and that was also to be the overriding project of modernism).

“Art”, she wrote, “is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contract with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. All the more sacred is the task of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the People. It is not so very serious that we should have false ideas about evanescent fashions-about the manner and conversation of beaux and duchesses; but it IS serious that our sympathy with the perennial joys and struggles, the toil, the tragedy, and the humour in the life of our more heavily-laden fellow-men, should be perverted, and turned towards a false object instead of a true one.”

This is a kind of manifesto of moral realism. But it is important not to mistake George Eliot’s commitment to the moral vocation of art and realism for a disregard of formal concerns. Art works morally only, she would insist, if it is aesthetically effective. As she was tell her young friend Frederic Harrison many years later in a much-quoted letter, she would not, in her novels, “lapse from the picture to the diagram.”

Among the many objections of twentieth-century writers and critics to the tradition of literary realism-putting aside the epistemological issues and questions about the inevitability of mediation-is that realism is, as it were, just one damned thing after another. It is a pile of facts that add up to nothing but the facts. Virginia Woolf’s famous essay, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs Brown,” is perhaps the most delightful as it is the most representative dismissal of the realist activity of merely recording external fact. Speaking on a detailed passage in Arnold Bennett’s HILDA LESSWAYS, Woolf insists, “One line of insight would have done more than all those lines of description.” But George Eliot’s realism, while it is indeed attentive to the external details of the world her characters inhabit, is not like Arnold Bennett’s. The details reverberate with significance and the images are as much a part of the consciousness of the characters as representations of material reality. The very possibility of meaning is one of the questions George Eliot’s novels directly encounter. So the narrator remarks in ADAM BEDE, “if it be true that Nature at certain moments seems charged with a presentiment of the individual lot, must it not also be true that she seems unmindful, unconscious of another?”

And shortly afterward, Adam’s world darkens permanently at the moment he is calmly examining a large, double-trunked beech tree “at a turning in the road”. The tree, quite literally there and precisely represented, is more importantly the marker of a stage in Adam’s consciousness as he becomes aware that Hetty and Arthur Donnithorne are lovers. George Eliot’s realism extends from the external world tot he world of individual consciousness-like James and the psychological novelists who followed, she threw the action inside; the question of consciousness, of who is perceiving the external fact and under what conditions, becomes for her an indispensable aspect of the realist project.

The intensity and formal complexity of George Eliot’s novels, even in the relatively expansive mode of her early works, must be credited in part to her refusal to disentangle representational precision, psychological states, formal coherence, and moral significance. Getting it right was for her no simple matter of recording external fact precisely, but of making herself capable of the most complete possible honesty by opening her mind and feelings tot he otherness of things and people-precisely what she did not find in the poet Young. The point is not that she always succeeded, but that for her realism was a vocation. In that famous chapter 17, the narrator of ADAM BEDE tells us that she aspires “to give no more than a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines will sometimes be disturbed; the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you, as precisely as I can, what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box narrating my experience on oath.”

The strenuousness of George Eliot’s art is due not only to this commitment to tell the truth (as through in a trial at law) but to the awareness of how very hard it is to do so, to avoid being false. “Signs”, says the MIDDLEMARCH narrator, “are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable”. Her novels explore with a subtlety new to the history of English literature the devious ways of the mind, the natural and psychological and social impediments to knowing or speaking the truth. “So,” proceeds the narrator, “I am content to tell my simple story, without trying to make things seem better than they were; dreading nothing, indeed, but falsity, which, in spite of one’s best efforts, there is reason to dread. Falsehood is so easy, truth is so difficult”.

George Eliot was alert not only to the complications of society, but to the subtle difficulties of the medium, language, itself. There is a famous narrative intervention in THE MILL ON THE FLOSS that can suggest something of this alertness: “O Aristotle! If you had the advantage of being ‘the freshest modern’ instead of the greatest ancient, would you not have mingled your praise of metaphorical speech, as a sign of high intelligence, with a lamentation that intelligence so rarely shows itself in speech without metaphor,-that we can so seldom declare what a thing is, except by saying it is something else?”

Metaphor always threatens to escape the limits of its denotation and is at the heart of language; thus the writer must be, as George Eliot sought to be herself, a kind of scholar like the one described by Walter Pater some years later, a scholar of language and meaning, scrupulous, meticulous, unrelentingly attentive.

The yields of these labours of realism to resist the conventional simplifications of art or personal interest turned out often to be only partially compensatory. There are costs to the realist programme, for the “truth” George Eliot insists on is, primarily, the hard truth that the world is not made in our interest, not “mindful” of us. Reality is largely what conventional art would treat as banal and dismiss in the name of heroism or elegance. The sympathy her art is designed to evoke depends on a recognition of our mutual implication in ordinariness and limitation. With satirical contempt, she mocks the injunction that if “The world is not just what we like; do touch it up with a tasteful pencil, and make believe it is not quite such a mixed, entangled affair”.

She, for her part is committed to the “faithful representing of commonplace things”. The direction of her novels and of realism itself is toward accommodation to the ordinary, toward acceptance of limitation. And thus, through the largest part of her fiction-writing career, her novels describe their protagonists’ education in renunciation. Their triumphs are precisely in their acceptance of limits, their return to the ordinariness they at times dreamed of transcending. In ADAM BEDE, of course, Arthur Donnithorne’s self-indulgently generous fantasies are thwarted by his incapacity to restrain his sexual desire, but Adam himself succeeds only as he curbs his anger, and it is in his strong capacity of self-sacrifice that he earns the happy ending.

More painfully and extravagantly, Maggie Tulliver in THE MILL ON THE FLOSS, having failed in the extreme self-denial she had learned from Thomas a Kempis’s THE IMITATION OF CHRIST, must learn true resignation after her elopement with Stephen Guest, and can only triumph in the death that follows her attempt to rescue her brother.

The contest between individual desire and moral responsibility is a recurring theme of all her work, and an almost inevitable corollary of the realist’s programme. In realism, s the “Finale” of MIDDLEMARCH puts it, “There is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it”. She had made a similar point in FELIX HOLT: “there is no private life that has not been determined by a wider public life”. The formal and theoretical justification for the multiplot novel derives from this sense that every individual life is shaped by connections with conditions outside it, conditions of which the representative realist character is unaware.

There are many moments in the novels when the reader is reminded of the inadequacy of any sense of character and self-divorced from sensitivity to the reality of others. So in MIDDLEMARCH, the novel turns early on the juxtaposition of Dorothea and Lydgate, and on Lydgate’s immediate inattention to her: “nothing could seem much less important” to him “than the turn of Miss Brooke’s mind.” “But”, the narrator interposes, “any one watching keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots, sees a slow preparation of effects from one life on another, which tells like a calculated irony on the indifference or the frozen stare with which we look at our unintroduced neighbour. Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand”. It is rather easy to see that such a way of understanding relationships must almost inevitably lead BOTH to the multiplot novel (seen usually as “loose and baggy” by modernist writers) and the complications of point-of-view narration (virtually indispensable to the development of modern narration).

But in twentieth-century criticism, this centrally nineteenth-century recognition of the ways in which every individual can only be understood IN RELATION TO the social complex and the larger movements of history has often evoked very negative responses. Feminist criticism, for example, has long....like Marian Evans, that is, a woman who resisted the conventions of society and made a creative and original life for herself, even living outside of wedlock with moral confidence in her choice. Such resistance, within George Eliot’s determined realist resistance to focusing on the extraordinary, is inevitably thwarted by conditions. Only someone of genuinely heroic stature (one would have to infer, only someone as exceptional as Marian Evans herself) could have sustained and justified such a life.

Thus on feminist grounds and on many others, George Eliot’s realist programme was more than potentially politically conservative. In certain respects, it might be said to fit well with D.A. Miller’s description of the work of the Victorian novel: “to confirm the novel-reader in his identity as “liberal subject....who seems to recognise himself most fully only when he forgets or disavows his functional implication in a system of carceral restraints or disciplinary injunctions.” What Miller calls “carceral restraints” might be recognised in George Eliot’s insistence on self-restraint. The liberty she allows her protagonists is the liberty of the “subject” who chooses his or (most often in George Eliot’s novels) her own restraints. The virtue of the realist protagonist, in accommodating to the ways of the world, lies exactly in the power to recognise limits and responsibilities and restrain the subversive and powerful pulls of desire and personal satisfaction.

That conservative-reforming impulse in George Eliot is now usually read as rather exclusively conservative, and her own political views at least half confirm this reading. George Eliot wrote a political speech for her fictional radical, Felix Holt, as a direct intervention after the passage of the Second Reform Bill in 1867. Characteristically, for George Eliot, Felix moves away from direct political action: “What I am striving to keep in our minds is the care, the precaution, with which we should go about making things better, so that public order may not be destroyed, so that no fatal shock may be given to this society of ours, this living body in which our lives are bound up”.

Here the sense of intricate interdependence, the sense of our being “bound up” with a past that we can disrupt only be, in effect, destroying ourselves and the living-organic-society of which we are a part, restrains Felix, and George Eliot, from efforts at radical change. This political stance here accounts for much of George Eliot’s realist programme, and the passage itself-giving the fictional character Felix a role in the nonfictional life of political England in 1868-suggests why it is the fiction that determines George Eliot’s success as a writer. For in the fiction, brilliantly open as it is to unfulfilled possibilities and an almost infinite range of interpretation and action, George Eliot explores the alternatives to her own positions and the enormous difficulty of choosing and acting on the “right” one.

.....the qualities of her art, its satiric and yet impassioned rejection of the kinds of falsifications we have identified in Cumming, Young, and the silly novelists, had deeply conservative consequences, and even entailed a rejection in her fiction of the risk-taking, scandalous career of Marian Evans. The novels often revisit the crises of Marian Evans. The examples are everywhere, in for example, the ostracism and redemption of a Maggie Tulliver, who almost elopes with an engaged man; the alienation of a misunderstood Silas Marner; the struggles of Romola, undervalued by her father, betrayed by her husband; the stunning self-repression and disillusionment of Mrs. Transome, who in FELIX HOLT, had thought to derive joy from the child she bears from her illicit sexual relation with the lawyer Jermyn. The restraints of past obligations, family tradition, and social responsibility take precedence over ideal aspirations-in effect they ARE the novels ideal aspirations.

Resolution comes with assimilation to a community, and not with the kind of ostracism Marian Evans suffered for many years, until, with the enormous respectability and prestige of George Eliot’s novels behind her, she was accepted socially and finally, entered a legitimate marriage.

Silas Marner. George Eliot

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The restraints that, in her grim, clear-eyed honesty, George Eliot’s realism imposed on her were, in the end, too “carceral”. The power of much of her writing is in her representation of the profound failures of the middle-class society whose values she sought to revivify, and most particularly of the costs of self-restraint, the unjust limitation imposed on remarkable characters, usually, but not exclusively, women. Her novels are shot through with images of disenchantment and loss that survive for readers beyond the constraining plots in which the characters are tied. There is Mrs. Transome, standing before a mirror, “going close to it and looking at her face with hard scrutiny, as if it were unrelated to herself. No elderly face can be handsome, looked at in that way; every little detail is startlingly prominent and the effect of the whole is lost. She saw a dried-up complexion, and the deep lines of bitter discontentment about the mouth”.  There is Dorothea in Rome awakening to the awfulness of her marriage to Casaubon, and at the end there is the desolate, abandoned Gwendolen, “for the first time being dislodged from her supremacy in her own world....."

Such moments of disenchantment, as Barbara Hardy describes them, are a condition of the realist project. They mark stages in the lives of her protagonists as they are “forced”, as Hardy says, “from the centre to the periphery, from the dream of self which filled the world to a reduced consciousness.” The pain often seems in excess of the deserts, even for egoists like Gwendolen and Mrs. Transome, for while the focus in George Eliot is likely to be on individual limits, she can describe with remarkable acuity the cruelties, injustices, and banalities of the world that imposes those limits.

The tormented escapes and returns of the heroine of ROMOLA mark a crisis in George Eliot’s realism, a crisis that takes the shape of a representative question: “The question where the duty of obedience ends, and the duty of resistance begins, could in no case be an easy one”. If learning to value the “commonplace,” to find the sacred in the ordinary, to recognise the depth and intensity of the bonds that connect us with family and society, is the central work of George Eliot’s realism, the novels are nevertheless marked by a struggle to avoid idealizing rebellion. SILAS MARNER begins with the expulsion of the innocent Silas from the religious community he piously loves, as he is subject to an irrational trial and hypocritical accusation. Silas’s catalepsy might be taken as a figure for the condition of other more complex and realistic heroines, like Maggie or Dorothea, who suffer for innocence at the hands of a coarse and unperceptive society.

The tension between the protagonist’s innocence and, usually, idealism, and the coarse brutality of the society that condemns them creates problems with which the novels sometimes struggle indecisively, as when, at the end of THE MILL ON THE FLOSS, the reader is in effect asked to believe in the idyllic nature of Maggie’s childhood, which has, however, been unfolded at length as a series of painful misunderstandings amidst a set of families steeped in primitive tribalism.

ROMOLA is the first of George Eliot’s novels to face directly, in its form and subject, the crisis of realism. On her first attempt at resistance, Romola is turned back by her encounter with Savonarola. Even at the end of the novel, Romola can only drift-not run- away, and becoming a kind of saviour in another community redeems her. The novel itself becomes, as George Eliot himself recognized, too “ideal,” and precisely because it needs to confirm Romola in her rebellion and independence in ways that are largely inimical to George Eliot’s programmatic realism. George Eliot’s notorious struggle to write ROMOLA, which was surely against the grain of her more natural focus on the English Midlands (.....SILAS MARNER), certainly had much to do with the way the books fails to accommodate itself to the methods of realism, despite her extraordinary research into the conditions of Renaissance Florence. The book will not settle for the restraints that Savonarola imposes and Romola, for a while, accepts. As Caroline Levine points out in a recent study, by the end of the novel Romola “has radically revised conventional relations between wife and mistress, having adopted her husband’s lover as her own partner. Affirming a startling independence, the women run the household together, free from the demands of men.”

While other critics have noticed this shift, which might be taken to belie the accusation that George Eliot never created an independent woman like herself, it is important also to notice that Romola’s independence is precisely in her choice of responsibilities. As in her own life, George Eliot reassimilates her heroine to her accustomed modes of self-repression. That is, while she seems to wrest herself free from obligations that George Eliot’s moral realism would seem to impose, she creates (as Marian Evans had done) new obligations that are, as the novel suggests, yet more authentic and valuable than the merely legal ones she had been forced to flee. ROMOLA hovers between the stern realism of the early novels and the formal and moral shifts of DANIEL DERONDA. It is half historical novel, half fable.

One of the marks of George Eliot’s realism is that is never QUITE the carceral and naively representational form it has often been taken to be. The tensions in ROMOLA suggest one way in which George Eliot understood the limitations of a naive representationalism and the “carceral” implications of her narratives. Famously, too, as the passage from ADAM BEDE quoted above makes clear, she knew the difficulties of representation. The novels are a struggle, and a struggle that becomes increasingly part of their form. So, in the famous passages in MIDDLEMARCH in which the narrator interrupts to remind us of the multiplicity of ways in which the experience can be understood, George Eliot’s narrator makes it impossible to sustain a single unequivocal understanding of the real. The multiplotted nature of many of her novels enacts in the very form her refusal to allow the artificial dominance of a single perspective.

“But why always Dorothea?” in its sudden radical shift of perspective from Dorothea to the unlikeable Casaubon, dramatically represents George Eliot’s recognition that no single perspective can encompass reality and that for realism to do its job it must allow for its incompleteness and disallow the possibility that any single person-the narrator included-can authoritatively interpret reality. Her sophisticated gestures toward what in contemporary theory we would call indeterminacy have led some modern critics to see her as anticipating deconstructionist...more than a mere naive ritual of representation, requires self-conscious questioning of its own potentialities for falsification. The truest realism, as George Eliot develops it in her own work, is one that truthfully confronts its limitations.

In her continuing explorations of the possibilities and limits of realism, George Eliot was clearly feeling, as ROMOLA itself had already shown, that the restraints of all those relative conditions that shape individual lives were, in the end, too limiting. MIDDLEMARCH, the novel that might be taken as the fullest achievement of English realism, is formally and substantively informed by the crisis of limits. It’s “Finale” seems to anticipate the criticism of the constraining force of its brilliantly complicated narrative. Dorothea, of course, always threatens to become the ideal heroine of the novel, and much of the book is given to the effort to keep this from happening and from thus distorting the multiple perspectives that give the book its form. There is a telling sentence that in effect lays out for us the possibilities that George Eliot’s realism allows to her characters: “Many who knew her,” the narrator states, “thought it a pity that so substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life of another, and be only known in a certain circle as a wife and mother. But no one stated exactly what else that was in her power she ought rather to have done.”

The key phrase here, the mark of the realist project, is “what else that was in her power.” MIDDLEMARCH imagines all characters as enmeshed in a mass of personal and social relations that are in effect determining. Only the strongest people have the slightest chance of breaking from the limits of that determination, but the realist programme refuses heroism as it refuses evil. Only in DANIEL DERONDA does George Eliot fully explore the alternatives to this realist way of imagining. On the one hand, in that novel, George Eliot creates the first woman character who attempts, with some success, to break from the limits of what is thought to be in the power of women-the grand opera singer, mother of Daniel, the Princess Halm-Eberstein. There has been considerable attention, particularly from feminists, focused on this remarkable character. For while in the end she is defeated, and further, condemned by her son for betraying the patriarchal tradition, she speaks with power of her own right to attempt to fulfil her great talents-almost one would think as Marian Evans might have spoken at times of her own career.

While the princess chooses the kind of exceptional life that was not in the power of Dorothea, DANIEL DERONDA violates another aspect of the realist programme. For in MIDDLEMARCH constraints are imposed not by deliberate and active evil, but, as in the case of Lydgate, by “the small solicitations of circumstance, which is a commoner history of perdition than any single momentous bargain....one determinedly professional woman, so she creates her one unequivocally evil man-almost in the tradition of Dicken’s sense of natural wickedness-although imagined with brilliant psychological specificity. Grandcourt is the exceptional villain in George Eliot, utterly different from, for example, Bulstrode, or Arthur Donnithorne, or even Tito Melema. His evil is intrinsic, an unredeemed and unredeemable insistence on personal power and command.

But these kinds of characters, in the excess that leads to their rather extravagant fates, do not belong to the kind of realistic programme that governs MIDDLEMARCH and leaves Dorothea with no alternatives to the secondariness of her life with Ladislaw. One of the other major narrative lines in MIDDLEMARCH, parallel and intersecting with Dorothea’s, works out the problem of heroism with Lydgate, whose “spots of commonness” make his failure to transcend the limits of the Middlemarch community inevitable. Dorothea has struggled, but without the resources available to men, and as a consequence the realism of her representation leads to the novel’s conclusion-a kind of culmination of the realist vision-disallowing any action that might create large changes but allowing that “the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive”.

That, as DANIEL DERONDA makes clear, was not finally enough for George Eliot. As I have been suggesting, DANIEL DERONDA, which is another multiplot novel, might be understood as a test of realism. In one narrative, Gwendolen Harleth undergoes the realist heroine’s fate, and in the other the novel breaks into something like a heroic romance, an almost mythic story of a quest for a mother and, yet more mythically, the possibility of starting a new nation.

The two narratives, of course, intersect, but they also comment on each other, and it is possible to read the “Jewish” half as an attempt to create a plausible alternative to realism. Throughout the novel, but particularly in the Gwendolen half, George Eliot’s portrait of English society is uncharacteristically cynical and bleak; it is a society to which accommodation would seem mere capitulation. Yet Gwendolen Harleth must in the end make the accommodation, move through the “carceral” patterns, and end in resignation.

Gwendolen, of course, is no “Saint Theresa of the midland flats,” and she must learn from Daniel himself the lessons of resignation that he, in effect, must unlearn in his part of the story. For Daniel begins in self-abnegation, must learn who he is, must act against the banal (and racist) assumptions of his society, and in the end, with whatever qualifications, he goes off to help found a state that will, in effect, re-establish the spiritual purity of the biblical world, while Gwendolen is left to make what she can of the crushing defeat of her egoistic ambitions and the virtual destruction.....

Realism is a leitmotif of George Eliot’s fiction-writing career. In her hands it was both a continuation of the acts of (perhaps involuntary) rebellion that marked the life of Marian Evans, and a means back to that lost respectability, that accommodation with a world that had rejected her, which she sought from the time she eloped with Lewes. Her art everywhere participated in the ambivalent directions of realism itself-determined to get at the truth, deeply sensitive to its inaccessibility and the ways in which everyone, the best and the worst, distorts it for personal interest; reformist and deeply critical of the structures of society, conservative about politics and feminism; daringly exploratory-she called her novels “experiments in life”-and resistant to change.

Her novels open new directions in English narrative: psychologically, she richly anticipates the Freudian understanding of the power of the irrational to determine human behaviour, she, more than any novelist before Henry James, understood and explored the problems of perspective, of “point of view”; for better or worse, and I take it as for the better, she made the novel as a form something more than, or at least in addition to, popular entertainment, and in this respect certainly anticipated (of course again for better or worse) the directions of modernism. She brought to bear on the novel extraordinary learning, from almost the whole range of nineteenth century knowledge-German philosophy, and biblical criticism and history, the new social science of anthropology, physical and particularly biological science, positivism, psychology, philology, and the study of language. The equipment may at times have seemed heavy, but as a consequence of that enormous learning and philosophical acuity she almost never wrote a word that was not interesting, even when there are moments in the novels that seem to cry out for the fuller embodiment she was always, in principle, seeking. Like any great artist, she was constantly at work exploring the limits of her own methods, seeking new and better ways to get it right.

The tangible result is the greatest realist novel in the language, MIDDLEMARCH, and several other novels that have entered the life of the English-speaking world-ADAM BEDE, THE MILL ON THE FLOSS, SILAS MARNER. To understand and value this work, it is best to attempt to get a sense of the full range of George Eliot’s knowledge and thought, and the nature of her complicated and difficult life. The chapters that comprise this volume attempt to lay out the major elements of her thought and art, the shape and the context of her career. While there is of course something a little artificial in dividing her knowledge and thought into compartments-philosophy, science, religion, politics, the woman question-her thought was rich and complicated enough to require such compartmentalisation. One needs to know something of her journalism, something of her poetry, something of the way she connected with the politics of Victorian society.

In the end, however, readers will (and should) want to return to the novels themselves. The object of this volume is to help lift George Eliot from the frozen condition of literary monument, to make the resistant richness of her art more clearly visible, and to make her superb intelligence and imagination more accessible to readers who have begun to recognise the power and originality of her art.

GEORGE LEVINE. THE CAMBRIDGE GUIDE TO GEORGE ELIOT

And God Created Woman. A Self Portrait. Amera Ziganii Rao Photography 

AMERA ZIGANII RAO. A PROFILE

AMERA ZIGANII RAO ALCHEMY & LIBERATION & HUMANITY™

The Sacred Whore High Priestess Society™
The Return To The Source. Ascension.

SOCIAL REFORM. THE FIGHT FOR FREEDOM AND LOVE. SHAMANISM. PHILOSOPHY. TRUE (UNIVERSAL) LOVE. NEO FEMINISM™. ANTI MISOGYNY. THE ARTIST'S WAY. WIZARDRY. TRUE INTELLECTUALISM™. WISDOM. GONZO SPIRITUALITY. NIHILISM. SEX. SOUL. GOD, THE MOTHER, THE UNIVERSE™. SPIRITUAL EXISTENTIALISM™. THE VOID OF CREATION™. ALCHEMY & LIBERATION & HUMANITY™. HELL. SUFFERING. GROWTH. ASCENSION. LOVE. LIFE. DEATH. WARLORDS OF LIGHT™

Writer. Philosopher. Esoteric Mystic. Clair Cognisant. Seer. Hierophant. Enlightener. Inspirer. Visionary. Artist. Creative; Human Rights. Self Actualization. Liberation. Feminization. Masculinisation. Equalization. Spiritualization. Sexualisation. The Merging of Spirituality and Sexuality (again at last). Self Responsibility. Self Empowerment. Healing. Humanity. Imagination. Intelligence. Compassion. Passion. Revolution. War. Power. The Wisdom Society. The Warrior Society. Success. Strength. Happiness. Love.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012

Writer, Speaker and Enlightener, Amera Ziganii Rao, is now putting together a comprehensive and unique programme of Alchemy & Liberation & Humanity™. A programme of learning that is specifically about one particular kind of woman. And one particular kind of man. The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and the Sacred Whore High Priest™, and the true society that they come from and the one they, in particular, she can and has to return to and that anyone can join her and him in. This is about Paradise on Earth.

This is about The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and the Sacred Whore High Priest™, and the Alchemy and Liberation and Humanity that is for all as a result of their healing and in particular, hers. This is about the kind of woman who is at the bottom of the pile in a Patriarchal Toilet Tribe from Hell Society™, the norm, the conventional world and the world of the Tribe. This is about the kind of man who is next in line from the bottom. The sensitive man and the female chattel. The High Priestess and High Priest of a profane society, that has long forgotten who they are.

This is about being at the bottom of the pile, for the forgotten and strangled shamans, and for her, the story of escape. Abused by her family, her friends, her men, her whole society, by the very nature of who she is and who they are and what has happened on this Earth. It is about women of love, of Spirit and of sex. It is about men of love, of Spirit and of sex. It is about the Cinderellas of this world. It is about the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™. Who she is and how, loving her is the secret to Paradise on Earth and how we have been living a lie for 8000+ years. A lie of male (non High Priest) religion with a male ‘God’ and with Patriarchs and Patriarchal types and Matriarchs and Matriarchal types ruling over us and making our lives hell, all in the name of family, the tribe and the way things are and should remain. Hate, fascism and profanity. A sick society that vilifies, more than anyone else, the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™, just because it was told to. A sick society that calls her Eve. A sick society that has forgotten who we all are, let alone the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and the Sacred Whore High Priest™. This is about us remembering and knowing who WE are.

This is a programme of healing for the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™, and the Sacred Whore High Priest™, to take them and particularly, her, from monstrous levels of low self esteem and lack of self knowledge, back to herself and it is a programme for all those who truly want to love her, and indeed, him. This is a programme for the greatest carers on Earth, who are vilified, destroyed, ridiculed, ignored, abused, used, misused and hated for being everything that those who would steal from us are not. This is a programme to turn Cinderellas into The Sacred Whore High Priestesses and for anyone who wants to love her or live by the values of the The Sacred Whore High Priestess Society™. And this is a programme to turn sensitive men into Sacred Whore High Priests™ and for anyone who wants to love him and live by the values of the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and High Priest Society. Love, humanity, Spirit and sex. This is a programme to reverse 8000+ years of witch burning, women hating and healer ridicule. This is about the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and all those who would love her and live by her values.

This is about the chance for Paradise on Earth. This is a programme for the most beautiful, kind hearted, wounded women and men on this planet. A programme of how to implement a system of how to beat life, how to survive life and how to resurrect from the grief that is a true life. Alchemy and Liberation and Humanity of the lower mind into the higher mind, the soul and the inner heart and therefore one's true, confident, ‘happy’, successful, creative, sexual, sensual, individual, intelligent, emotionally healed, capable of loving and being loved self. How to turn grief into creation and survive and thrive, despite all the shit, all the pain and all the hurt. How to live in a world of madness, hollowness and cruelty and how to be a winner. How to stand up for oneself and to take back the power that has been stolen from anyone with heart, Spirit and sex. The art and science of Alchemy.

This is a programme, based on my scholarly and non scholarly work over 15 years (so far), if not for my whole life, and my extensive and intense, visceral experiences of self transformation from resignation, cynicism and despair to a state of relative bliss, and above all, the right to be. The programme and the courses and my speaking and indeed my forthcoming book, will cover the method of change. The psychological, sociological, spiritual, cultural, political, emotional and physical and even anthropological methods of change. Why we are here. Who the Sacred Whore High Priestess™ is and why she is here. And who the Sacred Whore High Priest™ is. Why we are here. Who we are and what we are and why we are. The beauty and glory of the truth. The meaning of life, no less. This will be on offer in the future.

My first book of consciousness, my first book of the spiritual politics of humanity, of authentic power and of self love and strength. A comprehensive series of online courses, live events and audio and visual material. Books, live events, CDs and DVDs. And one on one personal empowerment consultations. The Amera Ziganii Rao Method of Change™. The right to be and the way to have the right to be. And indeed, how to maintain the will to live without love. How to BE unconditional, self sufficient, self caring, self love. The right to be and the will to be and the unparalleled success that comes with that. The Lost Knowledge™. HOW to live. And how to heal others, the profane and the sick and the soulless. The others. My Business and that of any Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and Sacred Whore High Priest™, is Human Rights, The Right to a Sexual Society, Self Actualisation and Freedom.

My Business is To Overthrow Fascism, in the Home and in the Country. My business is also mastering destiny. Overthrowing the ultimate 'fascism'. Our journey on Earth and The Return To The Source. Our healing, our ascension and our redemption. Fate. The daily crucifixions of a true life, the challenges and the fury of being healers and people of love on a planet like Earth. Submitting to the journey to liberate and evolve oneself, through following one's heart, however much heartbreak and devastation it leads to on the long long long journey to freedom and then the longer journey to happiness. 'Long Road to Freedom', as Nelson Mandela says. My business is always taking risks, never giving up and making the endless sacrifices it takes to become whole. Enlightenment, Nirvana and then Parinirvana and beyond. My business is pain. My business is bliss.

My business is seeing the truly glory of Spirit on Earth. The Sacred Whore High Priestess Society™ and all that it is. Spirit, humanity, sex and love again at last. And the end of our legacy as either servants or witches or unpaid carers or indeed, ignored mistresses, other women, other men even, and the weirdos that are at the bottom of society. This is our world and it is time to take it back and I can show you how. And that makes my life, truly, worth living. I want you to feel the way I do. Alive, with the right to be and the belligerence to exist in this profane and male ‘God’ led world of male supremacy, female supremacy, domestic, casual fascism, tribe rules from hell, with beautiful and kind, love intelligence laden, female and male Cinderella warriors at the bottom, caring for everyone else and getting nothing but hatred, ridicule and isolation for it. The meek are already inheriting the Earth and I can show you how.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012

I am THE High Priestess Monarch of the ancient past and I forgive you for becoming enslaved and taken over by the machines of the alien reptile force that invaded and took over Earth 8000 years ago. They taught you to hate me and my kind and you believed them. They told you I and my kind were dictators and that you were slaves, when all we had done was love you, honour you as companions and above all, we had let you just live. We were the holy communers, the ones who gave birth to human beings, the leaders of society, the creators of society, the vehicles of Divinity on Earth and the channels of wisdom. The ones who looked after everything and the ones who built everything and ran everything, because we could. And because we loved it. We are and were the force of creation. And you loved us and you lived. But they told you that you ‘deserved’ power too and that we were the ones standing in your way. And you believed them. The oldest ‘divide and rule’ strategy of hate in history and it worked. They used it and you bought it, hook, line and sinker. You had to give up sex, love, magic and your own spiritual gifts and you burnt, destroyed and violated me for 8000 years. The world calls that male supremacy. And indeed, family supremacy, Matriarchal supremacy and supremacy of the material world and all who believe in it. Men and women like you. When all that you are are slaves to a reptile force to generate hate energy for them to live and thrive and vampire the human race. The puppets of a hate force, that chose to destroy women and men like me, for hate to grow, so they could live. You bought it and it worked. The greatest fraud in the history of the world. I am THE High Priestess Monarch of the ancient past and I forgive you for becoming enslaved and taken over by the machines of the alien reptile force that invaded and took over Earth 8000 years ago. They taught you to hate me and my kind and you believed them. They taught you that my mind was evil. My mind, my sex, my body and my ways of life. The humanity, the glory of sexuality and the glory of creation and creativity and the glory of Divinity in each and every one of us. Our souls. They taught you that human beings are separate from Divinity, that sex was wrong and that women who have minds of their own are uppity slaves. They vilified us but much much worse than that, they destroyed your relationship with all that is unseen, all that we honour and love. They taught you to hate what is really God. By teaching you to hate us, you hated all that is good in yourselves. They taught you to hate the light. They taught you to kill us. The daughters of The Universe. The High Priestesses of God. The Spiritual Mothers. The Sacred Whore High Priestess Avatars of The Universe. The Sacred Army of Love on Earth. The Shamans, the Mystics and the Communers. They called me Eve and blamed me for the downfall of the human race and created the awesome profanity that is religion. Of men, by men and from men. Of reptiles, by reptiles and from reptiles. Christianity, Islam and Judaism and every other philosophy around the world was poisoned. There are no female spiritual leaders left. It is all profanity. They chose you to represent them because they wanted to divide us and they did. They told you to hate me. And you believed them. Now I am back and I forgive you. I forgive you because I can. Because I came here to save your soul. And because I finally know who I am. I am THE High Priestess Monarch of the ancient past. I came here to return your soul to The Source. God, The Mother, The Universe. To return you to what is really God. Because I love you. And because She loves you and your kind, whatever you have done. Whatever you have done to me and whatever you have done to Her. And most of all, whatever you have done to yourself. We forgive you. This is your redemption. Your freedom and your ascension. We are here to save your soul.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012

You bought the Sacred Whore like a piece of meat and you called that a wife. Your trophy wives. Your dancing girls. Your chattel and serving girls. Your piece of beauty. You bought us like you would cattle. Then you called it wives. Now you call it prostitution. The High Priestesses of the real God. You bought us to buy God, The Mother, The Universe and you caged us, separated us from our Divine gifts and skills in the Temple and drove us mad and then lost interest in us, because we had no gifts left, no excitement, no hunter in ourselves and no hope or joy left. Then you just called us mad and discarded us. You called us evil and you call love obedience, even though it had already killed us. You moved into our Temples and you played with the divination tools and thought you communed. The destruction of Atlantis was your gift. You stole us from God, The Mother, The Universe and you tried to usurp us. You vilified us, enslaved us and you still envy us today. You call it intuition. You might want to think about this when you hate us out of your jealousy. The mystic gene means physical tortuous pain and taking on the empathy of the human race. All their pains, evils and dark thoughts. We see and feel everything. We make crucial sacrifices to be near Spirit and the unseen and we go without for years. To be shaman is not glamour. I make it glamour. To be shaman is a specific Samurai existence, ascetic and harsh. We commune to be guides. And you take that and you shame yourselves because you just want the meat. You didn’t just want the meat. You wanted our beauty of spirit, our personalities and our love and kindness. And you destroyed them, because you caged us and called us wife.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012

The High Priestess Sacred Whores, the High Priests and the true protectors. Those who do not have the gift like either the High Priests or especially like the highest of all, the High Priestess Sacred Whores but who honour, protect and facilitate them to the world. Who honour the Shaman Sacred Whores of this world most of all, and who know who they are and who they are not. Who know the difference, who do not envy and who protect and love the representatives of Spirit, GOD, THE MOTHER, THE UNIVERSE, on Earth. Who honour their wisdom and who honour the latent Shaman in themselves too and who honour the communing ability of the High Priestess Sacred Whores. The non violators. Our only friends. The New Society exists. It is called Enlightenment. It is called Love. It is The Holy Grail.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012

The master race. It's all a lie. You are brought up to be a despot king and it is only your sister who ever tells you that you have become a pratt. The master race is all a lie. There are no kings in an equal world. Your father was misinformed. What he brought you up to be was a killer. Pure and simple. A misogynist. A modern misogynist. A polite killer.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

I enter the magical hours of pure feeling, pure thought, pure imagination and I think and I write and I 'mysticise' the Universe. I escape at will, the truth of my humanless, Samurai solitude, and I pursue the truth of love in myself and in everyone else. I am philosopher. I am shaman. I am alone. I frontier the Soul to be spirit on Earth.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

Amera Ziganii Rao is a former hard news journalist who is now turning professional with her art forms and indeed, her healing forms, after a long journey of inner searching, self teaching and exploring many layers and areas of both craft and wisdom. She is now working on her first book of philosophy and esoteric thought, and social, cultural and spiritual commentary. She is also showing her first photography collections. And last but most definitely not least, she is building a business to share her Sacred Whore High Priestess Society consciousness and empowering explorations to reach as many people as possible across the world. She is in her forties and lives in London.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

In the meantime, please enjoy this website. I have included many of the subjects I am covering, areas of experience and insight that I will be exploring to the fullest in my book, the courses and all the other work that is to come as a dramatist, novelist and essayist. I also of course, include many of the wise people on this planet, who have come long before me; authors, screen dramatists, playwrights, film makers, artists, and other enlighteners and grand carriers of the wisdom I have found the most helpful on my journey, to find peace and become enlightened. The seemingly impossible journey, in the face of oneself and one’s circumstances. People who have contributed massively to my healing on this mad journey called life, in this insane existence called The Universe. People who have helped to make me as good a carrier of wisdom as I in turn, can be. Thank you.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

Copyright and intellectual property rights are serious issues. And legally protected. Please do not reproduce my work anywhere without due credit and obviously, never for financial gain. 'Big Sister' is watching you! Other than that, please continue to enjoy my original work and the work of (credited) others, for free, while I work on using my material in further professional formats. Thank you for your interest and support.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012

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