MELUSINE: RACE TO GET HER
MELUSINE: RACE TO GET HER
He had it built in the basement of his house as a gift for his then-wife Pamela Anderson.
Say what you will about Starbucks, but they most certainly know how to market coffee, and in the Northwest where I live of course it is seen on every street corner. There are even Starbucks’ across the street from one another.
You can always depend on Starbucks to provide great coffee and great customer service.
However there has been some controversy recently over a marketing proposal that began and ended abruptly. The “#RaceTogether” campaign was an idea where in some stores, baristas have been writing the words race together on that latte cup or that Americano cup. The idea is to encourage us to talk about race. Baristas were encouraged to even ask customers “When did you first become aware of your race?”
Starbucks announced the Race Together initiative March 16 to “stimulate conversation, compassion and action around race in America.” Racial tensions flared in rallies and riots last year after police killed two unarmed black men — Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York — with no charges brought against the officers.
The Seattle-based company’s leadership team visited almost 2,000 employees in St. Louis, Oakland, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York over the past three months to discuss racial issues.
It may have been an idea that looked good on paper, and with the recent political climate focusing on civil upheavals regarding race, the CEO of Starbucks thought that baristas could strike up conversation about race while serving either a black cup of coffee, or their latest creation a “Single-Origin Flat White”: a cup of coffee with a dot of white cream in the middle.
The campaign was immediately talked about unfavorably in the social media. It was a said that customers would be going into Starbucks and literally ordering a grande, venti, or double shot of awkward conversation.
This also sparked a number of humorous coffee suggestions for new coffee products on Twitter, like the “Malcom X-spresso,” the “Police Brew-tality,” “Roast-a-Parks,” someone also suggested a “Some of my friends are black” coffee, turning the campaign to a roast that they were not planning on. The firestorm even prompted Corey duBrowa, a communications executive at the company, to delete his Twitter account.
The “Race Together” cup messages were called ham-fisted by critics and were stopped on Sunday morning.
This isn’t the first time a so called “cup campaign” has gone wrong at Starbucks.
Back in 2007 there were cups that were printed with the words “The Way I See It.” The cups featured words of Starbucks customers who saw themselves as intellectuals and sent their thoughts in to be featured on a cup.
Michelle Icanno, an Ohio woman, was steaming after reading an anti-God message published on the side of a Starbucks coffee cup. The message that got Michelle Incanno’s blood boiling reads:
Why in moments of crisis do we ask God for strength and help? As cognitive beings, why would we ask something that may well be a figment of our imaginations for guidance? Why not search inside ourselves for the power to overcome? After all, we are strong enough to cause most of the catastrophes we need to endure.The quote was written by a Canadian Starbucks customer, and was included as part of a campaign called “The Way I See It.” The Seattle-based coffee giant claims that was intended to spur discussion on different viewpoints. But Incanno stated, “As someone who loves God, I was so offended by that. I don’t think there needs to be religious dialogue on it. I just want coffee.”
That wasn’t the only offending Starbucks coffee cup. A Starbucks cup promoting a pro-homosexual message caused a lot of controversy in Waco, Texas. As WorldNetDaily reported in September 2005, officials at Baylor University told the Starbucks store on its Waco, Texas, campus to remove a cup featuring the words of a homosexual novelist.
And last but not least, a third anti-God sentiment appeared on a Starbucks cup in 2007, slamming the Christian faith and the Bible’s message regarding Heaven and Hell. While Starbucks’ disclaimer states that the messages on their cups do not necessarily reflect the views of the corporation, there were a lot of people that were steamed that the coffee cups had been taken over by godless hipsters.
Controversy over the Starbucks image has also gone all the way back to the choice they have made for the logo of the company. We all have seen the mermaid with a split tail and a crown adorning the coffee cup, but it wasn’t always that tame.
As some veteran Starbucks coffee drinkers may know, Starbucks changed their corporate logo not once but twice because some consumers found the split tail of their topless siren too lurid and suggestive. Many women complained that the mermaid or siren looked like she was spreading her legs as if she was looking for sex. She also had bare breasts which also offended some people.
Starbucks replied that the symbol was that of a split-tailed “Melusine” from a 15th-century wood carving found in a mariner’s book.
In ancient stories the tale of Melusine (sometimes “Melusina”) is spoken in reference to a water fairy. The story can be traced back to the figure of Melisande, wife of Fulk the Black, Count of Anjou in the 11th century.
As the story went, Melisande insisted that her husband never look at her on the Sabbath day. This he agreed to, and so every Sunday, she would go inter her private apartments to hide. As most fairy tales or legends usually go, nothing ever goes according to plan. Well, the husband decided to spy on her as she was bathing on the Sabbath. He saw that she was a strange scaled creature from the waist down with either two fish tails or two serpents for legs, depending on which version you read. After the husband broke his promise, Melisande transformed into a full-bodied dragon and shrieked away, never to be seen again.
Perhaps the real reason she had serpents for legs ( a mythological body type called an “anguepede”) is that, according to Fulk’s descendant, Richard the Lionheart, his bloodline was descended from “The Devil,” which would mean that Melisande/Melusine was too.
In Greco-Roman mythology, the Liliths were the “Melusines” or “mermaids” that have the head and breasts of a seductive woman. Her breasts are full of sweet milk and blood that can be boiled away to fine gold. Her lower body has the fins that split in two to allow for men to be seduced into a sexual bond with them. This leads the man into the water where he drowns and remains in the water forever without salvation.
In alchemy, Melusines were a symbol of the element of Mercury, which alchemists purportedly used to transmute other metals. In symbolic alchemical depictions she was shown shooting milk and blood shooting from her breasts, which would purportedly be boiled to make gold.
Room for cream? Melusine sprays milk and blood from her paps, from Azoth of the Philosophers by Basil Valentin, 1659
First, a simplified logo was introduced, hiding the siren’s breasts under waves of hair, but it still showed the belly button and the two tails.
Then second, this image was cropped and enlarged so the split in the siren’s tail would no longer show. Now, the only indication that this female icon is a sea creature is in the wavy lines, which originally were part of the representation of the two tails.
Although the image is that of a split-tailed sea creature or mermaid, it is still a siren.
More specifically, it is a double-tailed siren or a baubo siren, which The Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects points out, is “a cross between a mermaid and a sheila-na-gig.” This is what Melusine is.
Her suggestive pose refers to female sexual mysteries and the lure of temptation for any simple-minded fellow. The sheila-na-gig is rooted in paganism and the worship of evil spirits, yet ironically, it is found on many European churches and cathedrals as a decorative motif. In European heraldry, a Melusine is a device often used on coats of arms.
Carl Jung suggests that supernatural forces spring from the fusion of two biologically different entities, opposites that embrace and explain practically everything. Jung explained how archetypes have a mesmerizing affect on all of us. Even though most combinations of man and animal are typically chimera or monsters, such as the Minotaur, the goat headed fawn or Baphomet, we also are now entertained by other creatures such as winged angels, horned demons, and mermaids.
Jung believed that these images of fused man and animal sprung forth from our dreams. They may have existed in one form or another, and they have anciently been programmed into our collective unconscious to remind us of a time where the world was far more enchanted and maybe even more dangerous as the myths about such creatures always ended up with man being seduced and later killed while under the hypnotic influence of such beasts.
The creatures go beyond time and space and remain in a matrix that so far is unexplained yet remains deep in our subconscious minds.
We still respond to these images and they most certainly guide us magically through the real world.
Jung supposes that these primordial images bring us feelings of accumulated memory, and with enough thought and pondering can take on a life of their own. This can be felt and even seen by human beings that have had their individual opinions on logic stretched and molded to respond to ancient memories and images of so-called supernatural beings.
In truth, what these beings symbolize is something more than the obvious and immediate meaning.
In order to understand the evolution of thought forms and identifying that which is a basic human archetype, we must go back to the first man and woman and the Garden of Eden.
An archetype that has hidden in the shadows of the creation story is the serpentine woman known as Lilith. She has been known as “the goddess with a thousand names” if not more. She has many of the personality attributes that have been described in other so-called goddesses. In his book The White Goddess, poet Robert Graves described her:
The Goddess is a lovely, slender woman with a hooked nose, deathly pale face, lips red as rowan-berries, startlingly blue eyes, and long-fair hair; she will suddenly transform herself into sow, mare, bitch, vixen, she-ass, weasel, serpent, owl, she-wolf, tigress, mermaid or loathsome hag. Her names and titles are innumerable. In ghost stories she often figures as ‘The White Lady,’ and in ancient religions, from the British Isles to the Caucausus, as the ‘White Goddess.’ I cannot think of any true poet from Homer onwards who has not independently recorded his experience of her. The trest of a poet’s vision, one might say, is the accuracy of his portrayal of the White Goddess and of the island over which she rules. The reason why the hair stands on end, the eyes water, the throat is constricted, the skins crawls and a shiver runs down the spine when one writes or reads a true poem is that a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living, the ancient power of fright and lust–the female spider or the queen-bee whose embrace is death.She is the most popular identifying archetype in human culture. She dates as far back as 2000 years BC, and her image has been described and seen in ancient Sumerian tablets.
Lilith is usually depicted as a beautiful woman from the waist up and as a snake from the waist down. This same image has also been used to represent the demon Lamashtu or Abysuth. These are two other female demons that are considered child eaters.
Lilith is full of rage, rebellion and has a voracious sexual appetite. In later rabbinic tradition, she plays the role of the succubus. She has been called the “Bride of Satan” and according to Christian legend was the first wife of Adam.
In the Syrian Book of Baruch, an apocryphal work published at the time of Christ, Lilith is considered a siren of the sea. It says:
“I will call on the Sirens of the sea,As Siegmund Hurwitz explains in Lilith the First Eve: Historical and Psychological Aspects of the Dark Feminine, even today there is a belief in Greece that:
The Lillths who come who come out of the Wilderness
And on the Shedim and Tannim of the forests.”
…The Sirens of Parnassus lure sailors in danger from a storm by bewitching songs in the hope of immanent salvation. The unhappy ones steer in the direction of theses sweet sounds, but the closer hey believe to be to the deceptive voices, the farther away these move and so they are tempted to sail on and on until eventually they are drowned.Interestingly, one of the theories for the meaning of the name Melusine breaks it down into the Greek words “Melas-Leuke” meaning “Black and White.” Of course, that was probably a reference to the idea that she was a mixture of both light and dark energy, being a descendant of the Devil, rather than having any racial implication. The race Melusine came from was that of the Serpent.
This afternoon, my producer and I both went to Starbucks together and began discussing the company’s logo with the baristas. Let me tell you: it was awkward.
So the next time the people at Starbucks try to start an awkward conversation with you about race or religion, ask them why they work for a company that uses a logo featuring the daughter of Satan spreading her serpent legs. See if that doesn’t shut them up.
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