This book includes my "Groundhog" spiritual intercourse with Melina Costello, poet, teacher and counselor, author best known for Tutti-Frutti Town: Blinky Blueberry Finds A Friend (1991) and Seeking the God of Ecstasy: A Spiritual Journey of Sexual Awakening (2010). The latter work, a culmination of her decades devoted to the practice of meditative disciplines, is an account of her mystic encounters with Dionysus, praised by no less than Jungian analyst and best-selling author Robert A. Johnson (1921-2018).
Melina discontinued our exchanges due to pressing professional and family duties. I continued sharing my writings with her. They took the form of my extended notes on pythiatism, which the reader will find in this volume. The name for that psychiatric mythology hails from the time Cretan nuns were recruited by Greek priests to sit on three-legged stools inside a cave at Delphi, and, while breathing an intoxicating gas emitted through subterranean cracks, to writhe and scream hysterically in response to a certain questions put to the priests, who would then interpret the screams into ambiguous prophesies for a large fee.
Delphi, the locus of a large stone egg called an omphalos, was conceived to be the center of the world. A huge dragon or snake, a python, inhabited the cave. A prehistoric female cult maintained the site until Apollo arrived to shine the light of Reason on religious rites and convert the exalted place into a bank for the spoils of war and a united council for various Greek states. The priestesses imported from Crete distracted from the religion because they were young and beautiful, so they had to be replaced by old hags, or so it is said.
It may also be said that modern psychiatry is rooted somewhat in the analysis of the screams of hysterical, medicated females by a male priesthood. A prescription was crudely drafted for some course of action to be taken to resolve anxiety, such as over whether or not to go to war. Since the prescription was ambiguous, the parties did what they really wanted to do in the first place, and there was no blame on the priests if the result was undesirable to one side or the other since it was foreordained by the gods.
When a few people became aware of my correspondence with Melina and my interest in a sacred snake, they thought I was going mad, that I was talking to myself. that "Madame Me" was really me. Well, that is true, in a way, for one is nobody without somebody and a medium of communication. People who take the time to read a few of the articles in this little book will get to know better the Me in us all.
This book, written for people who do not read books because they prefer to read articles, also includes the articles, Was Emma Clueless? Her Husband Was Not Good Enough, The Difference Between Men and Women, The Idiot In Sartre's Mirror, Are We Neurotic? Hysteria and Modern Neurosis, Historical Pithiatism, The Madame Bovary Philosophy, A Therapeutic Exercise in Bovarysme, Imagination Betrayed, The Grotesque God of Reality Called Yuk, Jane Austen's Critics, The Romantic Fool's Game, Madame Me Interrupts With A Review, On Constructive Criticism, Jane Austen Describes Emma Woodhouse, Whatever Happened to Emma Woodhouse? C'est Moi, Ungodly Reason and Adultery, Mental Masturbation, Pythiatism & Why We Write, Imagining Nothing or Being with The Family Idiot, From Bad Novels to Forbidden Love, Gustave Flaubert and George Sand, A Note To Myself About Writing Novels, The Beginning Of Wisdom In Nothing, Liberty Fried Absurdities Instead of French Fries, On Pythiatism, The Hysterical Woman, On Cultural Negritude, Social Hygiene and Women's Liberation, Unhappiness Is Normal, Freudian Pythiatism, Will and Resistance Make the Man, Positive Pithiatism, Instinctive Imbecility, The Literary Taste of Shit & Count Dracula
