Milieu In Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven

Stephen King in his The Stand makes a crow the emissary for Satan . Earlier in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven we have a species of crow seducing us into evil . The crow then is the archetype for evil in Western literature. Yet we should never lose sight of the fact that in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals we have the Kantian categorical imperatives good and bad blur. Yet the distinction of the morally good and the morally reprehensible are never annihilated. It is another thing that reprehensibility is neither the same as evil, nor is it an effect or evil. It is the human discourses of purity and taboo which brings into being disgust and moral excretion. The iconography of the Mahavidyas destabilizes these categories and genealogies

In fact the terrain of Mother Dhumavati is Modernist --- to explain her milieu, if She has a milieu which is humanly cognizable, we would rather use The Wasteland of T.S. Eliot. Just because Eliot ends his poem with reiterations of peace, it does not mean that the telos of The Wasteland is peace or there is any hope for peace. It is a world bereft of all meaning: in Mother Dhumavati’s world the one resounding echo is Philomel’s “Jug jug jug jug jug jug”. Rape, sodomy, child abuse and torture have filled the world after the First World War and the Mother of all, Dhumavati responds to this “Jug jug jug jug jug jug” and rushes crazed through the multiverses. But as Christ said: He did not come to bring peace; Mother Dhumavati too cannot give us peace if Philomels continue to be raped and, the scandal at the heart of Christianity, Jesus the Messiah, keeps hanging from His Cross and is Crucified repeatedly in the iterative virulence of sin, as the primal scapegoat who cannot quench the human thirst for violence. A thirst which Mother Chinnamasta tried to quench by becoming the proto-sacrifice; Christ continues to quench the thirst of all intelligent beings for violence and offers His own blood price as oblation to YHWH to no avail. As does Mother Chinnamasta. The Christian God hangs on the Cross and is mocked by the powerful of this world to save Himself first, to answer the taunts of the Roman soldiers

Each artist brings her impression of the problematics of mimetic representation. It within this shifting terrain of mimesis, the minemata, in this case the representation of this Mahavidya has to be mapped within comprehensibility. The danger of containing any icon within comprehensibility is the danger of what the literary critic Cleanth Brooks saw as the heresy of paraphrase or reductionism. Yet there is value in this cultural work of iconographic sleuthing: Tantra as a discipline will become accessible as a sacred way of life for those who seek YHWH qua Brahman qua God. Whenever intellectuals scrutinize religious belief systems, the weak of intellect shudder in fright since their faiths are bound to be shaken. But as we know faith is strengthened by ratiocination. In the analysis of the iconography of the Mahavidya Dhumavati, we should never lose sight of the fact that her iconography is not fixed. Mostly she is represented as an old hag surrounded by ravens, but she is also shown as a young woman riding a peacock. There is not enough material on her in circulation which can definitively pinpoint her iconography. Therefore, her iconography is as indeterminate as the iconography of the other Mahavidyas are more stable and unequivocal. For example, the Mahavidya Chinnamasta is unequivocally shown as drinking her own blood and feeding her followers her own