“The lone and level sands”
Once more, for the final time on “Mothering Invention”, we return. As is traditional when we reach the end of an arc, we’re both writing big sweeping looks at some of the series’ underlying themes. Starting with: legacy.
Alex: At the heart of WicDiv’s premise, there is a deal. A severely shortened lifespan, in exchange for artistic immortality – or immediate fame and fortune, if you want to look at it that way. And a lot of the series, as it’s developed over the past four years, has been asking: who the hell would be willing to strike that deal?
Being completely honest, at some points during those years – I’ve thought that maybe I would. Not for the fame or fortune, so much, but the idea of creating something that could last beyond myself. ‘Legacy’ has a nice ring to it, you have to admit.
“Mothering Invention” has examined various ways people fantasise about achieving immortality. And has made it perfectly clear that this fantasy is foolish at best – and monstrous at worst.
Let’s examine first the kind of legacy that once appealed to me: leaving a mark on the world through art.
As this Pantheon approaches the end of their allotted years, it’s increasingly clear that none of them have created anything that will truly last beyond them. Look at the way the public talk about the gods in #37.
Cassandra risking everything to speak truth will survive only as “reaction gif of the millennium.” Even Dionysus, the god who seemed to have the best grasp on his legacy (“they’ll remember being happy for a night”) is remembered as a troubled drug addict.
It doesn’t seem like the results have been much different for the past Pantheons. Records are – likely thanks to Ananke – so spotty that in 2013, even academics can’t be sure if they’re real or a recurring hoax. The historical Specials have filled in the details. The 455 Lucifer’s failed “Pax Romana, Eternal”. Based on the legacy of 13th and 20th Century Pantheons, the most they can hope to leave behind is war and plague. (A pandemic legacy, if you will.)
With one exception.
The Woden of 1831 – the last true Woden to reincarnate – and her Creature. “You will go on long after we are gone,” Woden tells it, and for once we have no evidence to suggest she was wrong. Whether this Creature is the same as the ‘Zeitgeist’, the being “of living poetry and bleak lightning” which appears briefly in 1923, remains to be seen. But if we follow its real-world parallel – Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the genre it birthed, a lineage you can trace straight to WicDiv – the legacy remains strong.
This isn’t the only kind of legacy that the 1831 Special touches on, however. Between Woden’s three children and Inanna’s pregnancy, it suggests a second way: creating not things but people, who will remember you. This is something we commonly talk about at funerals – “survived by their family” – and in many respects it’s a much healthier approach.
It’s also the kind of legacy that Ananke seems most insistent on blocking. In 1831, we see the lives of Woden’s three children extinguished in the crib by Inanna, at Ananke’s behest, and the pregnant Inanna killed by Ananke herself. These are echoed in “Mothering Invention” by the revelation of Baal’s child sacrifices, once again at Ananke’s behest, and Minerva’s attempt to murder the pregnant Persephone.
But to make life purely so it can extend your own is monstrous. That’s the way that someone like David Blake (or “Woden”) thinks – a man who uses his own son as a resource for his own gain.
As it develops, “Mothering Invention” increasingly distances itself from this idea. Ultimately, Laura’s decision to terminate her pregnancy has nothing to do with her rejection of godhood, and the immortality that offers. In fact, as she makes abundantly clear in #39, it has nothing to do with any of us.
That same issue shows us that Ananke’s mythic motivation for killing all these children – a belief that it’s her immortality or theirs – is a trap, set for her by her sister. In the space of a dozen pages, the comic thoroughly rejects the idea that children are just another way of leaving a mark on the world.
By the end of the arc, there’s only one character still desperately clinging onto attempted immortality: Ananke (or “Minerva”). And she’s the baddie.
In Ananke’s case, it’s not that building a legacy is futile. She’s been incredibly successful, in a much more direct way than any of us in the real world could ever be. Not just living on in people’s memories – because what use is that when you’re spending eternity in endless dark, unaware – but literal immortality.
It’s more that what she does to achieve this, an eternity of child murder, makes her a monster. Which is one way to make sure you live long in history, certainly.
The Morrigan’s final act of abuse is to create something
that will last beyond her death (albeit not by much), by making Baphomet a
slave to her memory. The meaning of that final moment in #37 has been hotly
contested, but this seems to be Morrigan’s intent, given the reveal of her and
Baphomet’s underground Temple of Love in the very next issue.
Even if your intent or methods aren’t evil, though, it seems like WicDiv’s position on legacy is that it’s inherently selfish, or at least misguided.
Most of Pantheon aren’t trying to leave the world a better place. And that’s completely fair enough, they’re all still teenagers. These gods are really just kids, still in the process of working out who they are – as Laura seems to have realised in the past couple of issues, why would they want to leave a legacy?
After all, who’d want the things they wrote when they were 17 preserved forever? Only a fool, or a monster.
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