Inspiring Ideas and Insights from the Matriarchy

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

In her addictive 1988 book The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects, Barbara G. Walker offers many insights and much information of an inspiring nature. Writers can mine her work for ideas for many stories, whether of the horror genre or another. All it takes is an application of one's own imagination.

Here are some of her inspiring gems.

Any . . . symbol may have hundreds of interpretations, according to the differing beliefs of people who have interpreted it (ix).

How might a mortuary be interpreted by various groups with—shall we say unusual beliefs? For zombies, a mortuary might be seen as an eatery; vampires might convert it into a comfortable bedroom suite; a necrophiliac might also see a mortuary as a bedroom but would be apt to put it to a different use than vampires awaiting the deepening of twilight into night.

People revere external objects that strike their fancy for either esthetic [sic] or associative reasons. Whatever is perceived as somehow special in one's experience can become an object of worship . . . trees . . . stones . . . mountains . . . rivers . . . as well as every kind of personal or collective fetish (x).

Since beauty is in the eye of the beholder, aesthetic vision may differ from one person to another. What makes a place beautiful? The blood-splatter pattern on the wall before which a gunshot victim died? The human flesh that was burned into the stone of a dungeon wall when a prisoner was burned alive? The full-length mirror in which a man or woman was compelled to watch as he or she was flayed alive? What other “associations” might render this place or that sacred? Did Vlad the Impaler find the sharpened treetops stripped of branches upon which he fixed his enemies holy objects? Was the bathtub in which Catherine of Bathory bathed in murdered maidens' blood a revered spot in her castle? Was the burial ground beneath John Wayne Gacy's suburban home as special to him as a churchyard full of dead congregants' bones is to their surviving loved ones?

The simpler the symbol, the more meanings it can accumulate . . . through generations (x). Walker recounts how the swastika, once a symbol of “peace and creativity,” became seen, following its association with the Nazis, a hated thing symbolic of “totalitarianism and cruelty” (ix).

For a naive, loving, young bride pure of heart, her wedding ring might represent love and faithfulness and the sacred union of man and wife in wedded bliss. A few years later, if the groom is not whom she believed, but is unfaithful, cruel, and abusive, the same ring may come to represent hatred and betrayal and her bondage to a man she never knew. To her children, after they have learned of their dear, dead mother's years of torment at her husband's hands, the ring may signify the ordeal of horror, misery, and despair she suffered for their sake.

Ultimately, symbolism boils down to human needs and desires [related to such universal concerns as] health, wealth, fertility, power, control of the environment, or maintenance of the food supply (xi).

Again, Walker gives horror story writers much food for thought in her catalog of “human needs and desires,” especially if they were to be warped by corruption, evil, or decadence. Were an evil man to need a liver donor, to what ends might he be willing to go to obtain a reluctant benefactor? For someone who puts profit before people, what limits, if any, would there be? For a mountebank, an infertile man or woman might present a windfall of opportunity. To gain or hold onto power, men and women have done hideous deeds, indeed. An effort to control the environment could easily backfire, causing deaths by the thousands. What would an otherwise kind and compassionate character do to ensure that he or she and his or her family does not go without food?

Symbols are whatever one cares to make of them (xi).

Problems could arise if one group is willing to eradicate a group whose people stand in the way of what possible followers' devotion to a symbol the first group defines far differently than their intended victims do.

Walker's concepts and perceptions could seed plenty of more story ideas. Perhaps we will revisit her fascinating book's observations again in a future post.