Here comes chaos!
On banana shampoo and penis-birds.
Let’s start with an origin story.
On the hunt for a newsletter logo, I searched “pen with wings free.” Yield: one unlimited web use Shutterstock clip art image. The only—I would say problem, but am undecided as to whether this is a feature or a bug, so: The only intrigue associated with this image is that it looks like a riff on a phallos-bird, an artistic phenomenon popularized by the Ancient Greeks and commercialized by the Romans. (You can buy a theoretically authentic non-bird fascinus amulet for the conceptually high but relatively low price of $2,698.65 right here!)
These winged members are something of an enigma. They show up painted on pots and carved into stone. They are exactly what they sound like. (A penis with wings.) Some scholars believe them to have played a part in the Eleusinian Mysteries performed by the agrarian cult of Demeter and Persephone which, well, they’re not called the Eleusinian Understoods. Still, scholars know that the rituals were a multi-day event that centered on the sad story of Persephone’s kidnap and rape (which is where a lot of myths involving the Greek gods unfortunately go, particularly when they involve Zeus, who allowed Hades to capture Persephone) and eventual ascension from the underworld thanks to the perseverance of mama Demeter. The ritual is believed to have been something of an interactive performance in which participants traced the story through the rebirth of Persephone, who was played by one of the priestesses. And after it was over…epiphany? Transcendence? According to my former Classics professor Carolyn Dewald, the penis-bird “might be part of what was revealed at the end to the initiates.” Shock and awe indeed.
John Boardman, 94-year-old archaeologist and preeminent penis-bird scholar, wrote in a 2009 paper:
Sex is always good for a laugh, and a notable contribution to world views of the matter is the Greek treatment of dildoes, giving them wings (phallos-birds).
It would be cool if sex were always good for a laugh, and not sometimes good for weaponizing and stigmatizing and making variously dangerous and possibly life-threatening in an attempt to wrest bodily autonomy from as many people as possible. But it’s true that in the context of the Mysteries, the penis-birds make a certain sense. The rituals themselves were high in hilarity. At one point in the procession, masked men screamed obscenities and insults at the worshippers, in warped ode to a Thracian woman named Iambe, who in the myth entertained Demeter with jokes to lift her spirits as she searched for her kidnapped daughter. We have been laughing in the face of horrible things for millennia.
There’s also a theory that the worshippers’ giddiness was aided by the consumption of a psychotropic fungus—though, according to Eleusis’ chief archaeologist, Kalliope Papangeli, as summarized in a 2019 NYT piece, “psychedelic or indeed ecstatic and orgiastic fantasies abound everywhere in the discussion of the Mysteries…the fact that we want to believe such things says a lot more about us than it does about antiquity.” Papangeli considers Demeter and Persephone’s story “the most feminist of ancient myths…at its core are a pair of female deities outmaneuvering their apparently more powerful male counterparts.”
It brings to mind that Margaret Atwood story. She asked some women in her poetry seminar why women fear men, and they said they were afraid of being killed. She asked a male friend why men fear women, and he said, “They’re afraid women will laugh at them.” A reductive binary, perhaps, but illustrative. Maybe in the Mysteries the phallos-bird represented a final flex. Nothing disempowers a penis quite like dressing it up as a pigeon.
Anyway. Hello and thank you to the earliest adopters of this newsletter. You’re going to get ramblings, you’re going to get recommendations, and you’re going to get them bi-monthly for now.
Read…
…a 1975 novel about two lonely people who team up to jailbreak the London Zoo sea turtles, a classic investigation of truth in journalism, and an expansive essay collection on art and love. I wrote about all three books here, where you’ll find even more reading recs from my brilliant Vanity Fair colleagues.
Solve…
…your dry and itchy woes. Earlier this year, something dire occurred all along my hairline. Red, dry, next-level flakes. I broke out a full artillery of medicated shampoos (zinc, tar, salicylic acid, sulphur), plus hydrocortisone creams, apple cider vinegar rinses, coconut oil, olive oil, more washing, less washing, the works. No closer to a smooth head and tired of smelling like a niçoise salad, I went to the dermatologist, who diagnosed it as seborrheic dermatitis with a touch of eczema—I contain multitudes!—and prescribed a very ugly and immediately effective peanut-based oil laced with fluocinolone acetonide. Problem solved. In celebration I ordered the Leonor Greyl Lait Lavant A La Banane—a luxurious, oh-so-gentle banana cream-scented milk-to-foam shampoo—to maintain my newly repaired skin barrier while recalibrating the chic-to-Big Pharma ratio in my shower. (For full-body silky revival, don a pair of these cheap bad boys, pair with Dr. Bronner’s Peppermint Liquid Soap, and finish with Everyday Oil.)
Eat…
…a thick square of sweet chewy delight. Onggi Ferments, my favorite culinary store in Portland, ME, makes a perfect matcha black sesame butter mochi. I devour and proselytize it often, and have started supplementing my trips to the shop with a MacGyvered at-home approximation. New York Times Cooking has a great butter mochi recipe. From there, I substitute Miyoko’s cultured vegan butter, add about a tablespoon of culinary matcha, swap the glaze for a sprinkling of sesame seeds or sea salt, and promptly consume half the tray.
P.S.
Donate to or receive resources from: The National Network of Abortion Funds, The Trans Justice Funding Project, The Repro Legal Defense Fund.
Gussy up your mail with George Morrison stamps.
Thanks so much for starting this newsletter! What a good and fun read.