THE GREEN GODDESS

Mika Waltari's Green Goddess from the Island of the Setting Sun (1926) short story is a symbol of irresistible attractiveness and divinity's evil - or the gods' faithfulness towards those who worship them. But she's also the possibility of turning stone into flesh, through the power of desire - which seems to be immense.

 

"This effigy truly was more beautiful than all mortal women", the narrator affirms, and immediately one feels impelled to think that this strange, carved green figure of a foreign goddess found by the heartless Viking-descendant sailors whom the narrator (a king) commanded when looting a distant island is Miss Immortality herself. Could we say, in fact, that evilness is immortal and gods use, seduce and revenge on men? Who believes in the power of the holy curses? "Her love was destructive, but its wonder was great", Waltari wrote, and through sentences like this one we are thrown into a sado-masochistic type of relation, a tale of passion, power and violence.

Curiously, Green Tara, as a Feminine Goddess Archetype in Hindu Mythology and the consort of the Dhyani Buddha Amogasiddhi, is known, on the contrary, for her active compassion and is incarnated in all good women. Tara governs the Underworld, the Earth and the Heavens, birth, death and regeneration, love and war, the seasons, all that lives and grows, the Moon cycles (Luna) and feminine creation. Typically, Tara is seen as a slender and beautiful woman, with long hair and blue eyes. She is also the most popular figure on the Tibetan pantheon of deities, the beautiful goddess Tara, (pronounced tah' rah) whose name means 'Star' - originated by Indian Hinduism as the Mother Creator, her numerous representations spread from Ireland to Indonesia under many different names.

Could it be that Waltari inspired himself on Tara deity to create this cursing goddess? "I drew my sword and so the blood of my closest friend flowed to a black puddle on the floor and I saw the fire in his upturned eyes die away. Yet I felt no remorse, for I could see that the goddess had turned her head and was smiling at me and on her face there was an expression I could not fathom. (...) And I knelted on the cold floor and vowed to foresake my kin and the place of my birth and everything that once I had cherished, if only she would love me. And at this the goddess stepped down from her pedestal." The Mother Creator, when provoked and turned into the goddess of a vanquished people can, after all, show what amount of destruction creativeness might require.