Akasha, Queen Of The Damned

 

 “They came to kill us, the traitors! They would blame it on the spirits; that was the plan. And all to eat the flesh again, the flesh of their mothers and fathers, and the flesh for which they loved to hunt. They came into the house and they stabbed me with their daggers, I their sovereign Queen. I fell as they slashed at me, as they drove their daggers into my breast. One cannot live with such wounds as I received; and so as I fell to the floor, I knew that I was dead! Do you hear what I am saying? I knew that nothing could save me. My blood was pouring out onto the floor. But even as I saw it pooling before me, I realized I was not in my wounded body, that I had already left it, that death had taken me and was drawing me upwards sharply as if through a great tunnel to where I would suffer no more!

I wasn't frightened; I felt nothing; I looked down and saw myself lying pale and covered with blood in that little house. Yet I did not care. I was free of it. But suddenly something took hold of me, took hold of my invisible being! The tunnel was gone; I was caught in a great mesh like a fisherman's net. With all my strength I pushed against it, and it gave with my strength but it did not break and it gripped me and held me fast and I could not rise through it. When I tried to scream I was in my body again! I felt the agony of my wounds as if the knives were cutting me afresh. But this net, this great net, it still had a hold of me, and instead of being the endless thing it had been before, it was now contracted into a tighter weave like the weave of a great silk veil.

And all about me this thing - visible yet invisible – whirled as if it were wind, lifting me, casting me down, turning me about. The blood gushed from my wounds. And it ran into the weave of this veil, just as it might into the mesh of any fabric. And that which had been transparent was now drenched in blood. And a monstrous thing I saw, shapeless, and enormous, with my blood broadcast throughout it. And yet this thing had another property to it, a center, it seemed, a tiny burning center which was in me, and ran riot in my body like a frightened animal. Through my limbs it ran, thumping and beating. A heart with legs scampering. In my belly it circled as I clawed at myself. I would have cut myself open to get this thing out of me! And it seemed the great invisible part of this thing - the blood mist that surrounded me and enveloped me - was controlled by this tiny center, twisting this way and that as it scurried within me, racing into my hands one moment and into my feet the next. Up my spine it ran.

I would die, surely I would die, I thought. Then came a moment of blindness! Silence. It had killed me, I was certain. I should rise again, should I not? Yet suddenly I opened my eyes; I sat up off the floor as if no attack had befallen me; and I saw so clearly! Khayman, the glaring torch in his hand! - the trees of the garden - why, it was as if I had never truly seen such simple things for what they were! The pain was gone completely, from inside and from my wounds as well. Only the light hurt my eyes; I could not endure its brilliance. Yet I had been saved from death; my body had been glorified and made perfect.” (Akasha, Queen Of The Damned)

“I would have you obey me without question, and then understanding would follow. But this is not your way. So fearless. Yes, I took your audience from you. I burnt away the arena in which you sought to shine. I stole the battle! But don't you see? I offer you finer things than you have ever reached for. I offer you the world, my prince.

Stop the tears you shed for Baby Jenks, and for yourself. Think on the mortals you should weep for. Envision those who have suffered through the long dreary centuries, the victims of famine and deprivation and ceaseless violence. Victims of endless injustice and endless battling. How then can you weep for a race of monsters, who without guidance or purpose played the devil's gambit on every mortal they chanced to meet!

I want you to understand. You are my instrument! And so the others shall be if they are wise. Don't you see? There has been a design to all of it - your coming, my waking. For now the hopes of the millennia can be realized at last. Look on the little town below, and on this ruined castle. This could be Bethlehem, my prince, my savior. And together we shall realize all the world's most enduring dreams.” (Akasha, Queen Of The Damned)

Hello my dears. I am the Raven who speaks to you.

In this podcast I will make some observations about the great mother, the mother of all those condemned to the red nectar that leads to the life they no longer have. The Egyptian lady who bears the source of evil that plunges the damned into deep night. I will digress about the ancient Akasha and some feelings I had with the way Anne Rice ended up portraying her and which, in my view, was something too brief, it could have been something longer and not ended as abruptly as we see happening in the third book. Akasha and her brief appearance in the chronicles is somewhat ironic, since we are talking about the oldest existing creature in the universe created by Anne Rice. But to see this is to see, at the same time, how powerful and remarkable her appearance was; even brief, it left quite deep marks.

It is known that Anne Rice had a refined aesthetic in her writing. She writes with a very sensitive eye, with a clear sensory appreciation for what blossoms in her imagination. We are able to touch, taste and even experience phantom odors thanks to the descriptive way that Anne Rice chooses to portray her visions. She architects a crochet of words and intense feelings, full of poignant adjectives, rarely superficial. The typical pride of Lestat or the constant melancholy of Louis... the intensity with which the reader manages to get in touch with these feelings... this is nothing more than the vital force of the creativity that emanates from the writer in the words that she chooses to germinate throughout her life along the hundreds of pages written in red, which is her refuge and also her garden.

This feature has always been a constant in my experience reading The Vampire Chronicles. As a work that sheds constant light on the thoughts of a character, undresses momentary feelings, revealed in an intimate and crystalline way, the vampire chronicles are a type of reading that burns in the epidermis, that gives that heartache and leaves knots in the throat. It's a kind of reading that's impossible to do and expect us to come out of it without harm. And if it were to come out without harm, in my humble opinion it wouldn't be worth it, as it is a fundamental part of Anne Rice's writing the involvement that she promotes with the existential sufferings of the vampires that she values so much.

And, well... this is her intense driving... of sensitivity. Epithelial... like a sigh in the ear or fangs slowly running down the neck. Strong... sensitive... always. Until something happened to me... or rather... someone happened, which put me in a form of relationship and experimentation that, at the same time, left me intrigued, led me to the desire to discover, to unearth its mysteries and to know what was hidden behind her imposing figure. I speak of Akasha, of course.

I am not implying that by introducing Akasha, when finally her manifestation takes place in the book, that our sense of intensity with it has diminished. No, quite the contrary. It would be a total nonsense to say that with the right and disproportionate attack that Akasha performs right when she is awakened from her secular latency. What I want to say is that the form, the feeling she provokes in us is something quite different from what we had been feeling until then, having the books “Interview With The Vampire” and “The Vampire Lestat” as our retrospective.

Akasha is as intense or even more intense than Louis's worst days of depression, or Lestat's hysterical and pride-fueled attacks. However, I point out what there is to give and sell in the two passionate vampires and that is something very scarce in the great mother of the children of darkness: transparency. Everything, absolutely everything in Akasha has intensity, and an intensity not with the same proportion that exists in the others: in her everything is amplified, in a much superior level than other vampires who, in turn and in comparison to humans, already were in themselves just a bomb of sensations. This walking hyperbole that is Akasha also conveys to us the notion of source, of uncontrollable and unlimited power. It puts us in touch with something of the genesis, the origin of the gift of darkness and the curse it represents. Right away, she already distances herself from any and all comparisons with the characters known until then, even the most erudite, refined and powerful, like Marius. Anne Rice makes it clear that Akasha's being is at a level never seen before in "The Vampire Chronicles". And the author not only demonstrates this, but as is typical of her, she creates a sensory narrative experience with Akasha as she slowly introduces the vampire queen to us, always maintaining her aura of mystery.

Akasha is a gigantic and unnatural force. Something that conveys such a primal, primeval sensation that it leaves in our hearts the feeling that we are dealing with a long-dormant nemesis that manifests itself basically instinctually. It's as if nothing was accessible behind Akasha's eyes, her secret and motivation were always blurred and everything happened around her simply because she was there, absolutely not needing to move a rose petal for anything. If before we thought that the vampires who descend from the evil that inhabits the being of Akasha, if placed in comparison with humans, could be identified on the level of gods, the awakening of Akasha replaces them, through a fury and intense thirst for blood. In comparison, the other vampires are charlatan gods, insignificant and mere caricatures of what is in fact transcendent evil. It is as if the supposed gods of darkness, blind in their romanticism, had been reduced to mere cockroaches before the eternal, unshakable and irresistible goddess.

And the most interesting thing is that these sensations have a spokesperson, someone who introduces us to them and makes us approach this titanic force even before Akasha awakens. This spokesperson, our driver and the skin that makes us feel these sensations is Lestat. The fateful encounter with petrified Akasha and Enkil, presented by Marius, is the first moment where we have contact and accompany Lestat and the feelings that a being, apparently immobile and inert, still manages to awaken in him and, consequently, in us readers. He manages to dominate, invade and take care of his own being, without knocking on the door, prior notice. Lestat's ambiguity, represented by revulsion and, at the same time, an inexplicable need of desire for Akasha that attracts him like a magnet, makes us dive and feel the queen in our own soul. And it's something that also gives us a deep dimension of the gigantic extent of her influence. An inanimate corpse capable of provoking the most intense terrors and orgasms in a undead creature.

What I find curious about this bomb of emotions and great domination of us, the readers themselves, orchestrated by Akasha, is the sensation of paralysis and indescribability. The world is falling apart, the children of darkness mentally located, as they are nothing but the extension of her, her mother and source. All incinerated and sucked into the vortex of oblivion. And even with all this happening around us, we barely managed to move, move a single muscle, just like Lestat. This is something absurd, unexpected, something intriguing... that contradicts the need to manifest a basic preservation instinct that inhabits us from the first seconds of our existence. Akasha is mysterious... hypnotic, sexy and irresistible. She takes us to joy and mixes with pure horror. And what is most frightening is that, even as she moves, amplifying the influence of the feminine that inhabits her blood and womb, the womb of all vampires, she still terrifies us because apparently nothing, nothing stimulates the movement of a facial muscle in her. It's as if, by spilling blood and creating burning torches of desperate and terrified vampires by a truly divine power, superior to the mediocrity of what her egos believed to be the limit, she was not touched, moved sentimentally in any moment. Akasha is monstrous, because in the other vampires, even the secular ones, we still perceive some trace of humanity, as a way of thinking, expression of a worldview, the way they feel and taste things. This to Akasha seems to be something that she has not only experienced in its entirety, but now she is already beyond that, in another logic, practically split in how disconnected and alien in comparison to that of other vampires and mortals. It is as if we were dealing with such an ancient power, from such an ancient world, that something has already been lost in our consciousness, that element that would allow us a basic understanding of the senses and sensations that pulsate in this being that, although active, mobile and pursuer, behaves coldly and unshakably like the statue she was until her awakening.

Mystery, curiosity, intensity, physical and mental dominance... things that only the presence of Akasha is capable of infesting us, like a locust examination of a biblical plague of ancient Egypt. She's scary... but we want to see more of her, feel her more intensely. We were curious and provoked. We desperately want to know the reason for the existence that Marius, Lestat, Louis, Armand and many others live, chasing for centuries in the dirty and deserted streets of the old Europe and America. To me, this is the most notorious characteristic of Akasha: in cinema and literature, we are constantly presented with characters with disproportionate power and that leads us to wonder if there is, in fact, any hope of overcoming such an enormous force. And we see that here in Akasha... but that's not what makes the character shine. It is the fact that even though she possesses such strength, we are attracted to her and by her due to all the answers that we seek to acquire with her to fill in the gaps, the uncertainties... to obtain an argument, a justification to illusory create an order for chaos and a meaningless existence. Akasha sucks us into the quality that emanates from being her, of promise... promise of something more. When we reunite with something that we supposedly lost, we forget... that we want to relive, feel intensely again and that we can't necessarily do more. Original things, the essence of the first time when we met them... like, for example, the pleasurable and painful sensation of falling in love for the first time or even having enough enlightenment if such things really have any a priori sense. ... it's murky, it's enigmatic. But at the same time attractive. Vampires belong to her as an extension of her being... and she is chaos... but at the same time, she is almost impossible to resist, which in narrative terms is something very, very curious to watch and to accompany. Akasha is a femme fatale, in a sense. But the way of possessing and dominating, even with a strong sexual accent, is something even deeper than that. Even because to reduce her to that would be impoverish the queen a lot.

To me, Raven, the ambivalence that accompanies Akasha, which I have already mentioned, is one of the points that most help to build the mesmerism, the hypnotic sensation that she causes. That moves the search to understand her origin and her desire. And this ambivalence manifests itself in extremes inside and outside Akasha, as if by contagion... extremes that inhabit this millennial being, describably the most beautiful of all vampires that ever existed and who, at the same time, contains evil and cruelty unprecedented, capable of ridiculing the most scavenger of vampires. If Akasha were an angel, she would be the image of Lucifer himself, the most beautiful angel, theoretically with the greatest cognitive appeal, who, fascinated by his own beauty and lost in arrogance, created for himself a concept of his own paradise, different from that which God idealized. Where everything would revolve around him and embraced by his wings. Akasha mirrors this demonic beauty in much the same way, even when she is inactive, her marble skin bathed in moonlight. All supported by a serene face and hypnotic beauty, which seems not to realize the real evil that lives in itself and the way in which this same evil expands and infects everything it touches. And in moments like that, when, metaphorically, the vampirism of the chronicles approaches the concept of disease, I don't make this kind of reduction. But are elements that give us the possibility to digress about it.

The absence of compassion is notorious and, as I said, even when she leaves her petrified state, Akasha seems to carry something that makes us feel like an empty shell, inhabited by secrets and primal essences, but totally enveloped by selfishness and gigantic nihilism. In this sense, many of the oppressive attitudes, motivated by something of an obsessive nature, somehow appear, even briefly in Akasha, a need to return to something that was sacrificed in her, that she lost, the moment she left her humanity behind. Curious, isn't it? For it is something that, in a roundabout way, ended up becoming the cross of all her vampiric descendants. Akasha's brutality seems to contain, in a way that is unclear to her, something that speaks of an orphaned feeling, of a lost object or part. It points to a need to fill the empty shell that she has become or, perhaps, to something that tries, foolishly, to justify her own existence that has long since made no sense and that, due to her inability to die, made impossible by the passion she has for her self-image and ends up being pushed symptomatically over the centuries, in a way that even reveals psychotic traits, insane I would say. The considerations that Maharet did in relation to the queen of the damned are quite assertive in my understanding: in a perceptive way, Maharet recognizes the monstrosity that Akasha became very much due to the blindness that took her. To me, and in agreement with Maharet, I see that Akasha is a character who, when contemplating herself with pride and vanity in the waters of the ancient Nile or in modern mirrors, cannot see her true image, the image of a monster... she is always lost and numbed by the hallucinatory image of divinity she has created for herself.

And it is quite tragic to see this. Because, if we rescue the story of Akasha and her husband, Enkil, we see in her a visionary in the times when she was still human. A woman who had strong and determined moral values ​​in her identity that pointed to the beneficial transformation of people, the construction of a model of society with much more dignity. She pointed to the abandonment of cannibalism and the beliefs that encouraged the scourge. She was, in her origins, a ruler who indeed had pretensions and enough passion to carry out revolutions that would keep her people away from violence and bring about peace. Which soon began to crumble when she aroused an interest in trying out the occult, approaching the witches Maharet and Mekare. I do not intend in this topic to reveal the conflicting relationship between Akasha and the twins, but the relationship between occultism, frustration, repression and revenge was characterized in a chain of events that led to the appearance of Amel, a powerful spirit and source of evil that would be perpetuated through Akasha and would condemn anyone who came into contact with her blood.

I think I have already touched on all the points I wanted, since this podcast is not intended to create a summary. But, in fact, the answer that lies at her origin is a tragic one, from someone noble who was corrupted, scourged by her equals, prevented from having eternal rest, condemned to remain and condemn many others. The one who in the genesis nurtured deep humanity and had a visionary soul, ends up being corrupted by a chain of events of revenge, betrayal and use of forces not compatible with the world she wanted to create. The condemnation to darkness, the prolonging of existence and the slow perishing of any and all meaning led the queen of the damned to a mental state completely distant from that of her origin, led her to idealize a purification of the world (completely distorted concept) as a way of response to her symptom. It led her to idealize a second Eden on Earth, a female Eden where she would exist as the center and where everyone would be her own mirror. The great revolutionary, possessed by evil, turned into an empty shell by time and degenerated by mental illness, introjected and then reflected, materially, her symptom in the world, in her descendants and also, ultimately, in the human race, which was also part of the genocidal cleanup she had plans to carry out.

Corvid greetings!