PIERCING THE VEIL: Heaven, Hell And “PENNY DREADFUL’S Vanessa Ives

By JILLIAN KRISTINA

“We are all two things in a way, are we not? Deep in the marrow? Angel and Devil. Light and Dark. The pull between the two is the active verb, which energizes our lives.”

She moves. She sees. She senses. She knows. The pulse of life – and death – is always dancing just beneath her fingertips. She walks in the light but lives in the dark. She communes with demons but prays to angels. She is painfully aware, present, and yet possessed. She is a living paradox, this and that, all and nothing.

Miss Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) is an institution unto herself. The luminous and venomous icon of the gothic horror series, Penny Dreadful, answers to no one. She is the meeting point between the vortex of life and death. She is the liminal embodied. She is ancient and modern, ruthless and gentle. She is chaotic neutral. She does what needs to be done, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t suffer for it. Her suffering is in her blood; it motivates, inspires and directs. It clarifies her vision while disabling her, but that’s the price one pays for walking between worlds,  the price one pays for never knowing the peace of being normal. But within this disabling, chronic knowing and feeling and experiencing, one touches the divine. One experiences what it is to exist beyond this plane.

“If you have been touched by the demon, it’s like being touched by the backhand of God. Makes you sacred in a way, doesn’t it? Makes you unique with a kind of glory – the glory of suffering, even. Here’s my question. Do you really want to be normal?”

With every footfall, Vanessa leaves behind a trail of visions and questions. No step is without purpose, no day without drama. To exist in her shoes is to experience life both within the subterranean and ethereal, to see through the darkness. To perceive the spectral and merge with it. Touch it. Love it, because time and time again, in all her will and wildness, she succumbs to what feels the most at home to her – the other. The other that allows her to shapeshift and shed and grow and expand and shred and transform, because what Vanessa runs from most, and most doggedly, is herself. And yet, in all of that, constantly struggling with the density of her destiny, she pushes on. Still, she looks in the mirror long enough to face herself.

“There’s things of which I’m capable, of which I’ve proven myself capable. Do you believe a soul can be taken over by another? That you can lose yourself to something dark? I believe in curses. I believe in demons. I believe in monsters. Do you?”

Today’s Full Moon in Scorpio resurrects those secrets, buried and burrowed within our bodies. To speak life to the memories we would rather live a thousand lives forgetting than face. Those darknesses we’re terrified to touch, to admit that they walk within the barricaded and forbidden corridors of our psyches. These mortal vessels hold so much, too much, so much more than we’re meant to hold. The entirety of the universe swells within our spirit, radiating from our core. Scorpio is all about those spectral hunters that snip at our heels, because what are they seeking? Only all that we’ve been told to suppress, because within the strictly and diligently drawn lines of shalt and shalt not, there lies liberation. Resurgence. Realization and ultimately rebirth. Because Scorpio also deals in hard revelations, but really, the lies that we tell ourselves. The lies we believed by those who feared the depth and strengths populating the Scorpionic waters that dwell within us all. Feed us all. This is where the shades and shadows of the feminine we’ve been told to fear and shun lie. The origin tale of every “dark” goddess – of Lilith, of Circe, of Hekate. Of Amunet, the snake-headed Egyptian goddess who Miss Ives is believed to be the reincarnation of – the Mother of–Evil who will bring about the end of days. Or, maybe just the end of days as we know it? 

“I’ve done things in my life for reasons that seemed right, and even moral, in their violent immorality. And now I stand without that God upon whom I’ve always depended … The old monsters are gone. The old curses have echoed to silence. And if my immortal soul is lost to me, something yet remains. I remain.”

Penny Dreadful exists in times of prophecy and superstition and fear of the dark – fear of women – perpetuated by those who benefit from it. Now, we exist in times when these old fears have been resurrected with a vengeance, and to the same ends, the eradication of the other. 

Of those who look differently, speak differently, practice and worship differently. Those who exist differently, because that poses the greatest threat – to exist unto one’s self, living one’s truth, under no one’s thumb – generating a profit for no one. Some might (and do) call these people evil, but does that not make the term adject to whoever is wielding it? To what end?

Dark vs Light. Good vs Evil. One is never absent from the other. In fact, one needs the other to exist. This is the paradox of existence, and what drives us, what compels us to find a way to not only exist, but discover ourselves in the ash and the filth and the blades of grass and the flowers and the fires and brimstone in between.

“Fear not old prophecies, we defy them. We make our own heaven and our own hell.”

With all of the gravity today’s fierce lunation brings, the cards point to a shift that we initiate, through all the gifts and delights and perils of horror of both the light and the dark. Because we are both, and always will be. Everlasting unto ourselves, as we live the words woven through the myths we write and rewrite and write again, for ourselves, until the place our dying breaths meet us with a familiar smile – and a secret whisper.

In the midst of so much devastation and uncertainty, the loves and passions of our past call to us now, because it’s those very things we knew as children   –  loved as children – that are rising to remind us of exactly who we are, exactly when we need to remember. These are the very remembrances and dedications to ourselves that will steer us towards the mountain of self-sovereignty. Of feeling whole and capable and inspired and refreshed, because this is the energy we need to finally run towards what we’ve been ignoring and neglecting, and with greater energy and ability than we might have previously thought possible. This is the road that leads out of the dark night of the soul to the light at the end of the tunnel – the light illuminating the possibilities of a new day. Of hope, which slides the blindfold down from its tightly occupied place of strangulation and deprivation, because when the senses are strangled, so is the life force that lights the way behind them. And with this new clarity, this hard-won and clawed for and bled for and hung-on-the-brink-of-death-for clarity, we see the edges and ends of this chapter and know the freedom of what it means to begin again. We finally allow ourselves to fall into and rest in what it is we’ve been cultivating and building – that which is before us, calling to be noticed, savored and loved, as are the inner children within us, the ones who started us on this path, again.

“You created life. So let it live.”