Human Sacrifices: are they Coming Back for Giorgia Meloni?

 

The victory of Giorgia Meloni's party in the recent Italian election has generated a wave of hate on social media, with many people showing on their social accounts pictures of the dead body of Benito Mussolini hanged upside-down in a square. A clear message to Ms. Meloni, and a reminder for all of us of how nasty people can be. It is a characteristic of all human societies that, in periods of heavy stress, the removal of a high-rank leader may take the shape of a human sacrifice. The most common victims are men, but in the direst situations, women may take the role of sacrificial victims. Ms. Meloni is at risk of becoming a sacrificial victim, the scapegoat that Italians will search for when, this winter, they'll find themselves freezing in the dark.

In the Iliad, we read about the sacrifice of Iphigenia, the daughter of King Agamemnon, performed to propitiate the travel of the Achaean fleet toward Troy. After having destroyed Troy, the Achaeans repeated the ritual, this time with a Trojan girl, Polixena, daughter of King Priam. Both were high-rank women for whom we could use the term "princesses."

In "The Golden Bough," (1890), James Frazer noted how a high-rank victim makes the sacrifice more valuable and more effective to appease the dark deities to which it is dedicated. So, the victim may be raised to the role of "king" just before being killed: groomed, exalted, showered with gifts, and made to access the best goods available. The typical victims are men, probably because young males can be considered expendable, whereas the reproductive value of a young woman cannot be replaced. oWhen things are truly dire, though, "queens" may be sacrificed, too, as especially valuable victims -- much more valuable than men. 

Human sacrifices are often not explicitly recognized as such by those who perform them. For instance, the ancient Romans strongly condemned human sacrifices but they performed them abundantly in the form of bloody and cruel executions. Think of the killing of the Jewish leader named Yeshua bin Yusuf by the Roman government in Palestine, ca. 30 AD. On the cross on which he was nailed, there were the words in Latin "Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum." It was supposed to be a mockery, but it is also true that Yeshua was of a noble Jewish family, so he was a king or, at least, a prince. 

Moving to our times, we, like the Romans, strongly condemn human sacrifices. But, like the Romans, we may indulge in bloody sacrifices much more often than we are willing to admit. The Christian roots of our view of the world originate from the slaughter of the Christian martyrs, starting from the 1st century AD. In more modern times, we can see World War One as a ritual slaughter of millions of young men, sacrificed to obscure and malevolent deities called "States." The most difficult moments of WWI also implied the sacrifice of Queens. One of them was Mata Hari, a famous actress and dancer, ritually sacrificed in 1917 in France. The same destiny befell the wife and the daughters of the Czar of Russia in 1918. 

World War Two had similar threads of ritual killing. The Japanese "kamikaze" fighters are a good example of how a society under heavy stress may punish its young men in a ritual of death. On the other side of Eurasia, the German government embarked on an elaborate mass murder program that involved the elimination of people considered inferior ("Untenmeschen"), Jews, Gypsies, and even German citizens. Not for nothing, the term "holocaust" is used for these mass exterminations. 

Another ritual killing of WWII was that of the Italian leader Benito Mussolini, in 1945, together with his lover, Claretta Petacci (in the image). Their bodies were hung upside down in a public square after a cruel ritual of beating and mangling them. They were the sacrificial victims designated to atone for the defeat that had nearly destroyed Italy and killed hundreds of thousands of Italians. Claretta Petacci was not responsible for the disaster, but she was killed, too. As it often happens in history, a young woman may be the ideal victim for the atonement that the sacrifice is about. 

And now, let's take a look at our times. If there ever was a society under stress, it is ours. We passed all the limits of survival: destroyed the old-growth forests, killed off large numbers of species, poisoned the atmosphere, depleted our mineral resources, eroded the fertile soil, polluted water and the atmosphere, set the planet on a path to irreversible warming, and a few more little things, including having deployed a sufficient number of nuclear warheads to wreck the ecosystem and, most likely, kill everybody. And we haven't renounced our beloved habit of making war against each other. 

Would you be surprised if we were to indulge in large-scale human sacrifices? We are not yet there, but the path seems to be traced. Have you noted how popular are "Zombie" movies? Take a look at them in light of what I have been saying here: don't you see them as a blueprint for the mass extermination of suburbanites? Truly, the fascination with this idea casts much light on what our society has in mind for the near future. We are not yet to the point of seeing the elites booking zombie-killing safaris in the suburbs of our cities. But other possible large-scale sacrifices are possible. I already mentioned how, during WWII, the German government hired the country's doctors to cull the undesirables. They complied, happily. That could be easily done in our times, too.

Human sacrifices, though, are not so much about numbers, but about the visible high status of the victim. Now, after the electoral victory of Giorgia Meloni in Italy, many people commented by publishing on their social accounts the images of Mussolini's dead body and of his lover Claretta Petacci. A clear message to Ms. Meloni.  

For sure, Italy is going toward a difficult period. With the supplies of natural gas cut, this winter Italians are going to find themselves freezing in the dark, and without a job. Whoever will be leading the country at that moment, risks being deemed responsible for the disaster. And it is also true that people can be extremely nasty when they are in a dire situation. 

Look at this image with Giorgia Meloni's face upside down. It is reported to have been taken in Torino during the electoral campaign of 2022 in Italy. "Fasci Appesi" means "hang the fascists." Giorgia Meloni seriously risks becoming a new sacrificial victim to appease the dark Gods that humans have themselves created. I mentioned how the victims were exalted and turned into kings before killing them and we might even imagine that Meloni was chosen as "queen" for exactly this purpose by the subconscious societal mindsphere. 

Several commentators, in Italy, have expressed the same idea, although not in terms of human sacrifices, but simply in terms of political expedience. In this interpretation, the hastily organized election of September had exactly the purpose of placing at the top a figure that will act as target for the ire of the population, when Italians will actually realize what it means to be without electric power. The term "scapegoat" has been correctly used. It doesn't mean that Ms. Meloni will be shot and hanged by the feet. Simply, that her rapid demise as a leader will lead the way to an authoritarian government that will impose draconian (a word charged with meanings) measures on the Italian population. On the other hand, Meloni may also do better than expected and succeed in spite of everything. Who knows? Good luck, Giorgia, because you'll need a lot of it.  

 

Curiously, and independently, Jon Rappoport published an article mentioning human sacrifices on the same day as I was publishing this post

   

Mata Hari as Seen by Jason Porath: A Rejected Princess

 

Jason Porath has been doing a fantastic work with his "Rejected Princesses." In his Web page, you can found tens of wonderful images of heroines who fought for (sometimes) good causes and (sometimes) won their battles. 

This image of Mata Hari is not realistic -- it is not meant to be. But it is a masterful interpretation of who she was and how she danced. Much better than other attempts to portray her as a character in a comic book. Available only in Porath's printed book. 

 

 

Mata Hari: the spy who wasn't

More than a century after her execution, in 1917, Mata Hari remains the prototypical figure of female spy. An extreme case of “femme fatale”; she is seen as someone who not only seduced men for money, but also for the greater lust of having them killed by the thousands on the battlefield.

However, Mata Hari’s fame as a spy is usurped. Looking back at the acts of her trial, we can see the absurdity and the inconsistency of the accusations raised against her. There just was no way that she could have caused “the death of hundreds of thousands of French soldiers” as it was said. She was, rather, a scapegoat killed in order to distract the public in a moment when the war was going badly for France. Put simply: she was framed.

Still, even without the glamour and the adventure that go together with the career of a spy, Mata Hari remains a fascinating figure for us. In the present book, all the references to Mata Hari’s story, her trial, and her execution are factual. Born in a small Dutch village in 1876, in 1905 she came back to Europe from what was called at the time the “Dutch Indies”, after having divorced from her husband, a Dutch army officer. Her time in the Indies had been of just a few years, but it was enough for her to invent a kind of sensual “Oriental dances” that she presented for the first time in public in a private museum in Paris.

As a dancer, Mata Hari drew a lot of criticism at her times and it is likely that her dances were little more than strip teases with an Oriental flavor. Still, clearly she was doing something right and she became immensely popular. Her figure became also commonplace in the wave of erotic postcards which exploded in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century. As years went by, Mata Hari gradually gave up with stripping naked in public and she became a high level courtesan, seducing the rich and the famous. She seems to have been successful at that, too. During the war, she may have tried her hand at being also a secret agent, but she wasn’t very successful at that. At 41, she was arrested, jailed, and then shot by a firing squad on October 15th, 1917.

It may well be that Mata Hari’s Oriental stance was not just a veneer to ennoble a little her strip teases, but it may also be that she had seriously studied Buddhism and other oriental ways while in the Dutch Indies. Her behavior at her execution, her calm, her evident belief that death was simply a passage, show that her Buddhism was not just a pose but something that she had taken by heart.

With all her originality, however, surely Mata Hari was not an intellectual. Her achievements seem to be more the result of intuition than of reasoning. She had, no doubt, an incredible skill at fascinating men, but her ability to manage her life was less than satisfactory, to say the least. Her lifestyle was always beyond her means. This, and her clumsy defense at the trial give some weight to the claim of Emile Massard that she was not very intelligent (Later on, R. Warren Howe would define her “hare brained”).

But you don’t have to be a genius to have an impact on the world and there is no doubt that Mata Hari had one. She was a very unconventional figure and being so unconventional was, at her time as in ours, dangerous. The deadly mix of nationalism and propaganda that killed Mata Hari was to continue and to explode in later years with the 2nd world war and the holocaust, leading Europe into what were the largest exterminations of innocent people that history has (so far) recorded. Mata Hari was among the first to be engulfed by this wave of senseless killing. She was killed in cold blood by people who were, most likely, perfectly aware that she was innocent but who couldn’t resist the effect of propaganda that makes it impossible to face the onrush of lies that submerge one’s reason and one’s judgment.

That things went out of control with Mata Hari is shown also in the cruel and harsh way she was treated. The pictures that we have of her at the time of the trial show us a woman physically destroyed by months of life in jail (so much for Massard’s fancy stories about her “dancing” in prison, or even requesting a “milk bath”). Seeing these photos we may, in a way, understand how Mata Hari may have considered her execution as a true liberation.

Mata Hari received also the ultimate insult, that of being denied a decent burial, of having her dead body desecrated by dissecting it on a hospital table. She was denied the status of human being. Rather, she was treated as a sort of giant insect to be disposed of. The transformation of human beings into insects and their subsequent extermination is something that Kafka had already described in his prophetic story “the metamorphosis”. Kafka died in 1924, in later times the anthropologist Roy Rappaport defined as “diabolical lies” those lies that “tamper with the very fabric of reality”. Causing people to believe that “they” are less human than “us” is one of these diabolic lies.

The Destiny of Women Spies

 

Laura D'Oriano 1911-1943

 

On this blog, I discussed several times the case of Margaretha Zelle, AKA Mata Hari, executed in 1917 on the accusation of being a spy for the Germans. But, of course, there have been several cases of women accused of espionage and then executed. Some were real spies, others were victims of a new version of the "witch hunt" that had bloodied Europe during the 17th century. 

While Mata Hari was surely an innocent victim, the case of Laura D'Oriano is different and it seems clear that she was a real spy for the allies during WW2. But the reasons that led her into troubles were the same as those that doomed Mata Hari. According to Brian Sullivan, "there are three reason that lead people to become spies. The first, the rarest, is ideology. The second is money, the third is blackmail."

There is no doubt that neither Mata Hari nor Laura D'Oriano had any interest in the ideology of the conflicts they were witnessing. They were just swept away by a situation of personal problems, lack of money, and just the impossibility, at times, to resist to evil. 

Laura D'Oriano's story reads in many ways like that of Mata Hari. Both were cosmopolitan women who had lived in foreign countries and spoke several languages. Both were escaping from a marriage with an abusive husband, and both were trying to pursue an artistic career to make a living. Mata Hari was more successful and achieved world fame. Laura D'Oriano failed. She was, no doubt, a beautiful woman from the pictures we have of her. But that's not enough to guarantee a career of performer.

It seems that Laura D'Oriano had serious problems of money, she tried various odd jobs until she was was framed into a low-level espionage job for the Allies. She moved to Bordeaux, where she was supposed to provide information about the movements of the Italian submarines stationed there. That seems to have involved seducing some of the Italian officers manning the base. We will never know whether some of the Italian submarines were sunk as the result of the information she obtained. But that is the job of female spies operating as seductresses. 

That of the spy is a dangerous job, no matter what is your role. It is probably not glamorous at all and it doesn't even pay well. So, Laura D'Oriano was identified, arrested in Italy, and sentenced to death. She was shot in Rome on January 13, 1943. Curiously, in one last detail that made her similar to Mata Hari, she wanted to die looking at the firing squad.

https://www.robadadonne.it/galleria/chi-era-laura-doriano/ Roba da Donne

 

 

 

https://www.robadadonne.it/galleria/chi-era-laura-doriano/

Fantastic: Mata Hari's Pinball from 1978!

Mata Hari is a Physical Pinball Table designed by Jim Patla with artwork by Dave Christensen. It was released by Bally in 1978, just as the company was switching over from electro-mechanical pinballs to solid state.

Inspired by the Real Life Mata Hari, the game depicts the exotic dancer and spy performing her duties. The pinball backglass shows her lounging in her chambers, handing a small folded map to a gentleman identified only as The Baron. On the playfield, Mata Hari is passing off documents stamped Top Secret, and is featured stepping out from behind a gigantic knife while framed by oversized feathers and snakes. The sides of the cabinet eschew all subtlety, with Hari pointing at a silhouette of the skull and crossbones while preparing to strike with her dagger.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Pinball/MataHari

Below, an image of the playing board and of an imagined Mata Hari's face on the side of the machine.

Kill the Witch, Kill the Spy: Mata Hari and the Hollywood Universe

This is an interview with Maria Butina, alleged Russian spy, released after she spent 15 months in jail in the US. Her case is remarkably similar to that of Mata Hari, shot for espionage in 1917 in France, some one hundred years before. Fortunately, though, Maria Butina was not shot.

Sometimes, it is amazing how history repeats itself. It seems that whatever we do is always a repetition of an old story, that we live in a sort of Hollywood universe, where there exist a limited number of TV tropes, repeated over and over, always the same, just with a few changed details.

Think of Mata Hari: the evil spy. Yes, the one who caused the death of "perhaps 50,000 of our children" during the Great War, as one of her accusers said. How did she accomplish such a remarkable feat? Well, it seems that somehow she was able to understand the French war plans by gathering intelligence while staying in a hotel in the back of the front line. And that the Germans were killing French soldiers because they were told how to do that by an aging Dutch dancer who had styled herself as a Hindi priestess.

Madness? Sure, but she was not shot not because of something she had done, but because of what she was. A foreigner who had made the mistake of accepting the offer of the French secret services to embark on an improbable plan of spying on the Germans. Possibly, it was because she really thought she could help France. But, of course, it could never have worked and it never did. Rather, it put Mata Hari in a very dangerous position. A foreigner, a beautiful woman, and, avowedly, a prostitute, and she meddles with things larger than her. And when it is a question of finding a scapegoat, that kind of women make the perfect target.

Fast forward of a hundred years, and we have the case of Maria Butina. A good looking woman, although not a prostitute. Nevertheless, she went through an ordeal similar to that of Mata Hari, the target of accusations so improbable that you wonder how in the world anyone could even remotely take them seriously. Would you believe that the Russian secret services would gain anything by "planting" a spy in the US in the form of a student of international relations? What could they learn from him or her that could be even remotely important for the current confrontation?

Rather, Ms. Butina found herself in the wrong place, just as Mata Hari had: a foreigner who could be demonized at will. Ms. Butina had made her big mistake with enrolling in the US National Rifle Association (NRA). She believed that the right to bear arms was a good thing that should be adopted in Russia. She didn't realize the danger she was putting herself into. The NRA is notoriously among Trumps' supporters and by hitting Butina they were hitting the NRA and, indirectly, President Trump himself. Like Mata Hari, Butina was meddling with things much larger than herself.

So, we had another variation of the theme of the evil, foreigner female spy. Fortunately for Ms. Butina, she was not shot like Mata Hari, if times had been more difficult, it might have happened. And we keep living in a Hollywood universe where things that you believe are true become true. It is the infinite power of propaganda to create its own reality.

The Mata Hari Series by Dark Horse Comics: The Reasons of a Failure

Dark Horse Comics published a 5-volume comics series on Mata Hari. Potentially a good idea but, in the end, a failure. What went wrong, exactly? Difficult to say, but clearly the series moved in bumps and jumps like a truck on a Mexican country road: sometimes speedy moving onward, sometimes making you seasick. The problems were equally bad with the story and with the imagery. Considering only the latter, in the first volume we had truly beautiful images, like this one:

Now, THIS is true to the image that Margaretha Geertruida Zelle was trying to project of herself as her alias, the creature named "the light of the day" in Malay, Mata Hari. An exotic, eerie, beautiful, mysterious, and even aggressive creature. In the pictures we have, Mata Hari was often shown dancing while holding swords and lances, sometimes even the kind seen above, the "Kriss".

But, then, as I said, the images in the series are unequal, they change in style and aspect. In the cover of the last volume, you see Mata Hari transformed into a clumsy creature, short-legged, a little fat, and with ridiculous heart-shaped lips. This is not Mata Hari, it is more Minnie Mouse.

And, in the 5th volume, they could do even worse. This image of the execution is truly an insult to Mata Hari's memory.

How could they create such a mess? I think I have an explanation but, first, let me show you an image (Paris 1905):

This is the real Mata Hari: look at the bearing, look at the expression, look at the way she is moving. This is real class: Mata Hari never was anything like a Barbie doll. She was an assertive woman in all her manifestations, in her dance as in life. And everything she did, she did with class. Great class.

So, I think that with the Dark Horse series they simply tried to drag the story too much: Mata Hari's life doesn't contain so much material that you could make five volumes out of it. Apart for her grand finale - the execution - her life story was not so dramatic. She was, mainly, a performer with a strong personality and a keen sense of self-promotion. You can describe her life in just a few sentences: she traveled to an exotic place, she divorced her husband, she came back to Europe, she had several lovers, she made some money, and she squandered most of it -- that's it, more or less.

Then, the story that she was a spy, well, it is more ridiculous than passionating. Poor Margaretha had the misfortune of finding herself as the target of both the German and the French secret services. The Germans tried to make the French look bad by having them kill an innocent woman, the French needed a scapegoat for their military failures. In the end, the enemies in the battlefield collaborated with each other in order to bring Margaretha Zelle in front of the firing squad. Bad luck aplenty for her, but not much of a "story" here.

What makes Mata Hari still remembered today is not what she did, but what she was. For sure not everybody loved her, but her personality was so strong and so powerful that it transcended the limits of the Dutchwoman Margaretha Zelle to turn her into the Goddess of the Sun, Mata Hari. All her glory showed up and faded in the single moment of the execution. And all she had done in her life, good and bad, found a justification when she stood in front of the firing squad, sending a kiss to the soldiers who were shooting her, and telling them, "Thank You."

In doing so, she truly transformed herself into the avatar of the Goddess, the sacrificial victim, and she thanked the mortals who were killing her for allowing her to return to the celestial realms where she came from. Not to everyone it is permitted to transcend their human nature in their last moments of life, but some have this destiny. Perhaps it is a blessing, perhaps it is a curse, but this is what we remember Mata Hari for.

Mata Hari: The Meme Grows

We can get some idea of how the Mata Hari meme has evolved over the years using Google Ngrams. The image below is for the corpus in French.

It is remarkable how the "Mata Hari" meme has been growing in the past two decades. The "blip" from 1990 to ca 1998 may be related to something different than the Dutch dancer, or to some glitch or the Google counting algorythm, but the increase in interest is clear anyway.
 
In English, the trend is less clear, but it is there:

So, what we are seeing is the slow evolution of a meme. Note that most memes do not even remotely have this kind of persistence - most memes flare up and disappear in days. A meme lasting a century is rare, and the Mata Hari one is still growing. We have to see how it will evolve and how it will affect us.

Note also how the meme has changed its polarity: up to not many years ago, the commonly accepted version was that Mata Hari had been an evil femme fatale, now we see her as an innocent victim of an ugly propaganda machine. A meme - or a myth - is like a living being, it grows, it changes, it evolves. And so does Mata Hari, her ghost is still haunting us.

The Mystery of Mata Hari: a Goat with Golden Feet

Can you note an interesting detail in this cover image? If you do, write about it in the comments!

"La Chevre au Pieds d'Or" by Charles-Henry Hirsch is perhaps the first novel ever published about Mata Hari's saga - in 1920. It set some elements that reappeared in later novels, for instance, the transformation of the Dutch dancer Margaretha Zelle into a more exotic creature, here a Russian dancer nicknamed "Toutcha," while the other main character of the novel is clearly inspired by Zelle's friend, Eduard Clunet.

Surprisingly, or perhaps not, it is a pretty good novel. It comes from a period in which novels were a common entertainment form, they were rarely high-level works of art but had to maintain a minimum of quality. People would buy these novels in order to read them and the novels had to be simple enough to be understandable by almost everybody.

And this is what Hirsch does: his novel is a straightforward drama, very simple in form and told in a style that today we would find unsophisticated, but that's effective for the author's purpose. We have only three main characters, Toutcha (Mata Hari), Marc Brégyl (Clunet) and the painter Ursac. Toutcha is the evil seductress, Brégil is the well-intentioned, although somewhat naive, lover and Ursac acts as a connection, chorus, and witness. Other characters are barely sketched: for instance, when Brégil is told by a good friend of him that Toutcha is a spy, we never learn the name of this person. That has a purpose: the novel has to be simple and readable by readers who couldn't be encumbered with too many names. Hirsch was surely a professional in these things.

Then, the story follows closely the official version of the Mata Hari story, with only one quirk and a very nasty one. The final turn of the plot has Brégil telling Toutcha that her execution will not be carried out all the way to the end, that it is all a pretense, that at the last moment the guns will not fire, and that he (Brégil) will come to save Toutcha from death. And Toutcha, the smart and devilish spy, turns out to be dumb enough to fall for this dirty trick completely.

Again, these novels were destined to a general public and couldn't be too sophisticated. This kind of crude plot twist could work well, no matter how nasty they were in regard to poor Mata Hari, not only killed for something that she had never done but cheated up to the last moment of her life. But so it goes, Hirsch was simply reacting to a common legend of the time which said that Mata Hari had not been shot for real, that the execution had been a fake.

One last point, why "La Chevre au Pieds d'Or?" It is not explained in the novel and it takes a little work for the non-French reader to understand that it is a reference to Victor Hugo's novel "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." A goat with feet painted in gold. named Djali, is a companion to the character of Esmeralda the Gypsy. Considering that in Hugo's novel Esmeralda is hanged as a witch, the reference to Mata Hari is obvious,



From "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" by Victor Hugo

A little white goat came running to her. Its horns were painted gold. "Now it's your turn, Djali," said Esmeralda. She held out her drum. "Which month is it, Djali?" she asked, smiling. The goat tapped the drum once with its foot. "That is right!

Ah... and one last point: at some point in the novel, we learn that the real name of Toutcha is "Maria Tatiana Golgoronine." Evidently, an evil character has to have a suitably evil sounding name!

The Snake, the Death, and the Naked Flesh. Mythopoiesis of Mata Hari

The prima ballerina Anna Tsygankova as Margaretha Zelle MacLeod, a.k.a. Mata Hari, in the Dutch National Ballet’s production of 2016. Here, Mata Hari is portrayed as dancing with a snake, a popular story about her but, most likely, just a legend. It is the same for the legend that says she stripped naked in front of the firing squad at her execution, in 1917. The origin of both legends is hard to track down, but a turning point in their diffusion may have been the novel by E. Temple Thurston "Portrait of a Spy" published in 1929.

Mata Hari has turned out to be a myth-generating machine of incredible power. Myths which are pervasive, persistent, unstoppable, and - most often - completely false. Two of these myths are especially unlikely. One is that Mata Hari would sometimes perform her dances with a snake, the other that she bared her breasts in front of the firing squad that was going to kill her.

About the snake, it is not totally farfetched. We have pictures of dancers of the time of Mata Hari and sometimes they appear with snakes, as you can see here. This woman is often said to be Mata Hari, but she is not her, clearly. Yet, the legend of Mata Hari dancing with snakes is persistent. In addition to the image at the beginning of this post, it is described in Michelle Moran's recent novel "Mata Hari's Last Dance".

About the other legend, standing naked in front of the firing squad, it is not a common myth. We have no pictures of the execution, but most of the fantasy images created afterward show Mata Hari fully dressed and in a rather solemn attitude - or, sometimes, with a frightened expression.

Still, the legend exists. It is reported, among others, by Julie Wheelwright in her book "The Fatal Lover" (1992) (p. 3) in terms of a contemporary of Mata Hari, Natalie Barney, speaking of the "tawdry imagined sable coat over nude flesh invented by someone who wrote for the most scurrilous kind of literary weekly" It is mentioned also at this link.

I think it shouldn't take much effort to debunk both legends: there is no evidence anywhere - nothing at all - that Mata Hari ever danced with a snake. On the contrary, a descendant of her family, Ton Zelle, told me that "she hated snakes" - a rather likely attitude for a Dutch girl, born and raised in a place where snakes are not common - to say the least! About stripping naked in front of the firing squad, well, it doesn't even deserve to be debunked.

But these myths must have an origin: someone, somewhere, must have expressed them first. I haven't been able to find the "scurrilous literary weekly" described by Natalie Barnes, but I think it is possible to pinpoint the origin of both with the novel by E. Temple Thurston "Portrait of a Spy" appeared in 1929.

Today, Temple Thurston is nearly completely forgotten as a writer and perhaps for good reasons, at least judging from this novel. Not that it is poorly written, actually it shows the hand of a professional, the style reminds Faulkner, at times. But, as a novel, it just doesn't stand on its own. The protagonist, the British painter George Le Mesurier, doesn't ever gain life. Better, but still not satisfactory, is the female character inspired by Mata Hari. She goes under the name of Liane Sonrel (fictional alter ego of Margaretha Zelle) and Mada Garass (the fictional equivalent of Mata Hari). She is a character with some life, especially at the beginning. Apart from the different names, she goes through the same parable as Mata Hari, starting as a low-level stripper in Paris and in the end being shot. We read that, at the last moment,

. . . she flung open the folds of that sable coat and her body was gleaming naked to receive their bullets in her flesh.

As I said, not a good novel but, at least, Thurston created a myth that still lives today. It has been said in our time that propaganda "creates reality" and that was true also at the time of Mata Hari. Propaganda created the story of her being a dangerous spy and, in the process, people saw non-existing things, such as her dancing with snakes or appearing naked at her execution. In the end, all the madness, all the suffering, all the hate, love, folly, pain, joy, and misery are our creation. And I might cite Lafcadio Hearn in his "Out of the East"

We may have to learn that the infinite whirl of death and birth, out of which we cannot escape, is of our own creation, of our own seeking;—that the forces integrating worlds are the errors of the Past;—that the eternal sorrow is but the eternal hunger of insatiable desire;—and that the burnt-out suns are rekindled only by the inextinguishable passions of vanished lives.

Vanished lives who still project on us their inextinguishable passion. Margaretha, you are still with us.

The Mata Hari Meme

Sarah Lewison hit onto something with her idea of the "Mata Hari syndrome", in which she compared Mata Hari to a virus inoculated into the European society of her time. It was, clearly, a highly infectious virus and its effects are still felt, nowadays. In more recent terms, we could say that Mata Hari was a powerful meme. She expressed trends which were taking shape during her time: exotism, oriental religions, female power and much more.

Here is an excerpt of the text by Lewison that you can find on "carbonfarm"


The attractions of Mata Hari consist of unaligned components, each a symptom of the time. Narcissism meets a rudimentary familiarity with exotic religion, flows into a fascination for difference, courses through the salon of a retired opera singer, and washes up in numerous bedchambers. She takes advantage of opportunities the way a parasite infests a host, feeding her enormous appetite for popular trends, and she becomes very big, big, enough that she can host her own soirees. A courtesan is also a hostesse

But we are not finished with the metaphor of river or wash. An underground tributary forms from love juices and coins and trinkets which tumble down, down, through beds covered with the flags of hostile nations. Deep underground, they form a nourishing microbial soup, which sustains her, soup that is also a trap, a quicksand waiting for the wash-up of her career. The microbial soup, a syndrome in itself, becomes infested as a current ofparanoia, preferences and dire circumstances run together. Like an organism, she has generated a process, which must fulfill its own life cycle.

Mata Hari's Milk Bath: The Multiplication of Evil.

Months of jail in Paris, in 1917, had reduced Mata Hari to the condition you see in the picture, above. As a further insult, she was accused to have requested a "Milk Bath" for herself. An exquisitely evil form of propaganda.

Sometimes we talk about "the problem of evil" - What's exactly evil? Why does it exist? Philosophers have discussed the subject at length, but I think there is an exquisite property of evil that makes it even more evil (if you allow me the recursive definition).  Its capability of multiplying itself, to turn everything it touches into more evil.

In a post on my blog "Cassandra's Legacy," I was discussing the issue of "False Flag" operation. They are an especially nefarious kind of evil: the idea is that, in a conflict, the stronger side manages to justify an aggression by attacking itself and blaming the victims.

And here is an example of this great power that the strong have on the weak. It comes from the book by Emile Massard "Female Spies in Paris"(1922). Massard was the commander of the Paris garrison during the Great War and in his book he tells the story of the detention and of the execution of Mata Hari. As you may imagine, it is a tale full of insults and lies, signifying nothing. But, in some case, Massard manages to go beyond lies, marching straight into the territory of pure evil. At p. 63, he says that Mata Hari  "had the pretense of asking for a milk bath! . . . in a moment when there was no milk for our little children! . . . "

I don't think it needs to be said that it is a lie. But, just in case you might think there could be something true in it, it was explicitly denied by the medical officer of the St. Lazare's prison, Leon Bizard, who wrote a report on Mata Hari in 1923 on the journal "Chronique Medicale". (30e année, n° 12. 1er décembre 1923 p. 355-372 - download here). It is another report full of insults and lies against Mata Hari, but it contains some grains of probable truth as they come from someone who surely knew well the prison and its characteristics. One is that the prisoners in St. Lazare lacked running water. Another that Mata Hari had asked for a bath - which seems to be a pretty reasonable request given the situation, and also a reasonable request to make to the medical officer of the place.

Then, Bizard comments: "She never had the stupid pretense - as it has been said and even written -  of asking for a milk bath." Bizard also says that, "she never had the right of an everyday bath" and it is unclear if that means she could have occasional baths. In any case, when Bizard says that the false story of the milk bath was even reported in writing, he clearly refers to Emile Massard, the probable originator of the legend.

So, we have a pretty reasonable request for a bath from a woman who was locked inside a cell with no running water. And I can hardly find a more typical example of how propaganda works when this reasonable request is transformed into the evil one of asking for a milk bath "when there was no milk for our little children."

Transform the victim into aggressor: so easy and so effective. It is the great power of evil: that of multiplying itself. This is a power that goodness can't possibly match. Only saints can turn evil into good. But to turn good into evil, an idiot is more than sufficient.


The image below is from the cover a 1931 pamphlet, simply titled "Mata Hari"

                                     

Mata Hari: The Banality of Evil

The illustration above is from a book that appeared in France in 1931, the title being simply "Mata Hari." There is no author explicitly mentioned, the book is part of a collection titled "Crimes et Chatiments" (Crimes and punishments) which had as director Mr. Arthur Bernede (1871-1937), presumably the author of this text.

As a book, Bernède's "Mata Hari" (1931) is an unremarkable pamphlet full of lies and insults. But, at least, it shows the banality of evil: look at the image above. So simple: a jeweled Mata Hari ready to stab in the back a brave French soldier defending the country - note the German helmets in the back of the evil woman!

Propaganda can be - and usually is - very simple. It is one of its characteristics: it aims low, at the base instincts of the human mind.

 But at least one image of the book can be seen as a homage to Mata Hari, the dancer. There is a certain beauty about her that not even the worst propaganda can take away.
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