Stone Heart

Attack so swift.
an angel of light
prematurally taken away
the force to which beats
through an animated corpse.
Prick of sharpness
breathing growing rapid
pulse dying
Dripping down is
blood on a
dried up
old side walk.
heartbeats thundering
through the sleeping street.
passion surging through
the predator
as he drinks from his
hapless prey.
death knocking at
life's door.
a stray tear falling
down the cheek of the deceased.
Here is made another
heart of stone.

Angel of Death

If I be an angel
then paint me
with black wings.
carve from me
a heart of stone.
take the blood
I foolishly possess.
ravage me with evil.
strangle me with passion.
bite my dying flesh
make me an angel
of death.

‘Twilight’ Sucks… And Not In A Good Way"

By Kellen Rice
Written by Phoenix native Stephenie Meyer, the popularity of the young-adult series comprised of Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and the newly-released Breaking Dawn has reached critical mass. With a Twilight film adaptation coming to theaters this winter and an opening day's sales of 1.3 million books for her latest installment, Meyer can be left with no doubt of her success. From a first-time novelist to a mainstay on the best sellers list, she has risen through the ranks like a veritable juggernaut.

But why? To figure out why the books were inspiring legions of fans and a dozen fan-sites (including the recently hacked Twilight Lexicon), I read the books myself to see what's what.

To put it simply, dear reader, I was horrified. Not just by the sickeningly purple prose or the lack of general writing quality, but the books themselves are insulting on every level-as a woman, as a teenager, as a literature student, and as a graduate of the Harry Potter craze. What's worse is that so few seem to realize it.


Twilight is the story of the so-called "average" new girl Bella Swan (Ha, ha, get it? Beautiful Swan?), who finds herself as the object of not one, not two, but a total of five boys' romantic designs (because she's so "plain", see?). The most important of these is the mysterious, hilariously-Byronic Edward Cullen. Bella plays the pitiful damsel in distress a few times and after 200 pages of thinly written suspense, we learn that Edward is in fact a vampire. Never fear, though, because Bella's "Adonis-like" admirer is no Nosferatu. Instead, he and his vampire family are so-called "vegetarian" vampires, feeding off of animals instead of humans and inexplicably attending high school (during lunch periods they buy trays of food and stare at each other so that Bella can conveniently get a glimpse of Edward from across the cafeteria). The first novel deals with Bella and Edward's romance and is capped off by a hastily tacked-on plot designed to shove Bella into the damsel in distress role yet again so that her vampire lover can save her.

Okay, you're saying. It's a little cheesy. But why is that so bad?

First and foremost, the books present a female heroine who can hardly take a step without needing some boy to rescue her. In fact, the books represent sexist views in almost every way-from the fact that Bella gives up her ambitions and plans for college to get married to Edward, the fact that she is portrayed as a modern Eve, begging the noble, moral gentleman for sex while he desires to preserve their virtue, the fact that their relationship is dangerously unhealthy, and finally to the fact that nearly every single female character in the book is a hopelessly negative caricature.

The series does not improve with subsequent books, either. In New Moon, Bella enters a self-described "zombie" state when Edward leaves her. In fact, the author oh-so-cleverly inserts blank pages with the months' names as a poorly conceived plot device for showing the depths of her heroine's pain and also to avoid having to write the "hard stuff." Bella turns near-suicidal; she purposely puts herself in harm's way-going so far as to jump off a cliff-to hear her lover's imagined voice in her head.

What does this say to readers, bearing in mind that the target audience is the tragically impressionable 12-17 year old girls? That they should fall apart at the seams for months if their boyfriend leaves them? That reckless self-endangerment is okay, so long as it's to be close to your lover? What a lovely message to send to young women.

The sole bright spot of New Moon is the lovable Jacob Black, a member of the nearby La Push reservation and newly-turned werewolf. It is in Bella's scenes with Jacob that readers see a glimpse of actual personality, and the burgeoning romance is certainly much more true to real-life teen romances than the lofty ideals of the star cross'd lovers Edward and Bella. But add another half-forgotten plot into the mix and Edward and Bella are reunited, with Jacob left by the wayside like a kicked puppy. Pun intended.

Eclipse. It is in this tome that Edward and Bella's relationship takes a decidedly worse turn. Edward goes so far as to remove Bella's engine from her car to prevent her from seeing her friend, Jacob, and even has his vampire 'sister' kidnap her from a weekend. Bella is a little peeved at this, sure, but she writes off Edward's atrocious behavior with the terrifying "he's just a little overprotective" and "he does it because he loves me". Reader, I actually felt a little sick while reading this, despite these so-called good intentions (they're always leading to hell, remember). Not only does Meyer give her two characters an obviously unhealthy-even abusive-relationship, but she romanticizes and idealizes it, and not only with Bella and Edward, but with Bella and Jacob as well.

Jacob, in fact, gets a bizarre personality transplant (lycanthropic dissociative identity disorder, maybe?) and turns into a real asshole in this book. He actually forcibly kisses Bella-twice-while ignoring her protests and actually threatens suicide should Bella refuse him. But not once does the thought of abuse, sexism, or inequality even occur to her main character! In fact, halfway through Jacob's forced kiss (sexual assault, mind you) Bella actually decides that she's in love with him. What is this??

I threw down my copy of Eclipse in disgust and I was ready to forget that the books existed until the Twilight-mania began anew in the lead-up to August 2nd's release of Breaking Dawn. I can write this article just having read the first three, I told myself. In the end, though, partly due to morbid curiosity and partly a result of wildly irrational hope that somehow Meyer would redeem herself, I gave in.

I was wrong. In Breaking Dawn, Meyer gives us an honestly bewildering and at times horrifying close to the series. The several hundred pages are filled with sickly-sweet self-indulgence and a blatant dismissal of continuity and realism. In brief, Bella and Edward get horizontal at long last (but only after they're married, of course-we can't have the naughty temptress taking away Edward's 107 year-old virginity) and Bella somehow gets pregnant. Please, Meyer says, never mind the fact that all the vampires' body fluids are replaced with their 'venom' or that sperm dies after three days, much less a century. Even more fantastically, the vampire/human spawn grows at an alarming rate, so fast in fact that Bella feels it "nudging" her at approximately two weeks of gestation. Now, I've never been pregnant but I did take health class back in high school and I'm pretty sure that there's something wrong with that picture.

I'll spare you the details of the rest of this horror show. Trust me, the birthing scene is something I desperately wish I could un-see (after the loosely-called 'baby' breaks Bella's pelvis, spine, and ribs from the inside, Edward ends up clawing his way to a surely-unsanitary vampire version of a Caesarian section using his teeth). I'm sorry. I had to share my pain. Bella becomes a super-special vampire with super-special powers and she wins the not-conflict of the not-climax. And don't forget her nifty ability to go hunting in a forest in a cocktail dress and heels.

Thankfully, the 'Twilight' series is over. Not as great is the fact that millions of girls are reading this sexist tripe without a care in the world, obsessing over the "perfect" Edward Cullen and the "hot" Jacob Black, pretending to be Bella Swan and ignoring the unhealthiness of the relationship just as successfully as the character does. What happened that two hundred years after feminist hero Elizabeth Bennet is put down on the page, we get one of the most awful excuses for a female literary hero that I've ever seen?

So frankly, excuse me if I bow out of the Twilight mania. I'm going to go sink my teeth into Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and pretend that Stephenie Meyer's terrible series did not set gender equality back two hundred years in the minds of millions.

I'm a nineteen year-old female literature student trying to understand the world one book, song, and idea at a time.

I hate to have to agree......BUT I DO. [; ~M.j.W~

The real meaning for the pentacle

I discovered the secret to the pentacle or pentagram. Its early use was to symbolize the Greek godess Venus. It is a sign of the believed energy between men and women, yin and yang. The sign in particular represents female energy.

Religious symbolism:


Christianity
The pentagram is used as a Christian symbol for the five senses and if the letters S, A, L, V, and S are inscribed in the points, it can be taken as a symbol of health
Medieval Christians believed it to symbolise the five wounds of Christ. The pentagram was believed to protect against witches and demons.

The pentagram figured in a heavily symbolic Arthurian romance: it appears on the shield of Sir Gawain in the 14th century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. As the poet explains, the five points of the star each have five meanings: they represent the five senses, the five fingers, the five wounds of Christ, the five joys that Mary had of Jesus (the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Resurrection, the Ascension, and the Assumption), and the five virtues of knighthood which Gawain hopes to embody: noble generosity, fellowship, purity, courtesy, and compassion.

Probably due to misinterpretation of symbols used by ceremonial magicians, it later became associated with Satanism and subsequently rejected by most of Christianity sometime in the twentieth century.


Mormonism
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has traditionally used pentagrams and five-pointed stars in Temple architecture, particularly the Nauvoo Illinois Temple, and the Salt Lake Temple. These symbols derived from traditional morning star pentagrams that are no longer commonly used in mainstream Christianity.


Judaism
The pentagram was the official seal of the city of Jerusalem for a time. Due to the similarity of the star shapes, it is occasionally confused with the Star of David by those unfamiliar with the symbols.


Satanism
Satanists use a pentagram with two points up, often inscribed in a double circle, with the head of a goat inside the pentagram. This is referred to as the Sigil of Baphomet. They use it much the same way as the Pythagoreans, as Tartaros literally translates from Greek as a "Pit" or "Void" in Christian terminology (the word is used as such in the Bible, referring to the place where the fallen angels are fettered). The Pythagorean Greek letters are most often replaced by the Hebrew letters לויתן forming the name Leviathan. Less esoteric LaVeyan Satanists use it as a sign of rebellion or religious identification, the three downward points symbolising rejection of the holy Trinity.

Neopaganism
Many Neopagans, especially Wiccans, use the pentagram as a symbol of faith similar to the Christian cross or the Jewish Star of David. It is not, however, a universal symbol for Neopaganism, and is rarely used by Reconstructionists. Its religious symbolism is commonly explained by reference to the neo-Pythagorean understanding that the five vertices of the pentagram represent the four elements with the addition of Spirit as the uppermost point. As a representation of the elements, the pentagram is involved in the Wiccan practice of summoning the elemental spirits of the four directions at the beginning of a ritual.
The outer circle of the circumscribed pentagram is sometimes interpreted as binding the elements together or bringing them into harmony with each other. The Neopagan pentagram is generally displayed with one point up, partly because of the "inverted" goat's head pentagram's association with Satanism; however, within traditional forms of Wicca a pentagram with two points up is associated with the Second Degree Initiation and in this context has no relation to Satanism.

Because of a perceived association with Satanism and also because of negative societal attitudes towards Neopagan religions and the "occult", many United States schools have sought to prevent students from displaying the pentagram on clothing or jewelry.In public schools, such actions by administrators have been determined to be in violation of students' First Amendment right to free exercise of religion.