mirroring

August 9, 2016

The Circle in the Square (Doctor Who)

Jane Campbell amy pond, Circle in the Square, day of the doctor, Doctor Who, eleventh hour, mirroring, the beast below, the doctors wife, time heist 5

(Content note: This post references childhood sexual abuse, the objectifying male gaze, and the repression and processing of traumatic events in general.)

Given that, let’s start with something really abstract. A symbol, and a pretty basic one as far as symbols go. A circle, circumscribed by a square. Simple geometry. And the Circle in the Square is by no means a hugely important or influential symbol in Western esoterica – it’s minor enough to take some digging to uncover, and what’s uncovered isn’t exactly consistent. Which, you know, is kind of part and parcel for abstract symbols.

The first thing that might come to mind is a problem of geometry – “squaring the circle” refers to creating a square of the same area as a given circle, using a finite number of steps with only a compass and a straightedge. It was eventually mathematically demonstrated to be an impossible problem, which is actually kind of delightful given the subsequent esoteric usages — for if such fusion is technically impossible, its success is necessarily transcendent, pointing to Ascension. Anyways, in basic symbolism, the Circle represents the infinite, the cyclical, the eternal, totality and perfection. The Square, on the other hand, represents material reality, the four corners of the earth, and subsequent limitation. As such, the Circle in the Square can represent a “union of opposites,” if you wish, or at the very least the immanence of the divine.

This basic analysis makes sense of the Masonic use of the symbol – and we should note that the primary symbol of Masonry consists of a square-edge and compass, used for making squares and circles. Anyways, as W.L. Wilmshurst describes in his 1922 book The Meaning of Masonry, “Deity, symbolized by the all-containing circle, has attained form and manifestation in a ‘square’ or human soul. It expresses the mystery of the Incarnation, accomplished within the personal soul.” This, we should note, isn’t just divine immanence (as opposed to a Manichean separation of the earthly and the sacred), but is specifically rooted in the human experience. Wilmshurst goes on to liken the metaphorical squaring of the circle to a kind of “regeneration,” an “ascension into heaven” that accompanies the “necessity of self-dying—not, we repeat, the physical death of the body but a mystical death-in-life of everything except the body” which is fundamental to understanding the esoteric mysteries.

There are also sources like Elliott Wolfson’s Circle in the Square, which delves into the symbolism of the Kabbalah, and specifically into its gender implications. According to Wolfson, the Circle (with its curviness and suggestion of a hole) actually symbolizes the female, while the Square symbolizes the male, with the placement of one in the other not only suggesting union (alchemical or otherwise) but a particular hierarchical relationship.

And yet, despite such inconsistencies and problematic implications, there’s nonetheless the same underlying principle at work, namely the integration of what are seemingly, if not opposites, non-overlapping magisteria. Which is not unlike what Doctor Who does for a living – namely, smashing together disparate genres in new and interesting ways. …

June 21, 2016

Creature from the Black Lagoon

Jane Campbell amy pond, angels, beautiful, Doctor Who, mirroring, monsters, rory 6

Last week we talked about the expression of the Beautiful throughout the history of Doctor Who, and gleaned different kinds of aesthetics employed by the show in the process – from awe at new, strange places… to the banal objectification of women… to an almost ritualized praise of monsters in the modern era. And it’s this latter sense of beauty that I find most interesting, given how monsters are now used in Doctor Who, especially in the Moffat era. Because monsters are no longer just villainous plot devices for generating scares. Quite often they are secret protagonists, and weighted with symbolic value, especially when juxtaposed with our main characters such that they become telling metaphors. This latter process I call the “monstering” of a character, and of particular interest to me is how Amy Pond becomes consistently monstered during her time on the show.

But what does it mean “to be monstered?” What does that look like? And how unique is it to the modern era? To answer those questions, I’ll step briefly back into the past, to The Android Invasion, aa 4^th Doctor story with Sarah Jane in Season 13. In The Android Invasion the Doctor and Sarah Jane have landed on an alien planet that looks like Earth, but it isn’t Earth, it’s the staging ground for an alien invasion that will use android duplicates of certain Earthlings, which is pretty standard Doctor Who fare when you think of it. Anyways, there’s this great cliffhanger where Sarah Jane has been replaced by an android duplicate, only the Doctor has figured it out and attacks her, wrestling her to the ground. Her face falls off, revealing so much circuitry.

Yes, this the best moment in the otherwise fairly dreadful tale (it was written by Terry Nation, for gods’ sakes), but it’s also freighted with some potentially interesting literary readings. First of all, Sarah Jane isn’t the only android duplicate – there’s some regular UNIT personnel, and even the Doctor, all monstered by androids. It’s uncanny because we see characters we’ve known as “good” behaving in ways that are “not good,” which is rather transgressive. Aside from that, though, there’s the opportunity for the nature of the particular monster to inform us about our characters’ natures. This works particularly well in the monstering of Benton and Harry – they’re programmatic characters. Sadly, Terry Nation is not a particularly writerly writer, as the monstering of both the Doctor and Sarah Jane really don’t say much about them at all – well, unless we stretch it a bit. For example, Sarah Jane’s role as a Companion is often programmatic, from assisting in asking questions for the audience to serving as a plot device. And even the Doctor, well, it’s a role that could be (and has been) played by all kinds of performers, such that he doesn’t even have a real face anymore.

Contrast this with the monstering of Amy in Night Terrors. In Night Terrors, we see Amy transformed into a deadly Wooden Doll, the product of a child’s nightmare, a child who’s afraid of being abandoned. …