Any reading but the most superficial will reveal the special, symbolic nature of female figures in Fuentes' works. Few of his women characters can be classed as mimetic portraits of individuals drawn from life, although there is usually a mixture of elements drawn from reality with ingredients of the mythic, magical or occult. The real tends to give way before the unreal at the story's end, which strikes a note of the mysterious or unexplained. Several critics have noted Fuentes' interest in the occult, and Gloria Durán [in The Archetypes of Carlos Fuentes, 1980] has studied his interest in witches, seeing them as a projection of the Jungian anima. Insofar as the anima subsumes a full range of types (including the goddesses of antiquity), this is unquestionably accurate. However, since in the broadest sense all female figures may be considered aspects of the anima, examination of clearly allegorical feminine figures from the vantage point of mythic criticism should prove fruitful, for elsewhere Fuentes has displayed a broad familiarity with major myths and their variants. This essay will focus upon several tales in English translation which display certain features of the triple lunar goddess and her cult. Women in these stories exemplify two or more phases of what Robert Graves calls the White Goddess, the triple goddess of birth, love and death, visibly manifest as the new, full, and old or waning moon. Worshipped under countless titles, the goddess is associated with an array of attributes, sacred animals and emblems. Her cult is inextricably bound up with that of her son (also her husband), a sacrificial figure periodically slain and revived or reincarnated in a successor.

Graves [In his The White Goddess, 1966] avers that Celts, Greeks and Hebrews were all originally worshippers of the Great Goddess or Mother Goddess, one of whose names was Diana, and whose cult involved sacrifice of the male (later modified to ritual castration, mutilation or laming) and ritual eating, as described by Frazer in The Golden Bough. Other personae of the goddess were Danaë, Alphito, Demeter, Ceres, and Albina (regarded by Frazer as Demeter or her double, Persephone). Graves equates these with the White Goddess who is identified with Jana/Diana/Dione/Juno. Jupiter was her husband, but before that, her son. In the Golden Ass of Apuleius, Lucius invokes the White Goddess under several names, mentioning a variety of epithets and attributes, as summarized by Graves: "Dame Ceres, original and motherly source of all fruitful things .. . thy daughter Proserpine .. . the celestial Venus .. . sister of the god Phoebus [i.e., Athene]." Her "divinity is adored throughout the world, in divers manners, in variable customs, and by many names: The Mother of the Gods, Minerva, Venus, Diana, Infernal Proserpine, Ceres, Juno, Bellona, Hecate, Rhamnusia and Isis." Among additional relevant personae is Hera (Greek counterpart of Juno), an early death goddess who had charge of the souls of sacred kings, a form of sun god with many incarnations, including Bran, Saturn, Cronos, Orion, Samson, Cuchulain, Romulus, Zeus, Janus and Hermes, among those listed by Graves. The hero-god acquired royal virtue by marrying the queen (or White Goddess), eating some part of his dead predecessor, and in turn was succeeded at New Year by a reincarnation of the murdered king who beheaded him in an alternate eucharistic sacrifice. Each king or sun-god was the beloved of the reigning queen or Moon Goddess. All were borne by, married to and finally laid out by the White Goddess, the layer-out being the death goddess Hera Argeia.

Cirlot identifies Hecate as a symbol of the Terrible Mother, a deity who devours men, a personification of the moon or evil side of the feminine principle, responsible for madness, obsession and lunacy [A Dictionary of Symbols, 1962]. Her attributes include the key, dagger and torch. Triform Hecate (with three heads) presided over birth, life and death—past, present and future. As the Terrible Mother, she signifies death and represents indifference to human suffering, the cruel side of Nature. Among her symbols are [according to Graves] "water, the mother of waters, stone, the cave, the maternal home, night, the house of depth." Hecate was associated by the Greeks with the Moon, crossroads and the lower world, the number three, and the powers of witchcraft and magic. Artemis (the Roman Diana), Mistress of Wild Beasts, but also patroness of girls and hunters, was associated with Demeter, earth-goddess and goddess of fertility and vegetation, and her daughter Persephone (being identified by some with the latter), and with the harvest goddess Cybele. Aphrodite, called by Aeschylus the first cause of vegetable fertility, was also represented as the mistress of wild beasts, but inspired them with lust, putting desire in animals, men and gods. She is goddess not of spiritual love but irrational sexuality. Venus, associated in astrology with the Moon, with Mars, and with copper, is related symbolically to both spiritual love and mere sexual attraction. The white Moon Goddess's sacred number is thirteen, "insofar as her courses coincide with the solar year, but fifteen insofar as the full moon falls on the fifteenth day of each lunation. Fifteen is also the multiple of three and five: three expressing the three phases of the moon, and the Goddess's three aspects of maiden, nymph and hag, and five expressing the five stations of her year: Birth, Initiation, Consummation, Repose and Death." Nine is the prime Moon number. The Moon Goddess is associated with water (the moon draws the tides), hence with dampness or humidity. The White Goddess controls the winds, and it is an axiom that "she is both lovely and cruel, ugly and kind; she is Goddess of Life-in-Death and Death-in-Life." The three Fates are a divided form of the triple goddess, appearing in Greek legend also as the three Muses and the Parcae. The three Graces are explained as the love goddess Aphrodite in triad.

Fuentes has incorporated a surprising number of these attributes of the White Goddess into the stories examined here. Most important of her many faces are those of Diana and Hecate, but aspects of Demeter, Hera and Venus-Aphrodite are also present. "In a Flemish Garden" ("Tlactocatzine") has the greatest use of mythic detail, but the others have sufficient parts of the mythic structure to permit identification, despite the absence of elements (two instead of three phases of the goddess, for example, or a failure to consummate the sacrifice of the male, or absence of the goddess's recognizable companions or familiars). Fuentes has implicitly related the genesis of Aura (whose protagonist is clearly the White Goddess) and that of "In a Flemish Garden," which chronologically preceded the novelette. In a letter to Gloria Duran (8 December 1968) he recalls viewing the portrait of Charlotte of Belgium in Chapultepec Castle at the age of seven, and later finding in the archives a photograph of an enormously aged Charlotte in her coffin. "The two Charlottes: Aura and Consuelo. Perhaps Charlotte never knew she was growing old. Until the end she wrote love-letters to Maximilian." This episode from Mexico's history, the result of Napoleon's ill-fated venture of New World empire, is more specifically relevant to "In a Flemish Garden," wherein several details point clearly to the cult of the triple goddess.

Narrated from the perspective of the male protagonist, this tale is set in an old mansion characterized by "a certain lack of human warmth in . . . rooms which had been empty since 1910." Forty years later, despite its sub-tropical location, the house emanates "a penetrating cold . . . particularly noticeable in contrast to the temperature outside." Even more clearly than the darkened home of Consuelo (Aura) this is a cave, with a climate different from that of the world outside: "We don't notice the seasons in Mexico City; one fades into another with no change of pace. . . ." "Today, in this place, I have with a kind of Nordic indolence noted, not for the first time, the approach of autumn." The story is written in diary form, with the foregoing entry corresponding to September 20, the day before the autumnal equinox. The cave, of course, is symbolic of Hecate in her dimension of Terrible Mother. The garden exhibits its own separate climate: "A grey veil is descending over the garden . . . a few leaves have fallen from the arbor . . . and an incessant rain is fading the greenness, washing it into the soil." Water, likewise an attribute of the moon goddess, reiterates the separation of the enclosed space and external world: "If in the house I seemed to caress the skin of a different world, in the garden I touched its nerves." Beyond the rather obvious conventions of the attenuated Gothic tale, a second symbolic level alludes to 19th-century Mexican history, and a third to myth, a timeless mélange where Aztec deities and the triple goddess of classical antiquity inhabit the same space. The melancholy and misty light belongs to the Gothic context as well as to the domain of the moon goddess, with the "verdant growth of the vines . . . not that of the burnt earth of the plateau" coming from the sphere of Demeter/Hecate. The figure which appears ("a small body, black and hunched") might be the stereotypical witch: a little old woman, "at least eighty," "wizened, slim, clad all in black." Unobtrusive symbols of the moon goddess appear: "Her skirts brushed the ground, collecting dew and clover" (both moisture and the trefoil being attributes of this deity). Her totally black garb, tangled white hair, "her bloodless lips, the paleness of her flesh" suggest a death's-head, an impression reinforced by "her hawk-like features, her sunken cheeks, reflected like the vibrating planes of the reaper's scythe" which evokes the old, waning phase of the moon-goddess, the goddess of death, as does her customary hour of appearance, at sunset. Unexpectedly, she appears next—if only fleetingly—as girl or maid, skipping about, pantomiming, until the narrator's intrusion ends the childish activity, and he again faces the old woman and a penetrating cold (a fairy-tale attribute of moon queens).

This female figure thus represents at least two aspects of the triple goddess—the old and the new moon, Death-in-Life and Life-in-Death, and it becomes increasingly obvious that the narrator possesses attributes of the sungod: he is a "handsome blond" with an Apollonic identification with the arts, and the character of victim. He receives a cryptic message, one word on elegant old rosewood paper: "Tlactocatzine," followed by a second missive, whose author is the moon goddess in her third phase of maturity, love and fulfillment. She addresses him as beloved, writing, "The moon has risen and I hear it singing; everything is indescribably beautiful." But the icy cold of this figure is stronger than the warmth of love, and her hands, "nothing but wind—heavy, cold wind"—are controlled by the White Goddess. In this apparition, she is enveloped in a white lunar light. Not only is the narrator confused by her with her lost love, Max, but he becomes her victim, her prisoner, sealed within the mansion whose door is covered with "a thick red lacquer. In the center, a coat of arms glimmers in the night, a crowned double eagle, the old woman's profile, signaling the icy intensity of permanent confinement." The eagle on the coat of arms belonging to the late Maximilian—the old woman's husband whom the narrator is to replace—represents the Aztec sun-god, and is considered the king of the air as the lion is king of beasts. The Aztec title "Tlactocatzine" is the name used by the Indians to welcome a ruler they confused with the sungod.

In "The Two Elenas," the myth's more negative aspects are missing. What is preserved is primarily the mythic structure and the colors of the White Goddess: white, black, red. Here the idea of succession or substitution of the husband (emphasized by Frazer and Graves as central to the Goddess's cult) is seen first in the daughter's suggestion of a ménage à trois with a mutual friend and then in the establishment of a sort of identity between mother and daughter through their sharing of the same man (the mother is mistress of her daughter's husband). In this variation on the mythic original, the White Goddess is both wife and mistress/mother-in-law to Victor, a relationship sufficiently similar to the myth to evoke the archetype. The elder Elena (whiteness dressed in black) echoes the daughter's enunciation of the theme of the replacement of the sacrificial husband with his cyclic substitute, since her own aging mate—the old year—has yielded his place to the younger counterpart. The third aspect of the goddess, the hag or old moon, is absent, and a brittle modernity has replaced recognizable emblems of the goddess in what is essentially a degraded or reductive version of the myth.

"A Pure Soul" is narrated from the perspective of one of the female characters after the demise of the male victim. Claudia, the narrator, is Diana by reason of her virginity and hostility to marriage, Athene by virtue of being sister to the sun-god/sacrificial hero and her devotion to learning. Their mother is "la Llorona," the weeper (not only an Aztec myth, but a principal facet of Isis, as well as the grief-stricken Demeter in search of Persephone). Claire, with whom Juan Luis falls in love, is Venus-Aphrodite, fulfilled love, light (as her name indicates), the full moon, maternal urges. The three women, collectively, are a triad comprising maid, nymph and crone, or the central phases of the pentad, initiation, consummation, repose. But Claudia is also Hecate, according to another reading of the story, the dark side of the moon (or reverse of Claire), the evil side of the feminine principle, the devourer of men, who by her letters and psychological manipulation provokes the hero's suicide. This is a degenerate derivation of the myth, in which the mother-son incest motif has been replaced by a potentially incestuous brother-sister relationship. Juan Luis—who is Apollo because of his involvement with fine arts, music, poetry, eloquence and numerous amours—is a solar hero, sacrificed because Claudia, jealously, would rather see him dead and hers forever than lose him. This motivational change is a substantial modification, although the external structure of triple goddess and sacrificial solar hero is retained.

"The Doll Queen" provides a recognizable variation upon the mythic theme. Likewise narrated by a male protagonist, it recounts his impulsive attempt to locate a long-lost childhood friend, seven-year-old Amilamia who fifteen years earlier used to talk to him in the park. As his memory reconstructs Amilamia, she is an idealized version of the child or maid, associated with several symbols of the White Goddess: she appears in a "lake of clover," water and three-leaved plants revealing the moon goddess. She wears a white skirt, and invariably carries a pocketful of "white blossoms" (which Graves explained were used for casting spells). Amilamia is remembered in the wind, "her mouth open and eyes half closed against the streaming air, the child crying with pleasure" (the White Goddess traditionally controls the winds). She is also something of a nature goddess, "sitting beneath the eucalyptus trees," "lying on the grass, baring her belly button to the sun; weaving tree branches, drawing animals in the mud," and "imitating the voice of birds, dogs, cats, hens, horses." The second stage of the Goddess, nymph or goddess of love, is not explicitly present but hinted at in two ways, as a dream of the narrator, "the women in my books, the quintessential female . . . who assumed the disguise of Queen .. . the imagined beings of mythology", and also as a potential of Amilamia/Aphrodite, clearly suggested when their last romp suddenly acquired erotic undertones: "Amilamia was on my chest, her hair between my lips; but when I felt her panting breath in my ear and her little arms sticky from sweets around my neck, I angrily pushed her away and let her fall."

The remembered garden has some of the magical, past-in-present qualities of the house of the Flemish garden for there, "as if by a miracle, one had succeeded in suspending the beat of the surrounding city, annulling that flood tide of whistles, bells, voices, sobs, engines, radios, imprecations." After Amilamia has disappeared from the garden—a microcosm of earth—and the hero goes to seek her, there are certain analogies with Demeter's search for Persephone (and Amilamia is Persephone), or Orpheus' seeking Euridyce. The hero must figuratively descend to another world: "I would have to cross the garden, leave the woods behind, descend the hill .. . cut through that narrow grove" and cross a busy avenue which is a figurative Styx with its "flood tide" of noise and the requirement of waiting (as if for the ferry-man) to "cross to the other side." What he finds is a "gray suburb," "dead-end streets," a house closed almost like a tomb, with "heavy entry door, two grilled windows with closed shutters . . . topped by a false neoclassic balustrade." This Greek motif, like the caryatids and Ionic capitals adorning the mansion of "In a Flemish Garden" subtly indicates the presence of myth beneath the surface of the narrative. Beyond the door, he detects "harsh, irregular breathing," betraying the presence of a sort of Cerberus (watch-dog of Hades) whose function, true to mythic prototype, is to prevent intercourse between the worlds. Leaving after his first unsuccessful attempt at "penetration" the narrator narrowly escapes being a sacrificial victim: "A piercing scream, followed by a prolonged and ferocious blast of a whistle, saved me in time. Dazed . . . I saw only the automobile moving down the street."

Returning under the pretext of doing an assessment, he encounters a woman of fifty, "dressed in black and in flat black shoes, with no makeup and her salt-and-pepper hair pulled into a knot", with eyes "so indifferent they seem almost cruel." She carries a chaplet, an old-fashioned rosary, which may be interpreted as a key, for Cirlot points out the "morphological relationship between the key and the. . . anserated cross." The witch-like appearance and key identify the woman with Hecate, as does the suggestion of cruelty. The woman's only adornment, "a silver crucifix dangling over her dark belly," is another key and also a moon symbol, since silver is considered lunar. This is the Terrible Mother, associated with cruelty, indifference to suffering, and the lower world or death (i.e., Hades). Despite insistence on the shadows and darkness of the house, its being termed "almost uninhabited", a clue which indicates Amilamia's continued presence in the tomb-like abode is a symbolic fruit "where little teeth have left their mark in the velvety skin and ocher flesh", not eaten but bitten, as in the case of Persephone and the pomegranate.

The description of the other guardian does nothing to dispel the notion that he is a monster of the ilk of Cerberus: "heavy shoulders and hidden eyes . . . scarcely visible behind swollen, wrinkled lids as thick and drooped as the neck of an ancient turtle . . . greenish hands" and hair "like the bottom of a barnacle-covered ship." His breathing evokes a dragon's hoarse breath, and he has a "choking voice that issues from his belly instead of his larynx." An "asthmatic old bear" who wears a "turtle's mask," he is clearly a composite, a mythological beast like the three-headed hound of Hades with snakes protruding from its neck and shoulders. Forced to confess the real motive of his visit, the narrator is taken to view the funereal chamber holding the dolls and forgotten toys of Amilamia, with the scent of flowers of death and in the center the small coffin with "the doll queen who presides over the pomp of this royal chamber of death." Almost nauseated and convinced that Amilamia died long years before, he leaves, but returns months later intending to give the child's card to the bereaved parents. As he approaches the door, several motifs evoke the goddess of fertility or vegetation: "Rain is beginning to fall . . . bringing out of the earth with magical immediacy the odor of dewy benediction that stirs the humus and quickens all that lives." In the dwarfish, deformed body of the "misshapen girl" he finds in a wheelchair, with a "hump on her chest," is incarnated a degradation of the myth, perhaps mentally retarded (if this is the meaning of the comic book). The guardian reacts as Cerberus to prevent her contact with the outsider: "Get back! Devil's spawn! Do I have to beat you again?" Persephone imprisoned, prematurely arrested at an infantile stage of development, she is the goddess of Death-in-Life, as the doll was Life-in-Death.

Lighter and more parodic, "The Old Morality" retains the skeletal structure of the myth of the youthful hero and triple goddess, the closed mansion and mother-son incest pattern. Narrated by an adolescent, it recounts his "rescue" from the "immoral" guardianship of his grandfather (a variant of Zeus, thundering his anger, shaking his cane, with a "lion's mane" and "wild beard" and young concubine). Characterized by the local press as a "land raper" and by the boy as "a wild bull with the priests and newspapermen" (lions and bulls being two forms assumed by the sun-god), the grandfather is a freethinker whose main diversion in his old age—excepting lechery—is yelling at seminarians. He is powerless to retain his grandson when the boy's dead mother's three sisters arrive with a court order to remove him from the un-Christian household. The three aunts are obviously a triad, resembling the Furies or Parcae (in the boy's sketches they are the "sharpest-nosed and noisiest birds"). All three dress in black, with black hats and white gloves, and are almost indistinguishable. Their resemblance to harpies is stressed by the grandfather's epithet, "cockatoos."

Aunt Benedicta, consoling her lonely spinsterhood by raising Alberto as a Christian gentleman, plays the role of mother, even undressing and bathing him: "You're just a child. Pretend I'm your mother." But the bathing leads to caressing in the bath and eventually to an incestuous affair. Benedicta changes from a Hecate figure or goddess of Death-in-Life to a love goddess: "how that stiff woman in mourning who came to the ranch has changed . . . Benedicta knows how to be affectionate, too, and she has very smooth skin and, well, different eyes—bright and very wide—and she's very white." Cyclic rotation of the son/husband (who replaces a predecessor and is in turn replaced) is inverted at the end, as "Aunt Milagros, with her trembling eyelid, came to my room and began to stroke my hair and ask me if I wouldn't like to come stay a while in her house." The three members of the triad will rotate the hero-victim between them.

Fuentes may have written a deliberate spoof or burlesque of this mythic pattern of hero-victim and triple goddess in "A la víbora del mar" ("To the Sea Serpent"), the final tale of Cantar de ciegos, which was not translated. It involves role reversal and sexual inversion as a trio of homosexuals trick a naive spinster into marrying one of them (neither youngest nor oldest, but the central figure or "love-god"). In an obviously cyclical confidence game, a series of previous victim-brides have been conned into giving their money to the husband and have then been murdered or abandoned. Isabel commits suicide upon realizing how she has been duped. Inversion, of course, is a standard technique of parody, and the inverted elements all belong to the archetypal pattern. Other elements associated with the White Goddess are present, especially the moon and water, since the action takes place on an ocean liner, and the "sea serpent" is both a mythological allusion to the Goddess's reputed primeval copulation with the World Snake and to the biblical snakeas-trickster myth which here denotes the victimizer.

Fuentes is a self-conscious writer, an admirable critic and literary theoretician who is frequently well aware of the mythological or other sources of his inspiration. Being well-read and reasonably fluent in English, he may have been familiar with The White Goddess or The Golden Bough, or may have gone directly to original mythology sources. Whether or not he is conscious of the full extent to which he has incorporated the figure of the White Goddess and her cult into his narratives, the archetype provides a key to understanding his artistry, and might be applied fruitfully not only to the tales analyzed here, but also to those of his novels which are particularly accessible to mythic analysis, for example Sacred Zone, Change of Skin, and Cumpleaños (Birthday). The appropriateness of mythic analysis of Fuentes' works using Aztec deities as the archetypes has been repeatedly demonstrated. Classical mythology must be considered as a comparably significant source.