SOURCE: "Continuum or Break? Divine Horsemen and the Films of Maya Deren," in New Orleans Review, Vol. 17, No. 4, Winter, 1990, pp. 86-97.

[In the following essay, Smetak explores how Deren's Divine Horsemen fits in with the aesthetic set forth by her films.]

In 1947 Maya Deren, a New York based film-maker, received the first Guggenheim Fellowship awarded for creative work in the field of motion pictures. The result of this, however, was not a film but a book, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. Deren's original intention had been to go to Haiti to film indigenous dance. She had, as she says in the preface to the book, "deliberately refrained from learning anything about the underlying meaning of the dance movements, so that such knowledge should not prejudice [her] evaluation of their purely visual impact." But she soon discovered that "the dance could not be considered independently of the mythology," and she was thus forced to spend most of the eight months she stayed in Haiti learning about the culture.

The book, an anthropological study of Voudoun culture, is the work of an amateur. Deren admits that she had "no anthropological background," yet her background as an artist "provided an alternative mode of communication and perception: the subjective level which is the particular province of artistic statement." She says:

But my detailed and precise interpretations were derived specifically from the fact that, as an artist, my predominant professional concern was with form An artist usually recognizes the integrity of a form, whether or not he agrees with it, if only because he would do unto others as he would desperately hope to have them do unto him.

The implication here is that she saw what she saw without prejudice, without pre-conceived notions which would have warped her observations. Yet her book is not a break from her earlier work but a continuum because what she saw was influenced by ideas she had already formed and expressed through her films made before she went to Haiti. The overall organization of her book reflects what she says about the essential character of the photographic medium in her essay "Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality," where she slates that this medium is "so amorphous that it is not merely unobtrusive but virtually transparent." Her function, as she saw it, was to be as transparent as a camera:

I, having no … commitment, nor professional or intellectual urgency, could permit the culture and the myth to emerge gradually in its own terms and in its own form.

In keeping with this, her book begins at the beginning. And as in the beginning was the Word, she starts with the Word: "Myth is the twilight speech of an old man to a boy." Our introduction to Voudoun takes the form of an initiation as she first explains the mysteries underlying all myth, the specific forms the mysteries take in this myth, and then allows us to observe, but only observe, a ritual we are not yet ready to understand. The book follows this pattern as she first teaches us the forms and their meanings, then takes us through the actual rituals, each building on each until, at the end, we are ready to participate, to be possessed by the loa as she herself was possessed, through dance.

But the idea that dance exists as a ritual by means of which one could be possessed by something other than one's self was not something she hadn't thought about before. As film critic Parker Tyler notes, "Maya Deren found in dancing a possession by a transcendent spirit," and he felt that her film Ritual in Transfigured Time (1945–46) used dance and "its power to confer power, to promote revelation, to initiate the individual into final harmony with the world of nature." Deren's own program notes for this film substantiate Tyler's observation:

The quality of the movement is not a merely decorative factor; it is the meaning itself of the movement. In this sense, this film is a dance … the film confers dance upon the non-dancer … the elements of the whole derive their meaning from a pattern which they did not themselves consciously create, just as a ritual … fuses all individual elements into a transcendent tribal power toward the achievement of some extraordinary grace.

Also, the fact that she was possessed by the loa Erzulie, the loa of Eros, should come as no surprise. In both Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and Ritual in Transfigured Time, the female subject (played in Meshes by Deren herself) is as if possessed by the force of Eros. In Meshes, this possession leads to suicide as one manifestation of the subject kills her body. In Ritual, the subject, escaping the male embodiment of Eros, plunges into the sea, the widow become bride as the film goes into negative.

But Ritual is not that easy to read. The widow does run from the male dancer whose attitude toward her is clearly one of courtship, but Deren's program notes for the film indicate that some sort of transference or transformation has occurred:

Such efforts [that of ritual] are reserved for the accomplishment of some ritual metamorphosis, and above all, for some inversion towards life; the passage from sterile winter into fertile spring; or, as in this film, the widow into bride.

The conclusion of the film, however, the plunge into water, is ambiguous because the image of water itself is ambiguous. As Joseph Campbell, who served as mentor for Divine Horsemen, notes in his own book, The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology:

Every threshold passage … is comparable to a birth and has been ritually represented, practically everywhere, through an imagery of re-entry into the womb…. The water image in mythology is intimately associated with this motif, and the goddesses, mermaids … Ladies of the Lake and other water nixies, may represent either its life-threatening or its life-furthering aspects.

Thus her plunge is either into a new state of being (as the program notes say) or into death, a suicide that resolves all conflicts.

In Meshes, water is clearly a death image. During the course of a dream, the subject splits into three selves, one of which will emerge from the sea to walk across a vast expanse of time and kill the body of the three selves. The self who kills seems to be a projection of the unconscious. Deren comments:

As the girl with the knife rises, there is a close-up of her foot as she begins striding. The first step is in sand (with suggestion of sea behind), the second stride … is in grass, third is on the rug, and then the camera cuts up to her head with the hand with the knife descending towards the sleeping girl. What I meant when I planned that four stride sequence was that you have to come a long way—from the very beginning of time—to kill yourself, like the first life emerging from the primeval waters.

But even here the death image contains within itself a core of ambiguity because the film was meant to depict an inner reality and an inner experience. Deren says:

This film is concerned with the interior experiences of an individual. It does not record an event which could be witnessed by other persons. Rather, it reproduces the way in which the sub-conscious of the individual will develop, interpret and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience…. Part of the achievement of this film consists in the manner in which cinematic techniques are employed to give a malevolent vitality to inanimate objects. This film is culminated by a double-ending in which it would seem that the imagined achieved, for her, such force that it became reality.

In Divine Horsemen, death itself has this kind of ambiguity. In Meshes, the sea is emblematic of death or perhaps a death wish, Thanatos. In Divine Horsemen, however, the sea is the source of all beginnings:

The microscopic egg rides the red tides of the womb which, like the green tides, still rise and recede with the moon; the latest life, like the first, flows with the sea's chemistry … is beached in a surf, its heart reverberates a life-time with the pounding momentum of the primal sea pulse.

No one has witnessed the beginning of life, but death is not so hidden. It is "life's first and final definition," and, as such, it is death that has "first informed the ancestral elders" and has given them "the common inspiration of their common fanfare for origins, their common fiction of initiation, their common metaphors of metamorphous":

The fictions of the old men are their final fecundity. As their flesh once labored to bring forth flesh, so the minds of the elders labor, with a like passion, to bring forth a mind. By rites of initiation they would accomplish the metamorphosis of matter into man, the evolution of a mind for meaning in the animal which is the issue of their flesh…. The rites of this second birth, into the metaphysical cosmos, everywhere mime the conditions of the first physical birth. The novice is purified of past, relieved of possessions, made innocent, placed nascent in the womb solitude of a dark room … a man emerges by ordeal, to be newly named, newly rejoiced in.

In other words, the fact of death makes possible the second birth, the animal reborn as a human being. This process of transformation is given form in myth which "is the voyage of exploration in this metaphysical space … between the quick and the dead":

To enter a new myth is a moment of initiation…. It is to enter, in one's mind, the room which is both tomb and womb, to become innocent of everything except the motivation for myth, the natural passion of the human mind for meaning.

To note that the fact of death is the motive for and marks the beginning of the myth-making process is not an idea original to Deren. Susanne Langer in Philosophy in a New Key defines myth as "a story of the birth, passion, and defeat by death which is man's common fate." Joseph Campbell connects myth to dream: "Through dreams a door is opened to mythology, since myths are of the nature of dream, and that as dreams arise from an inward world unknown to waking consciousness, so do myths." Freud, using a similar analogy, is more specific:

But the dream-work knows how to select a condition that will turn even that dreaded event [death] into a wish-fulfillment…. In the same way, a man makes forces of nature … into gods [whose function is to] reconcile men to the cruelty of fate, particularly as it is shown in death."

Given this context, the origin and function of myth and the function of water in myth, the suicide at the end of both Meshes and Ritual acquires another meaning. In both cases the highly ritualized self-murder marks not literal death but a transition as both women cross a threshold into another state of being. The old self has died so that the new self may be born. This is clearly the intent in Ritual as widow becomes bride, but in Meshes the rebirth is displaced. The realization that will enable the subject to cross the threshold is not the subject's but ours as we discover the dangers inherent in denying and repressing the impulses of the unconscious. Deren comments that "Meshes is, one might say, almost expressionistic; it externalizes an inner world to the point where it is confounded with the external one." Deren's reaction to watching her own film is one of realization displaced on to the viewer:

The important thing for me is that, as I used to sit there and watch the film when it was projected for friends in those early days, that one short sequence [the four steps] always rang a bell or buzzed a buzzer in my head. It was like a crack letting the light of another world gleam through. I kept saying to myself, "The walls of this room are solid except right there. That leads to something. There's a door there leading to something. I've got to get it open because through there I can go through to someplace instead of leaving here by the same way I came in."

Since both films deal with the female subject's feelings of repulsion and attraction toward Eros, it could be argued that they represent a continuum, an attempt to resolve certain conflicts within the artist herself. This is, however, a tenuous position to take because a psychoanalytic approach to art cannot be easily transferred to a psychoanalysis of the person who produced the art. Art itself is a cultural censorship mechanism and thus cannot be taken as a purely personal expression of anything. Besides, these films, particularly Meshes, were products of collaboration, and P. Adam Sitney argues that Meshes is as much Alexander Hammid's film as it is Maya Deren's:

In recent years commentators on this film have tended to neglect the collaboration of Alexander Hammid, to consider him a technical assistant rather than an author. We should remember that he photographed the whole film. Maya Deren simply pushed the button on the camera for the two scenes in which he appeared. The general fluidity of the camera style, the free movements, and the surrealistic effects … are his contribution. If Meshes of the Afternoon is, in the words of Parker Tyler …, "The death of her narcissistic youth," it is also Hammid's portrait of his young wife.

But if a thread may be established, it could be said that Meshes is about a woman who fails to resolve her conflicting feelings and that Ritual is about one who has managed to find a means, that of ritual, toward resolution. Given this context, At Land (1944) may be seen as an allegory about a woman, newly emerged or born from the sea, empowering herself by snatching the symbol of power, a chess piece. At Land is, however, problematic because the woman (played by Deren, which would encourage a confusion between the fictive woman and the artist herself) snatches power from other women. If the chess piece is taken to have erotic significance—it is phallic—this would lead to a reading that would see the power of Eros, for women, as essentially matrilineal. Feminine sexuality is not something women get from men even though the dominant culture may define female sexuality from a male point of view. It is something women get from, win from, earn from, learn from other women who, given the configuration of the characters in this scene, guard rather than share the secret. It is not, in other words, a power to be taken lightly, nor is it easily obtained. The snatching of the chess piece may thus be taken as an initiation ritual, the second birth of the woman first born from the sea.

If these three films are taken as different steps toward a resolution of inner conflicts regarding sexuality, the final resolution of these conflicts occurs in the last chapter of Divine Horsemen, "The White Darkness." Divine Horsemen was intended as an anthropological study, that is, a study of another culture, not an expression of the artist's own personal concerns. As Deren says:

I had begun as an artist, as one who would manipulate the elements of a reality into a work of art in the image of my creative integrity; I end by recording, as humbly as I can, the logics of a reality which has forced me to recognize its integrity, and to abandon my manipulations…. I feel that that fact that I was defeated in my original intention assures, to a considerable degree, that what I have here recorded reflects not on my own integrity which, as an artist's had been overcome, but that of the reality that had mastered it.

She had gone there, tabula rasa, but quickly found that that approach was not going to work. She had intended to make a "creative" film but found herself, though she does not discuss this, moving toward a documentary.

Documentaries have their own problems, problems of which she was fully aware and discussed at length in An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film:

But the documentary film maker is not permitted the emotional freedom of other artists, or the full access to the means and techniques of this form…. He is further limited by a set of conventions which originate in the methods of the scientific film. He must photograph "on the scene" … even when material circumstances … force him to select the accessible rather than the significant.

Thus Deren was forced to change the premise of her project. She could not photograph except what was accessible unless she knew what was significant, but if she knew the culture well enough to know what was significant, her knowledge would prevent her from seeing the Haitian dances as pure form. She would run the risk of creating something not quite art since, for her, art is defined in terms of its form. Further, the documentary, as a form, exists in limbo between the objective and the creative for, as she says, "in order to achieve a 'realism' of effect, it is often necessary to be imaginative in method." The project pulled in two directions, and the tensions of this pull resulted in not a film but a book, a documentary in words of the cultural context of the dance she had originally intended to film.

While the book, Divine Horsemen, is impressive as a study of Haitian culture, it also exists as a creative piece which further developed themes and ideas already expressed in the films Deren had made prior to 1947. The three films I have discussed seem to have something to do with erotic power (her personal language makes it difficult to state anything definitively), either possessing it or being possessed by it. "The White Darkness" chapter in Divine Horsemen is a description of actual possession. She says, "I have left possession until the end, for it is the center toward which all roads of Voudoun converge." This is also something which could be said of her previous work: that it converges toward the possession she has left for last.

Possession comes through dance, and to prepare us, she preceeds the last chapter with one on the drums. Drums are central to the ritual but not so the drummer. He is a craftsman and "has no position whatsoever in the hounfor [temple]." His music is not a personal expression but that of the tradition:

The form is the total statement; and its distinctive quality is that reverent dedication which man brings only to divinity … it is therefore characterized by a quality of selflessness, discipline and even of depersonalization. The performer becomes as if anonymous.

This is also how she has described herself as an artist. In Voudoun, which she sometimes explains using analogies with American artists and their world, the reason for this anonymity is functional and a function of the religion:

A collective religion cannot depend on the vagaries of individual aptitude and persuasion; on the contrary, it must stabilize these vagaries and protect the participants against their own weaknesses, failures and inadequacies. It must provide the generally uncreative, often distracted individual with a prescribed movement and attitude, the very performance of which gradually involves, and perhaps inspires him…. The tradition must support the individuals, give them security beyond personal indecision, lift them beyond their own individual creative powers.

There is much here that echoes her own aesthetic theories, and perhaps her break with colleague Stan Brakhage could be explained by the distaste she expresses in this passage for art that exists as pure personal expression. The passage also explains what underlies her belief in the power of dance. This power of dance has been noted by others. Susanne Langer, for example, in Feeling and Form felt dance to be "the envisagement of a world beyond the spot and moment of one's animal existence" and that the first move of dance was "the creation of a realm of virtual power." Ecstacy, she further states, "is nothing else than the feeling of entering such a realm. There are dance forms that serve mainly to sever the bonds of actuality and establish the 'otherworldly' atmosphere in which illusory forces operate." Langer uses words such as "virtual" and "illusory" to establish the difference between this world and that other. For Deren, there is a boundary to be crossed, but that other world is neither "virtual" nor "illusory." It is as real and as concrete as this one. For Deren, the loa were not virtual projections of a "primitive" mind but as actual as the person who experienced possession by them.

Deren's description of the dance nevertheless, the final dance in which possession occurs, takes a specific myth-like form which reiterates that of her book as a whole. As life starts with water and as creation myths and initiation rituals foreground this motif so too does her description of this dance:

Hardly has hearing plunged to encompass this dark dimension, then the high clang of the iron ogan [musical instrument] sets in…. This towering architecture of sound … seems to advance without movement like a tidal wave so vast that no marker exists to scale its progress for the eye. Then a chorus of voices, having, it would seem, accumulated its force in the trough concealed behind the towering crest, hurls forward over that crest, and the whole structure crashes like a cosmic surf over one's head…. Now it is the dance which suggests water.

The actual possession comes suddenly and in two phases. The first is communal:

What secret source of power flows to them, rocks them and revolves them …? I have but to rise, to step forward, become part of this glorious movement, flowing with it, its motion becoming mine, as the roll of the sea might become the undulation of my own body.

The second phase is frightening, a sudden blow from which she, like the women in her films, flees. She is shaken:

These are the warning auras of possession, One knows oneself vulnerable. I begin to repeat to myself; "Hold together, hold, hold."

She leaves the dancing but then returns, becomes part of it, never stopping until

This sound will drown me! Why don't they stop! Why don't they stop! I cannot wrench my leg free. I am caught…. There is nothing anywhere except this. There is no way out. The white darkness moves up…. It is too much, too bright, too white for me; this is its darkness. "Mercy!" I scream within me…. "Erzulie!" The bright darkness floods up through my body, reaches my head, engulfs me. I am sucked down and exploded upward at once. That is all.

This is followed by an image in which all oppositions are reconciled, all divisions made whole:

The sun-door and the tree-root are the same thing in the same place, seen from below and now from above and named by the seer, for the moment of seeing.

If the subjects of the films are seen as characters suffering from inner division caused by conflicting desires, if At Land is seen as one possible solution to these conflicts, the subject aggressively seizing that which could, if others have it, cause division and conflict, then Divine Horsemen may be seen as the final resolution. Either Deren is projecting her own psychic conflicts and resolving them through her art or this was a topic that interested her and was finally exhausted in her book. In either case, the nature of her film work changed after her trip to Haiti. She became interested only in form, making, in Meditation on Violence (1948) and The Very Eye of Night (1952), the film she did not make of Haiti. From her program notes:

[The camera can] be the meditating mind turned inward upon an idea of movement, and this idea, being an abstraction, takes place nowhere or, as it were, in the very center of space. [Meditation on Violence]

The laws of macro-and microcosm are alike. Travel in the interior is a voyage in outer space: We must in each case cut loose from the anchorage of an absolute, fixed center, enter worlds where the relationship of parts is the sole gravity. [The Very Eye of Night]

Her program notes use language similar to that used in Divine Horsemen when she attempts to describe what she "saw" as a result of possession. It is as if the film The Very Eye of Night were intended as a visual projection of that experience.

She made no films after that, and while this can be explained by the fact that she both ran out of money and got herself embroiled in so many other projects that she ran out of time as well, it is also a fact that her work exists of apiece. If her work is taken as a purely personal expression of purely personal problems (a tenuous but sometimes productive approach), then William James's comments in Varieties of Religious Experience on the religious experiences of the divided self are helpful. He says:

[Religion is characterized by] the contrast between the two ways of looking at life which are characteristic respectively of what we have called the healthy-minded, who need be born only once, and of the sick souls, who must be twice born in order to be happy.

The sick soul is one which is heterogeneous, divided within and against itself. This definition is essentially Freudian (though James was working within his own system), and, like Freud, James saw religion as one of those maneuvers (from which he, like Freud, was distanced) by which some people come to some sort of resolution of their problems. Religious conversion could unify the divided self, a comment that is more Jungian (though James pre-dates Jung) than Freudian. Jung felt that the divided self could be made whole (or at least the impulse of the divided soul was always in that direction), whereas Freud thought that the divided self could achieve only a simulacrum of wholeness through repression, sublimation, reaction formation, and similar tactics.

From this angle, Deren's films could be seen as an effort to achieve wholeness through artistic expression. She made no more films after The Very Eye of Night because she no longer needed to. She had already achieved wholeness in Haiti, and her last two films exist as an expression of her interest in form rather than as an expression of personal concerns and problems. On the other hand, since her subsequent life was marked by problems and her personality remained as aggressive and, presumably, as divided as ever, the wholeness she achieved could perhaps better be seen as aesthetic rather than emotional. The idea of conflicting desires was one which interested her, but, with the trip to Haiti, it seems to have run its course. She said no more about it because she may have had nothing more about it to say.

Interestingly enough, however, her book itself is divided against itself because she uses two opposing psychoanalytic approaches. Her definition of myth—"Myth is the facts of the mind made manifest in a fiction of matter"—is Jungian, for what underlies it is the assumption of a collective unconscious. This mind isn't any mind but all minds: "It is to meditate upon the common human experience which is the origin of the human effort to comprehend the human condition." Her approach, however, to the specific culture of Haiti (she makes of Haiti a discrete situation by overlooking Voudoun cultures in Louisiana and Brazil) is Freudian. Her observations are empirical and specific, inductive rather than deductive, and her explanation of the reasons for Voudoun makes use of Freudian ideas of displacement and sublimation:

Petro was born out of … rage. It is not evil; it is the rage against the evil fate which the African suffered, the brutality of his displacement and his enslavement.

and:

Our general tendency is to regard the psychosomatic act of transferring a difficulty from the psychic to the physical system as "bad." This evaluation reflects … a moral dislike of "dishonesty" and a scientific rejection of "untruth." But an organism cares little for such abstract criteria. It is concerned with self-preservation…. When a situation is temporarily or permanently and irremediably brutal, the organism behaves like a clever boxer: it shields the mind from the blows which would only destroy it, and absorbs the shock in the muscular and durable flesh.

These are explanations which she both believes and does not believe because, for her, the loa are real. From her first description of a ritual in which the "voices" of the dead are treated as actual and not explained away to her final description of the dance—

I turn back toward the dancers, and join them. I sing, converse with Ogoun [Warrior Hero loa]. Nothing is shaken within me. After many dances Ogoun announces that he is content with the dance, and that now he will leave.

—she speaks as one who has been "bom again" and believes totally in the religion she describes. Yet she makes no overt attempt to convert her reader. She wants us to accept the validity of the beliefs of these people much as we accept the validity of any religion, but whether we believe or not does not concern her.

She walks a tightrope, much like the hougan (shamen or "priest"), pulled in one direction by the demands of her culture to be scientific, objective, rational, and in the other by the demands of her aesthetics and personal religious beliefs to commit herself totally to the matter at hand. The book itself moves between, balancing its scholarly apparatus against personal anecdote. Her method of citation reflects this balance for, as she explains in the introduction, notes of interest to the layman are at the bottom of the page, those of interest to the scholar segregated to the back.

This balance could, perhaps, be explained as a defense mechanism because the book is, finally, a personal statement of personal belief, a belief that perhaps she feared might strike the rest of us as odd:

As the souls of the dead did, so have I, too, come back. I have returned. But the journey around is long and hard, alike for the strong horse, alike for the great rider.

But within its proper context, the journey and what it means is not at alt odd. It is, as Joseph Campbell says in the foreword to this book, an epiphany, a "crisis of becoming." Deren's experience, her "countertransference" to another culture, may be nothing more than a projection of personal fantasies; it certainly intersects rather neatly with her other work, but mere are too many parallels to similar experiences in many other cultures. It could be argued that since she knew something about such experiences before she went, that she, in spite of her best intentions, was imposing her own desires on what she encountered, forcing these into the a priori mold of her aesthetic theories, but then again, the universality of such experiences would work against such a pat dismissal. She saw what she saw. And if we do not believe, that is our problem not hers.