From: Alejandro Gonzalez (agonza59@encina.pntic.mec.es)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.ghost-stories
Subject: Bloody Mary, Veronica and the Scarlet Woman
Date: Mon, 06 Oct 1997 01:55:03 +0100
When I first saw the movie _Candyman_ I was struck by the urban legend who was the leit-motif of the plot: if you say "Candyman" three times in front of a mirror, then Candyman will come and get you. The protagonist, a young lady who's doing her D.Th. on urban legends, goes too far in her investigation and ends on the other side of the liminal surface as Candyman's bride.
Surfing some time later some newsgroups on Usenet, I discovered the script was based on a short story by Clive Baker (the one who did _Hellraiser_); but his story was, in turn, a development of an older urban folk legend, concerning Mary Worth or Bloody Mary.
I became interested then in that urban legend, and read a lot of personal testimonies of people who did the test (or who faked; who can tell?) in their teen years. Trying to stablish which the main trait swere of the multiformous thread (the name of the phantom varied from one version to another, including variants as Lady Donkey or Mary Willarth), I isolated several elements which I found meaningful:
So, a Freudian reading of the story could perhaps suggest that Bloody Mary and unexpected occurrence of menstruation to small ladies were close enough to stablish a firm link (though I have not read this interpretation, it struck me as obvious at one level). Elaborating this, one could say that Bloody Mary is some kind of innocent character who represents girls' innocence lost forever after menstrual blood appears: the inmaculate white of Virgin Mary is stained by the unavoidable agreement with daemonic forces that menstruation implies.
The theme is not exhausted by that level of interpretation, though. The idea of potencial bliss associated to the scary experience may be seen as a archetypal form of initiation, rites de passage: in fact, in a society without stablished initiatory rites, the Bloody Mary story may be seen as a psychical ersatz of that need. By the traumatic experience of shedding blood, the girl access to a world of bliss and pleasure: sexual natural high. This is the same as death, as orgasm is a petit mort, and sex is always a bloody/chthonic drive.
In that way, Bloody Mary would be near to what Spanish culture names 'la Virgen Puta', or what Crowley named the Scarlet Woman: in fact, the classical ambivalence of numen and 'sacred' as contamminating and purificatory, largely ignored in secularized Christian religion, resurfaces in this way from the collective unconscious.
I had already leave all the thing forgotten when, asking my students about the etymology of their names, we came to Veronica. Saint Veronica was the woman who gave Christ a piece of cloth to dry his sweat and blood when he was going to be crucified; this piece of cloth became later known as vera icon > veronica, 'true image', and so did the nice woman too
One of the children in the class mumbled almost for herself: 'oh yes, and Veronica the one of the ouija'. I asked her what she meant, and she told me the story; many of children (15-6 years old) nodded as she told me Veronica was a girl who played with the ouija board, using scissors to point out the letters. She was driven mad by spirits and killed herself burying the scissors down her throat.
But she is not gone; if you play with the ouija board without taking the issue seriously (or if you play with it at all, maybe) she will come and kill you with her scissors. And if you say her name in front of the mirror three times at midnight you will see her in the glass, with the scissors still in her neck.
I was struck once again by the paralelism with the Bloody Mary plot, and also by the fact that I had heard of Veronica and scissors when I was a child, though I couldn't remember anything clear of the story.
The kids asked me: 'but this is all bogus, isn't it?'. I told them: 'if you ask me if this is true, I'll tell you it's not; if you ask the people who told you the story, they'll tell you it is. I haven't ever made such a test myself, and the people who told you the story surely haven't either. So, who knows? Why should you believe me?'. This was the least manicheistic answer that came to me at that moment, though certainly insufficient. Then I added:
'If you ask yourself if it is true, you'll say it's not. Yet, if you have to do the test, you'll find one or another excuse, you'll persuade yourself it's ridiculous or nonsense, and you'll give up. And if you finally do, you'll see you have to overcome a strong resistance inside yourself, and your heart will beat fast, though nothing will happen outside. I have no answer as why it is so, and surely neither do you. End of the class'.
End of the post. Any clue, magickal or historical or folkloristic, will be welcomed as necessary. Good night by now.
Regards,
Alejandro
This page (http://www.ghosts.org/faq/bloodymary.html) last updated April 13, 2005.