All in a lather

A particular motif that runs through advertisements, thrillers, and reportage in German culture is that of the woman, alone, showering. Always, the woman is naked under running water, enjoying this private bit of sensuality, unaware that she is being watched. The woman never responds to the viewer who is privy to seeing her at a most vulnerable and private moment.

I’ve seen it on billboards advertising shower equipment. It’s there in vacation reportage detailing ‘what to do’ in Mallorca — presumably having a shower is central to the experience. In any household and clothing catalog like OTTO the bath units will be decorated with a nude woman showing us how they are to be used. I saw it used once thoroughly gratuitously on the old series of Derrick, one of the first detective shows in Germany. Here, a woman had just come home from work and needed to shower (which we saw) before the detectives even showed up at her place to question her. Showering? Had nothing to do with the crime.

(It took me about 5.7 seconds to find this Diana image on a search for German bath products)

Showering-woman is so repeatedly referenced, that nobody questions it. It’s like the sari-wettened-by-rain or the sunset-dance-with-windblown-scarves sequences in every Bollywood film, or the unvanquishable hero theme in American films, featuring a man of super-human strength and remarkable moral integrity — which recalls the early legends of Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill...it is an inextricable part of the cultural imagination.

Clearly, the ‘showering woman’ motif goes at least as far back as the Greek myth of Diana being watched by Actaeon. The popularity of this motif as an attention-grabber isn’t only about nudity. It is about the tension of seeing something we have not been invited to see, that maybe we are not developed enough to see. It is brave to open our eyes and challenge what we are accustomed to, and thereby gain knowledge; it is human to be curious. They call it voyeurism, which makes it seem diagnosable and weird. Seeing what is normally hidden and private alters our perception. To watch and take the risk of both being caught and being transformed by what we see – is a human desire. Curiosity is a desire in us to evolve.

The theme in art history is well-established. This painting from the 18th century is by Francois Boucher and is a fleshy excuse to see Diana nekkid.

In the myth, Diana the huntress lives alone, thoroughly independent in the forest, using her own superior skills as huntress to remain separate from society and men. She has determined to kill any man who invades her territory, or attempts to view her in her natural state. Diana also appears as a deer, so of course hunters seek her perpetually...but don’t always know who is Diana and who is just a deer—a goddess is expert at shapeshifting.

This fountain from Schloss Schönbrunn pleasure gardens in Salzburg, Austria shows Actaeon before the dogs get to him.

Actaeon is a hunter who watches Diana as she is dressing or bathing under a waterfall in the forest. He is riveted, and seeks to become her mate. Because he may be as good a hunter as she, he stands a chance. But he has seen her, exposed, without being invited. It’s not just that she’s naked and has a great body. In her nakedness, she is in a state of absolute unity with All of Nature, and this is a mind-splitting, soul-exploding revelation. He has seen her embody this merging, the stunning beauty of it, and cannot survive in the same form to tell the tale. His being able to see her at all means that he is extraordinarily skilled, and his vision of nature transforms him so that he both becomes as a god, and as an animal – her male counterpart. She turns him into a stag – he becomes merged, too – and his own hunting dogs bring him down.

The action, or the hunt, at Schloss Schönbrunn gardens begins with a thorough and unexpected soaking of all the Dianas seated at this table. In the early 1800's, this meant that muslin dresses would have become see-through. The garden follows a mythic story line in which pleasure and erotic play are highlighted by themes in classical myth. Lovers in this setting become the hunters or the hunted. The Diana/Actaeon myth is prominent in the garden design and features.

(Since Actaeon brought dogs to help him dominate nature during the hunt means that he is later destroyed by his own bit of ‘overkill.’ Diana doesn’t need dogs to be the best hunter. There is a message here: we will be brought down by our own attempts to undermine the sacred law, the perfection with which everything works in nature. We succeed when we merge with nature, when we commune-icate. When we force it and try to get the upper hand, our own vanity will rip out our throats.)

The hunting cult in middle Europe was perhaps the single greatest focus of non-religious imagination in the modern era (post 1500). The effect this motif had on art, architecture, and design cannot be underestimated; it was omnipresent – even though, or perhaps because it belonged to the elite, to landowners.

This strange dual-sided festival mask from 18th Century Austria turns the myth on its head. One side shows a benign and friendly deer, the other side shows a horny deer with sharp teeth. Clearly this is no majestic Bambi.

The mid-20th Century magister Robert Cochrane suggested in private letters that this motif must be studied in order to understand traditional witchcraft at all. He hinted that the roebuck-in-the-thicket, the hiding stag of the forest, is tantamount to the hidden wisdom at the heart of nature itself, and that the hunter’s sacred task of capturing the deer was a metaphor for the human’s sacred task of attaining this wisdom.

At right is a hunter's dish from Bavaria which features a stag being trailed by a very small dog. The stag carries in its mouth a sort of golden fruit, and its heart is prominent. The hunted stag motif appears abundantly on household objects.

In our time many are ashamed of hunting because it causes pain to animals, so it is difficult to understand that in the past, sacred-hunters understood that a deer will never be brought down, can not be captured, without its spiritual consent...that the deer is in no way an insensible victim of its fate, but rather that deer play a sacred and willing role in a human’s attempt to merge with the earth—no matter how they struggle to survive the hunt.

To imagine that an animal would spiritually conspire to sacrifice itself so that we people can evolve means that we have to give up the perception that death is bad. We would see everything as interrelated, abandon our attachment to conflict and competition as the central rules of life – and rather know that everything (the universe, God) is on our side to help us attain wisdom. As we attain this wisdom, we find our most evolved state is to be on the side of nature.