Eclipse: The ritual execution of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Astute students of archetypal history will definitely want to see the third episode of the “Twilight” series, “Eclipse” which opened this week. I saw it this week with my daughter and was the only non-13-year-old girl in the packed theater. But Eclipse fulfills an archetypal need and destiny: The four book series follows the full moon cycle of the English Earth Mother tradition and this book and movie brings the ritual execution of Victoria. In fact, Buffy is clearly identified as the archetype of the English Earth Mother in her three phases (see Graves, “The White Goddess”), Victoria being the last phase, the Death Mother or eclipsed moon. In one of the last televised issues of Buffy, she is identified as the “Lady of the Lake”: A ghost woman appears to her from behind the veil and says, ”You pulled the sword from the stone. I was one of the women [Triple Goddess] who put it there.”

Twilight is a Buffy knockoff – better yet, it is a Mormon version of the Buffy/Angel saga. In the Buffy chronicles, The Slayer’s second boy friend – Angel is her real love and her first boy friend – is Riley. But he is considered never holding up to Angel. In Eclipse, a new Riley appears; the second lover of Victoria, implying that Victoria is a stand in or analog of Buffy. Victoria, the enemy in Twilight, has bright red hair – she is the Red Queen is seen in the Unconscious of Alice in Wonderland: She is England's great queen, Victoria, the last of the English Earth Mothers. She must die for the White Queen to be “born again” and the cycle of the Triple Goddess to awaken again. She dies in Eclipse, executed by Edward (head ripped off), and Bella represents the new White Queen. Most excellent, on the cover of the book Breaking Dawn, fourth and final book in the series, is a white chess piece: the White Queen. The goddess cycle begins again in Aquarius.

Coolest thing though is that Stephanie Meyers, the author, replaces the American borrowed Logos (English law, philosophy and procedures) and Eros (Italian romance, poetry and religion) with new Logos (Mormonism; the vampires are high Mormons with a striving work ethic) and a new Eros (Native Americans). It should be noted that Mormonism started here in the mountains of Vermont and New York when America was going through a fantastic religious revival in the 1830s. The Mormons rose from the English dissenters here in New England. When the original Anglicans started arriving after the revolution, the Mormons headed west to Utah. My claim has been that they took the Protestant Ethic with them. So you can see in Eclipse and in the Twilight series the English civil war echoing through the centuries, even to archetypal warfare today in Hollywood.