Gérard Depardieu was accused last Tuesday by 13 women, most of them young actresses, of sexually aggressive acts ranging from inappropriate banter to quasi-rape, according to an investigation by French news website Mediapart. But if France finally decides to make a Harvey Weinstein case of her greatest thespian, Gérard Depardieu, it will be reluctantly.
#BalanceTonPorc (#DenounceYourPig), the Gallic version of the #MeToo movement, a call for women to speak out on their experiences of sexual harassment on the workplace, was only launched in 2017. There had been an earlier wave of revelations on misogyny in politics as early as 2011, triggered by the New York arrest of then-International Monetary Fund head Dominique Strauss-Kahn, yet it failed to ignite a broader movement.
But Gérard Depardieu? It’s not that anyone thinks such accusations are unlikely from the 24-stone, 74-year-old star of over 200 movies, a dozen TV series, 18 stage plays, documentaries, 16 audio albums from Italian pop to Hector Berlioz, nine books and even a graphic novel. He’s been Obélix, Christopher Columbus, Cyrano de Bergerac, Danton, Rodin, every Musketeer except Aramis in various Alexandre Dumas adaptations, Dumas himself, Inspector Maigret, and even Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
Depardieu is excessive, in everything. He gets a pass because he’s what the French call un monstre sacré, a holy monster. He’s our very own Gargantua giant, a national literary hero, practically illiterate until his teens, who can inflect the most difficult parts with extraordinary subtlety and vulnerability; probably the best Tartuffe ever since Molière wrote the play.
Nothing fazes Depardieu’s numerous fans. He converted to Islam and was a Muslim for two years. Vladimir Putin gave him a Russian passport after he got bored with living in Belgium as a tax exile. He got in trouble for urinating into an empty bottle on board a CityJet plane, because the flight attendants wouldn’t let him use the lavatory. He’s recounted how his mother wanted to abort him with knitting needles; that he helped deliver his own younger sister because the midwife was late; that he spent time in jail at 16 for selling stolen cigarettes and stealing cars; that, aged 9, he witnessed a rape by older boys in his neighbourhood.
Rape, in fact, is a recurrent theme in Depardieu’s life and career. He shot to stardom in Bertrand Blier’s 1974 Les Valseuses, an impressive indie debut that also starred Isabelle Huppert and Jeanne Moreau, and became a classic. Valseuses is French slang for bollocks, and the film, to put it bluntly, is a series of rapes, perhaps only understandable in the nihilistic post-May ’68 era. It’s been shown multiple times on prime time television — another example of France’s very different attitude to sex and performative transgression.
The 13 women interviewed at length by Mediapart tell damningly similar stories. On set, between takes, Depardieu gets into their personal space, talks dirty, growls suggestively, paws them: on the backside, hips, breasts, sometimes shoving a hand into their knickers.
In every case, the film crew ignores it, or, worse, starts laughing at the banter. The few brave enough to accuse the star (the bankable star, on whose name the funding of the entire film often rests) are told not to make a fuss. “Mais c’est Gérard!” directors and producers say. “He’s just like that, it doesn’t mean anything.”
Again and again, the victims, interviewed separately, say that even more than Depardieu’s acts, it’s the non-reaction of their co-workers and employers that traumatised them. They use a mafia term, “omerta”, having to stay silent or else. “I didn’t want to lose the job, then be blacklisted in the business forever,” one says. “I was twenty, he was important to the film and I wasn’t,” says another.
Two have already provided evidence as witnesses for a case brought by one young actress, Charlotte Arnould, the daughter of friends, who accuses Depardieu of having raped her twice in 2018 when, a 21-year-old virgin at the time, she visited him at his Paris house for career advice. Depardieu has been indicted but after five years the case still hasn’t had a hearing. Most of the events described in Mediapart this week fall under the statute of limitations; but the account nonetheless may end Depardieu’s long spell of impunity when the Arnould case comes to court.
Is France finally ready to slay its monstre sacré? The evidence would appear to suggest not.
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SubscribeIt’s probably less dangerous to believe in Astrology and make life decisions based on it, than it is to believe in Treasury forecasts and use them as a basis for policy making.
There is a similar credulity around Homeopathy, that I find equally unfathomable. If you actually believe that “Water has memory”, I’m intrigued to know how it forgets about all the poo that’s been in it? And if diluting it only enhances the strength of the active ingredient within, how come that dilution doesn’t magnify the “memory” of all the toxins as well?
I rather doubt that’s down to “knee-jerk, borderline angry hatred of female fripperies” so much as recognising that Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus and Pop Psychology is from Uranus.
(deleted a poor taste comment)
Strangely, I appear to have had several upvotes removed. When last I looked it had quite a few more ….
Has anyone else noticed this happening to them recently?
Did you think of adding an extra O to “Pop”?
It had to do with the planet. Poor taste – really.
Didn’t you know, Treasury forecasts are are drafted by Mystic Meg
I’ve never had the slightest belief in astrology, but then, that’s very common for Aquariuses like me.
And I bet you’re the sort of man that would join no club that would have you as a member.
Haha! How many times have I answered a woman’s question about star signs by saying “Sorry, I’m a Taurus so I don’t believe in astrology” and not one of them, ever, have seen the joke. But I guess you have to be immune to irony to believe in that horse-poo so it is predictable.
When I was a lot younger I would tell women who would ask my sign whatever one popped into my head at the time (never correct). They always thought my personality matched it perfectly.
The wife reads this stuff, I think she may have cards too. As far as I can see it’s like asserting stuff and rolling a d20.
LOL. I’m beginning to suspect that the Poppy in Poppy Sowerby is an abbreviation for Poppycock.
“My twin and I once went to see a psychic called Brian, who operated out of his conservatory in Skellingthorpe.”
Dear Author: intentionally or not, you have set forth the opening line for a potentially riveting novel (much along the lines of Anthony Burgess’s “It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me”.) You may answer the call or not. But, as the mythologist Joseph Campbell warned, if you fail to answer the call, to write the novel, life will wither and die; then a ride on the 344 bus from Wandsworth to the City will seem positively riveting.
The etymology of “Poppycock” is less mild than the way the word is now employed in English.
It comes from the Middle Dutch, Pappe-Kak – meaning “Soft Sh*t”.
You definitely know your s****t
Thank you for that. Didn’t now it. And because I learned this from you, I got off my ass and looked up another old word origin that had been nagging at me for awhile: lollygagging (or lallygagging, originally). It’s also obscure. Originally thought to be from Ireland, it was lower-class slang for sexual foreplay of an oral nature. Then it became a metaphor for “fooling around” and finally just wasting time.
So, to sum up: Astrology has replaced religion for lots of women. Fair enough, I suppose. It seems more fun.
America in retrograde. Very clever.
Like bad doctors there are bad astrologers. This article is dubious in its superficiality. Possibly she doesn’t know much about Vedic astrology as well as other streams well enough.
I do believe in the broad trends a good astrologer can predict. In one’s own life there has been enough reason to develop a healthy interest in astrology.
This author seems to be typical of the tendency to dismiss anything requiring belief and faith. Just because she has had bitter experiences doesn’t mean it holds true for everyone.
It would have been better if she had thus stuck to making it her own approach instead of trashing in a broad brush manner a field lots believe in.
And why the unnecessary gender angle? I know many men who believe sincerely in astrology.
The article makes an acute observation that the newspapers pitch the “advice” at the social interests of young women, but I am not sure it is about a desire for control. Maybe what interests people in astrology is not control, but day-dreaming based on the horoscope.
So, maybe you are going to go out today and meet your romantic soulmate like it said. If that doesn’t happen, well, ho-hum, there’ll be another to read tomorrow.
I can see how for a young single woman that might seem like a fairly appealing, cheap and harmless pastime.
*
I had a girlfriend once who was into all that. She was into manifesting and all that stuff. Nice girl, great fun. Bit skittish, of course. She wore a jangly bracelet on her ankle, you could here coming from a mile off though…
A witty and insightful article. I needed something to decompress me after experiencing great stress in the lead-up to one of the most important full moon cycles in decades.
Is a full moon cycle one where you ride without any pants on?
I find this article rather juvenile, it has that quite common distinctive character of ignorance coupled with arrogance found among some younger writers.
The earliest evidence (5000 yrs) of Astrology comes from the area around the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, ‘the cradle of civilisation’. The Sumerians, Egyptians, Chinese, Hindus, Greeks and Romans all used astrology. When humans had no electric light or TVs to distract them and instead studied their surroundings, they gazed at the planets and stars, observed patterns repeating and shifting, and linked them to their lives They blended astronomy with stories of gods and goddesses, kings and queens, symbols which helped explain their lives; birth and death, happiness and sorrow, success and failure.
It’s development has continued ever since, up until the 17th century it was an academic subject.
Astrology is unlikely to disappear any time soon.
Superficial Sun Sign Astrology as found in popular media is a bit of fun. Like many of the articles published, including this one, it is there to entertain. Criticise the media by all means, why not, but perhaps think twice about criticising ordinary people who enjoy the lighthearted entertainment.
“I find this article rather juvenile, it has that quite common distinctive character of ignorance coupled with arrogance found among some younger writers”
Isn’t ignorance coupled with arrogance, along with a large dose of insecurity, almost a definition of youth, whether they write or not?
Yes it is, I was awful and got myself into some fine old pickles, but I was not a journalist, only my friends and family had to put up with me. If like Ms Sowerby you have an article published today and it’s foolish you will be criticised, and quite right too if you are trying to influence people.
Weirdly it also seems to have become the definition for Boomers. But then Boomers are children who never grew up, so I guess it isn’t so weird.
You have misunderstood what she wrote. Things which are a bit of fun can be irrational and damaging, taking away agency in favour of some foolish notion of fate or destiny. The fact it’s an ancient belief proves nothing. People used to believe if fairies. Do you want to bring that back?
No, I have’nt misunderstood. You are taking it for granted that I agree with you that fate and destiny are foolish notions, I disagree.
Put simply, as far as I am concerned, I think our lives are influenced by both Fate (God’s intention for us) and Free Will; we each have a sort of fate, but we also have the free will to make the best of that fate that we can, try to be good, make the right choices, to have integrity and be courageous.
Agree, in the sense that each of us was dealt a hand of cards over which we had no control; and that it’s up to us to use our faculties as best we can, observing as we go from our surroundings and experience what works best for ourselves and others, and what doesn’t.
Apparently, the Chinese were only interested in the European science of astronomy as it developed in the 17th and 18th centuries because they thought it would make their astrological predictions more accurate.
Not much use, though, for getting to the Moon.
Well Claire, at least you have taken the trouble to learn something about astrology – which puts you ahead of the game on most other commentators here.
I studied astrological horoscopes for a plot device I was to use in a book. Before then I had no interest in horoscopes. What I discovered was the amazing variety of horoscopes no doubt catering to tastes and how the readers use them.
At one end of the horoscope spectrum are nonsensical machine generated snippets like “wear red and meet your new beau”. Weirdly specific, I doubt many if anyone reads these and “believes” them. In my view they are pure escapism, a reason to hope the unexpected might happen today. A momentary flight of fancy.
At the other end of the spectrum are lengthy weekly and monthly human creations discussing the meaning of life and what behaviours to use to “manifest” personal goals. The best read like coaching sessions, offering general advice on managing emotions and choosing positive behaviours, reminders to reflect on how we deal with people and the world. This type of horoscope offers no firm predictions so there is nothing to “believe”, the future is left open and dependent on your will and circumstances. In my view they are a pep talk to take control, a reason to believe you can make small changes and change your world.
The middle of the horoscope spectrum offers blends of these two extremes. A bit of passive hope mixed with reflection and positive hope you can make good changes. I see no wishing away of personal control here, the nature of astrology and the written horoscope doesn’t really allow one to do that.
What I do find disempowering and therefore alarming is tarot. By its very nature, tarot demands the wilful submission to fate: a life question is asked and the random chance of cards and the cunning of the tarot reader determines the life answer. It is extremely specific, highly personal, and very lucrative for the platforms offering it. The same toxic mix that makes for the commercial exploitation of dependency and addiction. A tarot user is wishing away control, and the captain of fate has abandoned the ship.
Was this piece
a) about women’s search for meaning in a post religious world.
b) a lament of the female tendency to believe in fairies
c) a clever dig at a corporate lawyer, once a friend, who frolicked with Poppy’s boyfriend at Uni
My guess is she’s discovered said ‘once friend’ subscribes to Unherd.
I once came across a young woman who claimed to be a multi-faith preacher. I didn’t like to put her on the spot by asking her if she had ever been invited to preach in a mosque. Or if she had sacrificed goats at Stonehenge at the Summer solstice.
A work colleague once declared that she was a witch. This sudden announcement was initially rather disconcerting. Should I buy her a coffee to placate her? Until, that is, one of her co-worker lads suggested she looked more Gorgon than hag on a blasted heath.
Another work colleague triumphantly declared that she wasn’t a Christian. Unsurprising really, as there wouldn’t be room in the universe for her ego and God.
She was the sort of person who liked to inform you of facts, not to demonstrate how knowledgeable she was, but just to keep talking at you. She once told me in the morning what she had been doing at the weekend and then told me the same thing again in the afternoon, without remembering that she had spoken to me before.
The Apostle Paul came to mind. If he had met this young lady he might have had to revise his view that a body has many different members, as clearly she was just a mouth speaking. If you told her something she didn’t know, she would just ignore you; again proving that she was a body without ears.
Her ego was an iridescent pool shimmering with self-regard in which she constantly fell in love with her own reflection. When her boyfriend brutally dumped her (I was sympathetic) she was like the tower struck by lighting. Perhaps there’s something in these Tarot cards after all.
Polly doesn’t tell us what she thinks of the women who become priests of the Church of England. Or, properly speaking, priestesses of the Church. Religions that have had priestesses have been markedly different to those that don’t.
And strangely these women priests seem to have just two incarnations. There are the portly middle-aged ones with bobbed hairstyles. Then there’s the other sort, exemplified by Paula Vennells – shiny happy liberal managerials who think that Jesus of Nazareth would have stood on the white cliffs at Dover welcoming migrants. Though the Bishop of Dover – the ‘bishop of the boats’ – being in a class of her own, does it best.
One of these portly types, who dressed, as all this genus seem to, as frumpily as Orthodox Jewish wives, declared in a sermon I heard that while she was ‘disturbed’ at the scale of abortion in Britain, a woman’s right to choose trumped all other considerations. ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven’.
“Never trust a poor fortune- teller”
Why do we never read the headline: “Psychic Wins Lottery”?
Priceless.
“It’s 19 minutes after the hour, and now it’s time for our daily feature, The Astrological Hour. A quick reminder: these reports are not intended to foster belief in astrology, but merely to support people who cannot take responsibility for their own lives.”
(The Kentucky Fried Movie, 1977)
Poppy Sowerby, I like your essay, it’s funny
Me? Hairy, bearded, cis-hetero soldier of the patriarchy. The other side of sixty. And I really like Vashti Bunyan. Anyone got a problem with that?
“Think of the legions of middle-aged women who sit at home ringing up psychic hotlines — a big money-spinning element of horoscope writing — paying £5/minute to hear whether a tall dark stranger will court or kill them.”
I did not know that. Sounds like a money spinner. Must get in on the act.
“bleak, atheistic sophistication”. Not sure how not believing in something entitles you to call yourself sophisticated but OK.
The vast majority of astrologers are anything but atheistic. Many are Christians.
This writer might want to go on YouTube and see all the astrologers that predicted earlier in this year- to the day practically- an assassination attempt on Donald Trump. Or that Biden would face a major ending somewhere in the month of July, while Kamala would embark on an expansion of her public legacy. (All from seeing their personal natal charts which are public information at this point.) Or that the national consternation we are all enduring in the US is a result of Pluto’s return to its exact position in the sky as to where it was when the US Declaration of Independence was signed, signaling the end of the first cycle in the American Experiment. (Just google Pluto return in the US natal chart. In the next several years we will either re-affirm our founding principles or leave them behind, forever.)
Astrology has been studied for more than 4,000 years, and simply maps the cycle of planetary positions in the sky against all history in that time. People talk to history never repeating itself but rhyming, and this is exactly why that is the case. (Former investment professional here, Wharton MBA, and decade long astrology student. The more one studies it, the more sense it makes. It isn’t sun horoscopes in a monthly magazine.)
p.s., the three wise men depicted in the Bible were denoted as shamanic astrologers in its earliest versions. They were following the light of a Jupiter / Saturn conjunction (the “star of Bethlehem”) at the time, which denoted a new cycle pertaining to beliefs (Jupiter, religion) and structure (Saturn). In other words, the birth of Christianity.
‘Pluto’s return to its exact position in the sky as to where it was when the US Declaration of Independence was signed’ Well that depends on what you think ‘the sky’ is. The solar system is moving through space with a spiral arm of our galaxy, and our galaxy is moving through the universe, all at many thousands of our earth miles an hour. Pluto will never be ‘at the same position in the sky’ as it once was. Ever.
Interesting. I really cannot bring myself to give credence to a system that says that because Babylonians saw a pattern rather like the shape of a the bull in the stars at the time of my birth (although it has moved since then) I would have the personality of a bull. (And few, if any, astrology believers I have met actually have any idea what bulls are really like. As a part-time farmer, I do. I’m not at all like a bull.)
But I had an interesting evening in a Swiss bar in the 70s. My two male mates were heavily into astrology. I gave them a challenge: as people come in, tell me what you think their star sign is. Get better than 60% and I’ll concede you have a point. I spent some time after the test asking the individuals what their star signs were. Pretty much everyone was happy to tell me.
They got close to 80% right. I’ve never forgotten that. They based it on physicality, expression, clothing, whether they came in first or gave way to another and many other such clues.I still don’t believe it astrology but nor do I rubbish it. I just don’t know.
Just have your own natal chart read by someone good and you will never forget it.
Confirmation bias. You only look for and remember the ones that match. The many orders of magnitude higher predictions that don’t come to anything just disappear from your mind like they never happened.
Apparently, stock fund managers work this way too.
I don’t know why the author is so sneery about this.
n the future that might affect current predictions.
What is the difference between that sort of predicting the future or the long range weather forecast, or climate change?
It seems that the whole world is desperate to predict and control the future.
All information is based on it. The if you do this then that will happen brigade have been at it for years.
The latest one is that if Trump is elected America will be destroyed . some others are:
All children who are confused about their gender will kill themselves if not allowed to transition, the world will only be saved by windmills and solar power.
These are all predictions about the future made by people who are trying to control it based on today’s information.
If circumstances change which they will, who knows what will happen? I don’t. Indeed no one knows what changes are coming up
It’s all the same, trying to control the uncontrollable. Why pick on astrology which is much more harmless than some of the others.
By the way, if m sure I read that nice that some of the people in the stock exchange use horoscopes and have a screen with them in to consult, so it’s definitely not just women!
An astrologer called Merriman has had a cult following for decades among financial speculators.He provides a free weekly newsletter as well as a subscription service.Susan Miller also has a following amongst speculators but also does general tips on love and when to take holidays or do house repairs or change jobs.Cult following are usually based on the first tip winning.After that any tipster who can beat a 50/50 strike rate over the medium/longrun is worth noting.
Most professional astrologers offer money back guarantees. If they were no good, they would not earn a living….
What a waterfall of tosh!
There’s rather too much on this sort of wibble on Unherd of late; one pays subs for insightful content not balls, crystal or otherwise.
Come on, Ed. Finger out your pull.
Wouldn’t this be more suitable in something like Marie Claire? It’s not badly written or anything, it just doesn’t seem to sit right here.
My star sign is Sirius. Never heard of it, have you? That’s because it’s very rare. In fact, only John McEnroe and I share it. Which means that you, and Poppy, cannot be Sirius.
In the early ’90s, when both political correctness and the “New Age” movement began to wane, I predicted that, if PC ever returned in force, so would New Age-y woo.
PC of course came back crazier than ever as Woketarianism…but, aside from the UFO stuff (that doesn’t exactly count), I’ve seen little evidence of the return of the woo…except for some signs of this astrology fad among women.
So my prediction is pretty much *kaput*.
Now…if one were inclined to stretch things a bit…which I’m not…much…one might say that the woo has been incorporated directly into PC. Gender ideology is, in essence, magical thinking. In fact, many versions of “social constructionism” are basically belief in thought-magic and word-magic… In fact, they’re even magical-er than magic. At least in fantasy, magic is efficacious. In The Once and Future King, Merlyn actually [physically] transforms Arthur into a hawk, an owl, a badger… Gender woo theory holds that people can actually transform themselves from e.g. men to women without any actual physical transformation. That’s some kind of super-magic, beyond even the ordinary magic of fantasy stories…
not sure if it’s snobbery or not Poppy , but keep it up , I liked it. Your prose is hilarious.
From Skellingthorpe! ..To Kennington!….
….as Peter Kay would say:
Garlic! …and Bread?
(apologies US readers – being terribly provincial)
Was it George Bush who was mocked for saying something like making predictions was hard, especially about the future?
It’s not a silly thing to say. Lots of people make predictions and most of them are nearly always wrong but never accountable whether they are meteorologists, economists, political pundits or astrologer.
Of these, possibly, the least arrogant and least harmful are probably the astrologer.
Prelest is a hell of a drug.
We are living in some of the most religious times in human history I’d argue.
Old notions of God may not be so widespread, but puritan religious fervours seems increasing. The new religions are political religions, particularly amongst progressives who have their own rituals in the form of protests, their own nomenclature in the form of shibboleths and a contorted postmodern vocabulary, their own proselytization in the form of activism and their own dogma prescribed to them by the intelligentsia and whatever is in vogue on social media. We see something similar among the Trump supporters in the US, though that kind of religion has yet to hit the UK I think.
We also have weird non-political religions too in the form of consumerism and pop-culture. They spring up as loyal and obedient followers of Walt Disney under in the form of “Disney Adults” and they spring up in the form of Harry Potter fans who, like the astrology sect, categorise people-including politicians-into houses (“Donald Trump is obviously Voldemort and Corbyn is naturally Dumbledore”, once said Roger Scruton along those lines) and they diligently lap up the ever expanding gospels of these worlds in the guise of ‘lore’. This particular religion has fell out of favour in recent times, however, since J.K. Rowling dared to blaspheme progressive dogma consequently resulting in her excommunication from the “critical thinking” population and branded as a Cain, sorry, I mean TERF.
Men, I find, are not as susceptible to this. Instead their religious idols come in the form of variably fashionable men who gain popularity and vanish again. Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate et al. These are in effect the neo-gurus of our day who disperse their wisdom for the unenlightened masses.
It’s a consequence, I think partly, of atheism. You call atheism sophisticated, but I couldn’t disagree anymore, it’s remarkably unsophisticated, not just as a philosophy, but in practice. The New Atheist movement itself became a sort of neo-religious movement with Hitchens, Dawkins and Harris as its high priests and the loyal and very dogmatic follows of such figures turning out in the thousands to hear them speak and buy their rather reductive and academically shallow books. This isn’t new either, atheism as a religion has its roots going back to the Cult of Reason during the French Revolution, their first act was to begin indiscriminately killing lots of people, as is common with atheist regimes for some reason. Atheism has managed to ‘kill God’ but it has failed miserably at killing religion, all it has done is create a spiritual vacuum that people now fill with politics, consumerism, charlatans, and neo-paganism.
As C.S. Lewis pointed out “spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served. Deny it food and it will gobble poison”.
Oh dear, another article by someone who is happy to spout about a subject she knows nothing about. Check out Pam Gregory’s video, submitted in June, on the subject of the full moon in Capricorn last weekend. Then have the humility to acknowledge your ignorance and arrogance.
“After all, why should men alone be the captains of their fate?”
Perhaps the answer to this question lies in alchemy and not astrology?
Those that identify with the world spirit over the will of the individual are feminine and traditional: valuing their time, place, language, ancestors that they where born to and under. Those that identify with the individual over the world spirit are masculine and liberal: valuing their ‘self-determination’, emancipation, freedom, and ability to exercise agency. The first group attempts to tie themselves and others closer to the earth while the latter attempts to have themselves and others fly free from it.
Under some Chinese perspectives, the passive and active (i.e the feminine and masculine) are interconnected under something called the taiji; there are times to submit towards the flow and will of the world and other times where one should exercise agency to change it. There is so no paradox between finding value in both “submission to the will of the world” in some times and “emancipation from a ridged authority” in others. It’s a bad idea to subscribe to either pure submission (where the individual should always bow to the collective and spirit of the world) or pure autonomy (where an individual should always be given self-determination and fly free of the spirit of the world).
The Indo-European Mother Earth and Sky Father follows a similar dynamic as the Chinese yin and yang. So does the Māori Papatūānuku and Ranginui. The God Geb and Goddess Nut in the Egyptian tradition follows a deviant pattern in that the masculine deity is assigned the earth while the feminine deity is assigned the sky.
“or return from exceptional Hinge dates only to sigh “BUT, he’s a Capricorn…”” Oh, so that’s why I don’t get second dates! I’ve always assumed it was because I’m a poor excuse for a toxicly masculine piece of excrement that doesn’t belong on the bottom of any woman’s shoe. Silly me, I was just the wrong star sign! Thanks Poppy, I’m all caught up now. Hmm, still doesn’t explain all the weird passive aggression though…
“Lay lines….” ? Hmmmmm