Each image holds a morbid fascination for the camera in Mario Bava’s 1960 Italian-made Black Sunday, and it’s fitting that it should: Bava was previously a cameraman himself, with this film graduated to the position of full-time director, and so would have been acutely aware of the significance of such apertures. Besides, being on the threshold of a new career, who better to articulate the anxiety of ambiguity these images also convey, the sensation of being in neither world entirely but both at once?

Fitting, too, that he should have chosen as his subject matter the story of a woman similarly suspended between worlds, the 17th-Century princess Asa, executed as a witch by her brother but lying in state awaiting her chance to possess the body of another. And since Katia, her descendent in the house of Vajda and object of desire 200 years hence, is herself only recently turned 21 and so on the verge of a major developmental advancement, Asa proves the embodiment of a rather more pervasive borderline psychological status than can be assigned to any one figure in the story or crew.

Bava’s mastery of the film frame extends this sense of undifferentiated anxiety to the viewer. The frequent dollying, zooming, and focusing of his camera and lenses into and toward these abysses serve to pull us across the threshold of the screen itself, effecting an authentic meeting of the minds where the audience may come to recognize, if not always identify, the substance of our shared apprehensions: As Asa to Katia, the movie possesses us, as well.

If Asa is a figurative intermediary, there is a literal, chronological one also in Masha, her descendant a hundred years on and Katia’s equally-spaced ancestor. As such a medium between the two women, Masha suggests a combination of the extremes of female identity implied by the seething libidinous evil of Asa and the purity of Katia, especially as all are given to be the likeness of the actress fulfilling the latter two roles, the British-born Barbara Steele. Since only

passing mention is ever made of this pivotal character in the constellation of Vajda women, however, the attentive viewer’s curiosity is understandably piqued, inviting the same scrutiny Bava affords his other borderline imagery.

Never seen in the flesh like the other women, Masha suggests a spiritual presence, an essence, which we equate with that other woman conspicuous in her absence in the family circle depicted here, Katia’s unmentioned and presumed-dead mother. She is, then, what Madelon Sprengnether has termed the Spectral Mother, in her book of the same name (1990 Cornell University Press, Ithaca), a psychological device bridging the young woman’s transport from girl to

independently-identified adult personality, and the image to which nubile Katia aspires.

Masha’s spiritual aspect is furthered by the circumstances of her death in the family chapel, during an earthquake. As it was on her 21st birthday also that the event occurred, we recognize the seismic impact of the occasion shared by both women and assume the cause of the upheaval to be Asa, again, as it is at the climax of the picture. Taking this medium as our own window onto the past, we may then discover something about what each woman represents in the film universe, as reflected in the mythology that is Katia’s only remaining model for patterning and development in the presence of men and their misconceptions and the absence of a living female model.

As we learn from Barbara L. Walker’s WOMEN’S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MYTHS AND SECRETS (1983 HarperCollins, San Francisco), pre-Celtic tribes saw the figure of Macha as the "Great Queen of Phantoms" (p.563), one aspect of the Irish Triple Goddess including Ana – signifying fertility – and Babd – "life-producing" – sometimes standing for all three. This triplicate division of the Goddess was common in pagan symbology, as in other belief systems, from the three Furies to the similar Fates and Omens, and remembered in such groupings as Bava’s three Vajdas, Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters from Macbeth, Stoker’s vampire brides in DRACULA, and even in the contemporary witch comedies Hocus Pocus and The Witches of Eastwick. Macha, says Walker, "presided over an extensive necropolis" (p.563), her voice "the same dread voice of the Banshee, or woman of the barrow-graves." Since

followers of the Old Religion [i.e., witchcraft] went to her land of death, naturally their spirits inhabited the ancient tombs that also represented her womb of rebirth" (pg.563-564). More apropos of Bava and his screenwriters, perhaps, the name may finally be a derivation of the medieval Latin masca, meaning, besides the pertinent and obvious "mask" – the film’s original Italian title translates into The Mask of the Demon – both "specter" and "witch" as well.

Further back historically, Walker cites the Old Testament book of Isaiah, whose Queen Maachah was banished for her pagan practices by her son – Asa. Despite their similar familial intrigues,

however, little more can be made of the coincidence in names. "Asa" does not appear in the Gogol story commonly credited as Black Sunday’s source, "The Viy," either, though Walker suggests the name may be a variant on the Old Iranian asha, or "Universal Law," which she describes as "a law of the matriarch" (p.66). Other speculation has it as the root of the Semitic Great Goddess Asherah or Egyptian Ashesh, the archaic form of Isis. Whatever the derivation, its connotation is of a uniformly powerful and commanding presence.

Asa’s character as well as name is resonant of other such fierce women, whose histories span cultures and religious doctrines. Foremost among them is Lilith, recalcitrant first mate of Adam in Hebrew legend, described by Claire Douglas in THE WOMAN IN THE MIRROR (1990, Sigo Press, Boston) as "strong, angry, and aggressive," and in archetypal terms as:

Lilith was considered a crossroads goddess, linking her again with the transitional nature of Asa and her sorority of visual metaphors. According to Walker’s DICTIONARY OF SYMBOLS AND SACRED OBJECTS (1988 HarperCollins

San Francisco, p.131), these locations were common sites for Sabbats, "for the reason that in the ancient world crossroads were held sacred by the Goddess Hecate, the Lady of the Underworld in pagan belief, the Queen of Witches in Christian belief." (As with many of their symbols and signs, the cross was appropriated by Christians from the pagans for their own utility.)

Other mythological personifications of the powerful woman include the Hindu Kali, "the Black Mother, the dark mother of night" (Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati in PARABOLA vol.xiii, #2; p.18); Sumerian Inanna, "a lion-goddess of war and a dragon slayer" (Edward Whitmont,RETURN OF THE GODDESS, 1982 Crossroad Publishing, NY, p.134);

Babylonian Tiamat, "the irrational power of the primordial age and the creative unconscious" and "the Great Round that is primordial water, primordial parent, heaven, earth and underworld, merciful and avenging in one" (Erich Neumann, THE GREAT MOTHER; 1955 Princeton University Press, pg.214 and 215); Greek Medusa, "the abyss of transformation… A femme fatale, and belle dame sans merci or witch" (Whitmont, 141); Hera, Mother of the Gods; Hecate, the triple goddess, again, representing the Virgin, Mother, and Crone (read: Katia, Masha, and Asa, respectively); and Galatea, the "Milk-giving goddess" who also gives name to Black Sunday’s production company.

All are basically representations of that monolithic real woman in everyone’s experience, the mother, and the mythical stature she holds in our subconscious.

Remembering that witchcraft began its history as a nature-based religion, the most prominent of these maternal figures would then be Mother Earth herself, the goddess Gaia.

As Neumann describes her (pg. 118 and 125), Gaia was typically depicted half-buried, as is Asa, to illustrate how her womb was in and of the earth. "She is the mistress of the vessel," he writes, "and at the same time the great underworld vessel itself, into which the

dead souls enter, and out of which they fly up again" (p.162). Ancient Egyptian theology saw the Great Earth Goddess similarly, as both the womb out of which life emerges and, like Macha, the physical grave and tomb to which it returns. This former image indicates the one threshold not explicitly depicted in Bava’s iconography but that for which all the others stand, the feminine sex – a portal between worlds. The subject matter of Black Sunday is, then, the centuries-old pent-up rage of a demonized archetypal chthonic force – at once pagan, feminine, sexual and ecological – marshalling its powers and readying to enact its influence on a wayward world once again.

Synopsis:
After a pacesetting prolog in which Asa is executed by her brother for consorting with the warlock Javutich, Bava’s story picks up 200 years later in 1830 Moldavia, with young physician Andrej Gorobec traveling with his mentor Dr. Choma Kruvajan. When their coach breaks down, they find themselves in the mausoleum of the Vajda family where rests the preserved corpse of Asa, which Kruvajan inadvertently and unknowingly reanimates when the inhibiting cross positioned outside a portal on her sarcophagus is broken in a bat attack and some of his blood drips into her eye socket. Outside, they encounter Katia, Asa’s living image, whose father the prince is preoccupied with the family curse which has brother turning against sister and father against daughter to the end of the family line. The resuscitated but still immobile Asa calls Javutich from his grave to murder and enslave Kruvajan, who kills Prince Vajda, the latter attempting to attack his daughter before Javutich kills him and takes her to his mistress. Asa proceeds to exchange energies with Katia until a band of villagers carries the witch to her second and final immolation as Katia and Andrej kiss. The Vajda name has indeed ended, along with its heritage of evil and incestuous in-fighting.

such a far-flung past as two hundred years ago, in film time – four hundred, in real life – the prolog then serves as an elemental, archetypal, possibly even evolutionary preamble, the origin-story of a culture or society, as Black Sunday’s familial setting indicates. So we are well-advised, then, to regard this preamble in depth, as a further window onto the rest of the picture.

The details of the scene are so convoluted, however, as to suggest a deliberate obfuscation, as though the filmmakers were talking around the issue like a cagey, defensive orator whose rhetorical inconsistencies nevertheless lend startling insight into the real intent behind his words. Asa, for instance, is allied by the narrator with

vampires, though Griabi only alludes to vague "evil deeds" in his charges against her. Since she is clearly not dead yet, however, nor undead, and her prescribed form of eradication not the standard staking but the stereotypical device for witches’ execution, burning, the vampirism claim is suspect at best, non-traditional at least. The film’s conflation of vampire and witch, then, creates the impression of not so much confusion between the two as a disinclination to distinguish between them, Asa’s straying from conventional ideology a putative drain on the mainstream for whom Griabi appears to speak.

Asa’s affiliation with her accuser is further complicated by the figure of Javutich. As Tim Lucas’s commentary to the

1999 Image Entertainment DVD release of the film points out, Ennio de Concini and editor Mario Serandrei’s script indicates Javutich as the "brother of the witch," which would explain the Vajda family crest on his mantle and fill in the gap in Griabi’s self-description as the "second-born son of Prince Vajda." It also reinterprets Asa’s "monstrous love for that serf of the devil" Javutich as incest, and leaves room for Lucas’s conjecture that Griabi might be using his position as Grand Inquisitor to make a play for the throne ahead of both his siblings. This is not too far a stretch considering the possible model for this backstory in the similar drama of Maachah and her adopted son as well as the political motives for all too many such accusations made during the European and American

witchhunts.

Despite all the insinuation and double-talk, however, three simple critical elements stand out: 1) the sororicide of the princess; 2) the method by which this is accomplished; and 3) the landscape against which all of this takes place.

In the first case, Griabi’s hints at incest underscore the lack of a Father or Mother figure in this cauldron of primal impulses, indicating the absence of an authenticating, "normal" force of Eros in the world. If Griabi is both familial and ecclesiastical Brother in this scenario, then the locus of his furor is apparently not only his physical, but a spiritual Sister as well, the pagan, feminine aspect of his own personality whose destruction will elicit repercussions all through history in the curse Asa levies on their descendents. And though the weight of redemption falls on Katia’s shoulders later, it will take a reversal of this opening scene, the sacrifice of Katia’s brother Constantin, to make this possible – a seemingly open admission of the wrong done despite Griabi’s murderous self-confidence.

Griabi’s fervor is topped off by the form his execution takes, the pounding onto Asa’s face of a spike-lined iron mask of Satan, about as clear a demonstration of "demonization" as has been committed to film. (Javutich receives the same

punishment, though offscreen; his execution not being part of the spectacle lends the impression that it is only auxiliary, complementary – not the point.) The vindication of this oracular figure in such later Bava pictures as Hercules in the Haunted World, Knives of the Avenger, Kill Baby…Kill!, Ecologia del Delitto, and, to an extent, the "Drop of Water" segment of Black Sabbath, lends credence to such a reading, indicating that the viewer should by no means take Griabi at his word.

This act of repression Bava takes as an act of liberation, however, his assault on the eye an asterisk to equally convulsive scenes of ocular violence in such precursors as Battleship Potemkin, Un

Chien Andalou and Horrors of the Black Museum. It’s an indication that we are about to experience a new way of seeing through the destruction of the old, which he emphasizes by having the camera pass through the eye of the mask itself as it is brought up to Asa’s face, as though traversing a Cocteauvian looking-glass.

Finally, we consider the atmosphere in which all this unravels, a desolated, desiccated anti-Eden befitting such gothic In-the-Beginning. The influence of Bava’s imagery here was immediate, with at least two other films that year, Roger Corman’s House of Usher and John Moxey’s Horror Hotel, replicating its fogbound landscape of scorched earth and twisted, dead trees, indicating a sterile world which here is over before the movie has barely begun. Assuming this

world to be a holistic one, how the terrain got this way would have something to do with the confinement of such a fecundating eroticism as Asa embodies, since her and Javutich’s execution does nothing to remedy the situation. (The later film is careful to distinguish between the Vajda estate and that of the commoners shown much affection by Bava and company, an antidote to the pro-bourgeois leanings of the Hammer horrors that were a primary influence on the picture and a heritage, perhaps, of Bava’s Russian source material.)

This exterior landscape is, of course, a mirror for the interior. Just as the Church was at that time involved in, as Ken Wilber puts it, "a war on two fronts: fighting regression to magic, and fighting supercession by

science" (SEX, ECOLOGY, SPIRITUALITY; 1995 Shambhala, Boston, p.244), the power struggle in Black Sunday describes a maturational conflict between fanciful childhood on the one side and rational, responsible adulthood on the other. While men typically engage in this project via the Dragon Fight indicated by the device on the Vajda crest – a triumph over and separation from the forces of mother, nature and femininity – womanhood is commonly achieved through identification and communion with those qualities. The effects of their repression by the relative opposite forces of father, civilization and patriarchy, however, will be the conundrum Bava’s characters will need to resolve if the landscape is to be restored to its presumed former efflorescence.

In order to understand what, exactly, Asa exemplifies as a woman and a witch, therefore, first a look at the history of witches and witchcraft throughout western culture, and what this says about the perception of women by the men who mostly constructed it.

The term itself, "witch," derives from the Middle English wicce, or wit – to know. This sage quality hints also at the earthy remedies for which she was originally recognized, as the village Wise Woman, or Saga – physician. In fact, it was from just such a medicinal herb that she acquired another of her epithets, Bella Donna – a beneficent poison, as we will see Asa to be, in time. So it makes all the sense in the world that the notorious "Inquisition" that began in the 15th Century should have directed so much interest and attention to this "knowledgeable" figure, a recognition that the wisdom their genocidally troubled minds might have been inquiring after lay in the identity of a supernaturally sentient female.

Wilber (p.183), traces the Saga’s history back a million years to the horticultural societies for whom the female deity was as much a given as today’s male. This divinity was in large part due to women’s fertility and the ignorance of men to their own role in conception, so that the female appeared to be the same self-regenerating mystery as the earth she worked with her hoe. Though her role in the divine sphere diminished with her counterpart’s realization of his own place in the reproductive cycle and his acquisition of more – and more sophisticated – tools, the great Renaissance physician Paracelsus, for one, acknowledged that "he had learned from the Sorceress all he knew" (Jules Michelet, SATANISM AND WITCHCRAFT; Citadel Press, Secaucus, p.xi), while Emile Brouette in "The Sixteenth Century and Satanism" (from SATAN, edited by Père Bruno de Jesus-Marie; 1952 Sheed and Ward, New York, p.321) credits her art with the development of what Joseph Campbell has called the basis of all intellectual culture, astrology.

The earth-based religion from which the Sorceress arose and for which she served as High Priestess was eventually

overthrown by the patriarchal religions, whose need to control those pagan tendencies contributed to the Inquisition’s inception. It was at about this time that, according to Selma Williams (in RIDING THE NIGHT MARE: Women and Witchcraft; 1978 Macmillan & Co., p.x), "the stereotype of the fire-breathing old witch overwhelmed the image of women as benign Earth Mother, Lady Abbess, or effective queen" and new legends of Lilith and the Amazons arose. Consequently, as the species matured and grew away from this ancient and powerful mother figure, it found, like many an adolescent male, that it had to demonize her in order to cauterize the wound of separation, making of the earth she represented evil also ("Hell is beneath our feet," as Susan Griffin

notes) and all matter on it a thing to be transcended in his quest for the now male, heavenly spirit that was his new ideal.

So the witch hunts, which, Ronald Seth documents in his 1969 IN THE NAME OF THE DEVIL (1969 Tower Books, New York), "began in 1450 and lasted for 300 years," an invention intended "to provide work for an Inquisition that was threatened with unemployment" ca. 1375 (p.10). By Seth’s estimation, in excess of 200,000 were executed in all – over 100,000 in Germany alone; in France, nearly the same – though Raven Grimassi, in ITALIAN WITCHCRAFT (1995 Llewellyn Publications, St. Paul), tells us that it was mainly the organized groups that the Church opposed: "The salutary village Witch was generally tolerated" (p.xv), thanks to her role as healer and counselor. It was the coven that

Montague Summers – an apologist for the Church – accuses, also, of being in political league against the throne and so the target of King James’s fury. Though James later re-evaluated his position on witchcraft, it was only after publishing his DAEMONOLOGIE in 1597, which, according to Seth, started a wave of persecution in Scotland that contributed to the burning of 4400 men and women (p.67).

As both Griffin (in WOMAN AND NATURE; 1978 Sierra Club, San Francisco) and Chellis Glendinning (MY NAME IS CHELLIS AND I'M IN RECOVERY FROM WESTERN CIVILIZATION; 1994 Shambhala, Boston) postulate, the history of witch torment

parallels the struggle of civilization to rise against its superstitious roots. Griffin (p.17) offers a grim and often absurd timeline juxtaposing the development of math and the sciences with the execution of purported "witches" from Joan of Arc in 1431 to Anna Maria Schnagel in 1775, demonstrating that the more man denies his own "instinctive…creative…erotic" side (paraphrasing Douglas on Lilith), the more woman burns. Glendinning similarly parallels these atrocities with the Western development of a "linear perspective" – a "way of seeing the world that is based on distancing and detachment" (p.59), as opposed to the fluid, pagan philosophy of relation and engagement

with the phenomenal world. "Eventually," she reports, "hundreds of thousands of people – mostly women, mothers, and healers – would be hanged, drowned, or burned in town squares all across Europe for nothing more than seeing life from the old, elliptical, nature-based perspective" (p.59).

The figurehead of this drive toward civilization was the patriarchal Church, which saw practitioners of the Old Religion as political enemies to be overcome the same way politicians have always abolished their opponents – by discrediting and demonization, and by replacing the old myths with myths of their own. Thus the legends of St. Patrick driving the snakes – symbolic of the

Cobra Goddess once worshiped by pagan peoples – out of Ireland, and St. George’s similar defeat of the dragon. This latter tale, not coincidentally, figures in Black Sunday’s crest, which is emblazoned on Javutich’s vest as on the Vajda hearth, and in the icon of St. George found on Asa’s body; it is on his Feast Day that Asa was executed and on which the contemporary drama resumes. Finally, the 1484 creation of Innocent VIII’s Bull, CSUMMIS DESIDERANTES AFFECTIBUS – "the papal declaration of war against witchcraft" (Herbert Thurston, "The Church and Witchcraft"; SATAN, p. 304) – led to the drawing up of that other notorious treatise, the MALLEUS

MALEFICARUM, or WITCHES’ HAMMER, which Thurston again credits as "the standard of procedure [for the treatment of witches] in the civil and ecclesiastical courts" (p.304).

Part of a rising tide of anti-feminism, screeds such as the MALLEUS – written by a pair of Dominican monks – and the TRACTATUS DE CONFESIONIBUS MALEFICARUM ET SAGARUM – "the chief handbook for Protestant and Catholic witchhunters alike" (Seth, 101) – made it clear that the real enemy was not just the heretic, but woman herself; feminine sexuality, especially. Griffin paraphrases the MALLEUS by stating, "all witchcraft comes from carnal lust which is in woman insatiable," and Mario Jacoby in LONGING FOR PARADISE (1985 Sigo Press,

Boston; pg. 72-73) reinforces this impression, noting that throughout the Brothers’ work, "sexual motivations emerge with remarkable clarity" (p.73).

Why woman should be so singled out as susceptible to the allure of the craft was, according to Brouette’s reading of the texts, that:

With such instruments at their disposal, then, the Inquisitors – at first met with great skepticism and apathy – were

after decades of campaigning finally taken seriously.

As a result, according to Michelet, 7000 "heretics" were "burned at Trèves…at Geneva five hundred in three hours; eight hundred at Wurzburg…and fifteen hundred at Bamburg" (p.xi). "The Attorney General of Lorraine," adds Seth, "Nicholas Remy, personally sentenced 900 to death between 1581 and 1591, while two decades later Judge Pierre de Lancre, sent to the Pays de Labourd…found all 30,000 of the inhabitants infected with witchcraft" (p.127). The executioner of Neisse, in Silesia, himself invented an oven "in which, in 1651, he roasted forty-two women and young girls, and in the next 9 years raised the total to over one thousand."

Few writers give a very detailed account of how the witchhunts came to end. Michelet describes some of the refutations of such ideology that were published at the time, and credits "The Apostle of Toleration, Chatillon" with "[starting] men’s minds on a better path" (p. [144-147]) while others such as "Agrippa, Lavalier, [and] Wyer" kept the argument moving. Still, it was to be another 200 years before Louis XIV would put an end to prosecutions in

France, and another 30 years for England to do the same. Which is not to say that witches, and women, are safe even today from the potshots of spiritually deranged men. Considering the lengths to which the Catholic contributors to SATAN go to apologize for the admittedly anti-feminine practices and beliefs which allowed their Church to participate in the historical mass-murder of its subjects, the volume yet has room for voices like Thurston’s to proclaim, "That such a thing as witchcraft exists or has existed in the world no Christian can deny who believes his Bible to be the inspired Word of God" and that "it is difficult to believe that the incriminating details confessed by the accused have always been elicited by the fear of torture" (p.300; throughout the text, editor Jesus-Marie reveals his bias by referring to the victims of such aggressions as "witches" – not, say, victims, or even, simply, men and women). As recently as 1994, Pope John Paul II went out of his way to condemn nature worship among the women of his flock, while two years earlier another religious leader, Pat Robertson of the Christian Coalition,

was denouncing the feminist movement in a fundraising letter as "a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft [italics mine], destroy capitalism, and become lesbians." That estimable decade also saw the publication of Texe Marrs’ BIG SISTER IS WATCHING YOU: Hillary Clinton and the White House Feminists Who Now Control America – and Tell the President What to Do (1993,Riverside Publishing), which one discount book distributor’s catalog described as putting forth the theory "that a coven of powerful women are determined to undermine the present government, end American sovereignty, and bring about global Marxism."

Three hundred years later, and the witchhunts continue.

WHEN A MOVIE skips forward in time the way Black Sunday does from prologue to film-present day – and especially when the leap is as drastic as it is here – the implication is that the resuming narrative is taking place in the

same mental space as before, even if the temporal situation has changed. The body may have moved on, but the mind remains stuck. Asa’s curse then plays as a sort of post-hypnotic suggestion triggered by the discovery of her suitably preserved corpse, she the relic of a bygone day which refuses to succumb to the decay of forgetting until resolved in the chamber of the mind in which it resides.

Into this landscape, who should arrive but a pair of physicians – healing agents – cabbing their way to a "convention;" that is, to assimilation into the larger cultural framework, typically represented by a marriage. That it is a young man and his

In SEX…, Wilber regards all such attractors in teleological terms – the forces pulling an object or idea from its inception to its omega point, or conclusion. Each stage along the way contains and envelopes the previous one in a

concentric pattern of emanation as the system or organism continually supersedes itself, as in the earth’s generation of life and that life’s subsequent evolution. Such transcendence is achieved, he says, through "a constant conversion of 'otherworldly' into 'this worldly'" – of potential into reality – via a process of integration. The interaction of the supernatural with the natural world in fantasy films promotes just this sort of spiritual advancement, Katia’s final, fleeting possession by the resurrected Asa the "conversion" and "integration" of the "other" world into this one to which the entire film from prologue on up has been leading.

Intervention on such a process, however, can result in pathology – a

"derailment," as Wilber puts it, of the system on its way to realization, as the doctors on their interrupted journey. Differentiation – of male from female, self from other – in the development of consciousness, for example, is a desirable goal, though differentiation taken to extreme leads to the maladjustment of dissociation, whose effects can be

far-reaching and severe. For Wilber, the Enlightenment dissociation of mind and nature – the principle known as dualism – represented a crucial detour in the growth of human consciousness, creating a schism between not only these elements but between such corollary concepts as heaven and earth, holy and unholy, mind and body, and, ultimately, man and woman. Glendinning, citing Paul Shepard, locates the origin of this split in humanity’s self-domestication and removal from the animal world (p.60), though all are reflective, perhaps, of that primal separation on departing the womb, the original symbiotic environment as recounted in the biblical story of Eden. So it’s no mystery that Black Sunday should begin with just such a separation, between Asa and her beloved. Her curse is a

dysfunctional way of dealing with a thwarted teleology, an acting-out against the wrong done in the shadowed, historical past.

The seemingly peripheral detail of Javutich’s execution preceding Asa’s lends itself to at least two interpretations. The

woman’s loss of a powerful masculine presence in her makeup – traditionally referred to as the animus, a mythical figure of agency and potential – leaves her inert and waiting for fecundation, like the winter earth awaiting spring rains. Since we’re dealing with the product of an all-male creative team, however, Javutich’s masked corpse sparks additional associations. At once, it suggests the dreamer who has already abandoned his body at the start of the fantasy, to be represented in the dream by a likeness or simulacrum – or, alternatively, the husk of a particular facet of that personality shucked and put on display in order to be regarded objectively. Given Asa’s maternal associations as well as the incestuous intimations of Griabi,

we may then see Javutich as the discarded, mother-identified child-self lost at a similarly convulsive point in development, much like Katia’s Masha.

As Wilber puns, "That which was dis-membered must be re-membered" (p.330) before transcendence may occur – the reason Black Sunday begins in the past, and why that past remains so persistent throughout. It is essential therefore that Katia and Andrej come together, their meeting spurring Javutich’s arousal out of hibernation in order to bring about the resolution of his undead character, as Wilber sees Eros – that sighing "organ," again – as the motive force behind all such reparations.

A blood relative of Agape, Eros is the element in human nature desiring a hand up, which Agape proffers. If this does not occur, Wilber maintains, Eros will manifest itself instead as Phobos – fear – and Agape as Thanatos, the death drive. Such is the condition that obtains throughout Bava’s film, Griabi’s rejection rather than emulation of his siblings’

erotic attraction resulting in, or consonant with, the pathology of his own political ambitions and the poisonous atmosphere this generates.

The thesis to which Wilber’s immense and multidisciplinary study itself is drawn is that, due to a similarly pathological diversion from our primal earth-consciousness, our Erotic relationship to the biosphere and all it implies – from matter and nature to woman and our own animal being – has turned Phobic; witness all the modern nature-in-revolt films, from The Birds on through The Day After Tomorrow. The failure of integration of this Eros (Asa) with its brother Agape (or stewardship of the earth, where its exemplar

Javutich now resides) demonstrates itself in terms of our current, Thanatoxic relationship to the planet, which Wilber hopes to help correct by reintegrating the several disciplines thrown into conflict by this seminal split. If we are ever to achieve his "centauric," or holistic, integrated form of consciousness, then, we will need to bring the mind and soul back into the body, god back into the earth, and reunite the male and female within – much of which happens, symbolically, by the end of Black Sunday.

Bava’s 360º camera pan around the interior of Asa’s tomb goes some way to address this need for unity by reinforcing the mandalic sense of wholeness the place suggests – a womblike oneness of time, identity, and the cosmos. The overriding impression of the setting, however, is as a chamber of the mind, the focal point of which is Asa’s sarcophagus, perched atop an altar as if to convey its "religious" significance to the men drawn toward it. It’s a shrine to man’s half-buried, mythological image of Woman and Mother combined, most

significantly of the Feminine Within – the Witch and the Vampire men try to suppress but whose allure none can resist for ever. Thus the cross positioned outside the coffin window, as later between Katia’s breasts (an echo of The Thing That Couldn’t Die’s similarly repressive talisman), placed there not to keep the vampire away, but to keep her in – in the past, the subconscious, and the Self, alike.

Against all nature – not to mention reason – a giant bat attacks Kruvajan here. As with all such irrational occurrences we can only read it metaphorically, as an

A further reading would indicate this glass as the camera lens or screen fixing Asa, like the audience, in frozen, "dead,"

unseeing contemplation of the conditions which contributed to her situation there. When Bava ruptures this membrane between us as he had done with his earlier passing-through-the-mask movement, he again lets us know that his movie is coming after us – that it, like Asa herself, is free now to invade our minds as she does Katia’s, and we will be obliged then to deal with her and its meaning at last, as her persecutors had historically not done.

Entombed with Asa is the icon of St. George, who slew a dragon to save a princess. Besides its conquering Christian subtext, the myth is also symbolic of the male child’s sublimation of his own primal femininity and mother-attachment – the dragon – in

observation of George’s feast day, on which the story proper begins, takes place on April 23rd, suggesting the battle as another heroic allegory for the renewal of spring. The Russian Orthodox celebration more pertinent to the characters themselves, though, is on November 3rd, marking the end of what Italian tradition has as a three-day visitation of the dead on earth – the film’s approximate time span.

The icon proposes not so much another talisman, however, like the cross, as a contiguity, an association between the opposing symbols of Christianity and paganism in an obscure recess of the mind. (The Exorcist begins similarly, with the discovery of both a pagan fetish and an icon of a saint in the same archaeological dig.) Kruvajan’s

removal of the item plays as a plundering of the goddess’s chamber akin to the one that opens Bava’s previous, uncredited co-directorial effort, Caltiki, the Immortal Monster, which is alluded to again when the doctor’s glass-wound drips blood into Asa’s eye socket much the same way Caltiki was fecundated or enriched by her lover

above, a comet passing through the heavens. The preceding lifting off of the satanic mask reveals the multiply-punctured face of the vampire – the spectacle of the sexualized mother – a shock effect repeated at the climax of the film when Asa’s garment is torn to expose her hideous and similarly cavernous skeletal insides: the horror of the female sex in general, paralleling the blasted landscape without.

As if by invocation, the separation of the dragonslayer-image from the "dragon" and the removal of the demonizing façade from the body of the woman yields the appearance of young, very much alive Katia in the doorway, at dawn, on Sunday: on three separate

Phoenix-like rising from the ashes. Standing iconically with two leashed hounds, she suggests a woman in control of her animal nature, adding to the surprise that she is, in reality, the troubled victim of events and of a family history well beyond her mastery. The introduction of her character completes the complex of identities implicit in the dual initials of both Asa/Andrej and Katia/Kruvajan, demonstrating the mirroring of all personae within a single, multifaceted personality.

Reflective of the figurative family unit drawn here with the elder Kruvajan and two children is the actual family introduced in the next scene, significantly gathered around the dragon-crested fireplace. There is a rich tradition surrounding the hearth and its place in

Mediterranean as well as Wiccan culture. It was sacred to the goddess Vesta – Greek Hestia, symbolic guardian of images – whom Ovid saw as a "living flame," and was supposed by her followers "to provide access to the spirits of ancestors now dwelling in the underworld" (Walker, WOMEN’S DICTIONARY, p.400), which it truly does here when it is discovered to conceal a passageway to the ruined chapel and crypt housing Asa’s body. (This motif is picked up from an earlier uncredited co-directorial effort with nominal Caltiki director Riccardo Freda, I Vampiri.) Set at either side of the portal to this catacomb are the portraits of none other than Asa and Javutich, separated, as ever, by the flames of their desire.

Grimassi tells us that the fireplace was the center of the house in Pagan Italy and the site of the Tuscan custom of the veglia. Here children would be told fairy tales "intended to merge the child into Tuscan community" while adolescents would be taught about their ancestors "in order to establish a sense of who they are and who they had been." All

would share stories of their "religious beliefs and customs, in order to preserve their traditions" (p.18). The clustering of these various narratives around a single image serves to connect them, then, suggesting the fairy tale as another form of the myth whose purpose, according to Wilber, was to glorify and strengthen the clan. All come into play in Vajda’s recounting of the family history while brooding before the firelight, as again soon after when detailing the unhappy circumstances of "mythical" Masha’s demise.

Vajda’s ruminative character reminds us that the Latin term for hearth is focus, which would have been of interest to Bava the

cinematographer, for whom the camera was certainly the center of his film-world. As Barbara Kirksey illuminates in her article "Hestia: a Background of Psychological Focusing" (FACING THE GODS, James Hillman, ed. 1980 Spring Publications, Dallas., p.108), the first modern use of the term was by Kepler in relation to "the burning point of a lens or mirror," indicating the primacy of the fireplace setting to the familial drama around which it centers as well as the immediacy of the burning-scenes at the beginning and end of the picture. The prince’s attitude before the fire thus suggests a bringing into clarity which the rest of the movie carries through, climaxing as it does with the optically-achieved effect of Katia’s transformation into Asa. This magnifying-glasslike concentration on a given object reaches its own burning point when the traditional villagers arrive with torches ablaze to consign the witch to her pyre once again, as it is light also which illuminates the image in the frame.

Kirksey considers imagery of this center in terms of the navel, equating the familiar contemplation by the fire with "navel gazing." This gains in import when taken with Grimassi’s observation that pagan cultures used to place newborns’ umbilical cords beneath the foundation of the hearth, whose logs tended to come from the base of the tree

to further symbolize the family’s roots. In this way, then, Vajda is indeed contemplating the family’s origins through what he doesn’t know is an umbilical passage back to the womb of their ruined spirituality. Bava’s linking of this scene from the last with a shot of the bubbling back to tumescence of Asa’s eyeballs implies that Kruvajan’s blood may have planted the seed for her revival, but Vajda’s focused "brooding" – in the sense of incubation – is what has truly restored her to life.

Though the Vajda family itself seems stable and loving, there is a contrast between the judgment meted out to them via the filmmakers’ plotting and design and the fate befalling the peasants living just outside

their realm. In particular, we are given the unnamed village girl introduced in the next scene, played by Germana Dominici, a 13 year-old lookalike for Barbara Steele. When the girl is sent out into the night to fetch some milk, the audience fears the worst for her, knowing how far the film has already demonstrated it is willing to go for a shock. This fear is compounded by the fact that at that moment Javutich is about to claw his way out of his grave in the cemetery adjacent to the barn. Accompanied by Asa’s verbal urgings to "Rise, Javutich, rise!" his arousal suggests an erection inspired by her feminine attraction – all going on behind the village girl’s back, the window behind her to which Bava’s camera is ineluctably drawn like a peephole onto her pubescent unconscious. Even though there is further upset awaiting her shortly after, the payoff to this sequence is in the fact that nothing happens to her: Bava is playing with the audience, but he is also clearly unwilling to let evil directly touch this innocent.

The purity of the milk imagery is picked up in the girl’s next scene, when she is found washing clothing at the riverside. After the heavy gothicism of the film until then, the brilliance of the daylight, the openness of the surroundings and freshness of the scenery compared to the barren Vajda landscape seem almost out of place, though the poignancy of the sequence is essential to the balance of the picture. The flowing, spirited vitality of the life depicted here, rich with children and activity, plays against the moodiness of the entrenched upper class, offering telling counterpoint to their

surface nobility – a façade Bava will quickly dispense with now that Javutich is on the scene.

When the white shirt the girl is washing, reiterative of the whiteness of the milk, is taken by the current, it leads to the carcass of coachman Boris, killed the night before so Javutich could transport the unwitting Kruvajan to the Vajda estate. As a direct consequence of family history, the corpse suggests a pollutant corrupting the public waters, the mansion a dark factory dumping its wastes into the townspeople’s real and psychic backyards – again, a motif derived from I Vampiri and foretelling, perhaps, Bava’s own later Ecologia del Delitto, or Ecology of Crime, featuring

another matriarchal Gaia-figure being brutally executed in its opening minutes. The discovery of the body here, a sad pastoral on the realization of mortality not unlike such later works as River’s Edge, Boyz N the Hood and Stand by Me, suggests a loss of innocence already hinted at in the girl’s previous-night witnessing of the ghostly coach ride. It’s also descriptive of Katia’s sexual maturity, Javutich’s arising the emergence out of the dirty earth of the same kind of pagan eroticism as got him buried in the first place.

Kruvajan’s seduction back to the Vajda house to tend the ailing Prince is again at the apparent psychic urging of Vajda himself, acting through Asa acting through Javutich. In the film’s most dreamlike setpiece, Javutich leads him through winding catacombs ever at an unreachable distance until his lantern is all that remains, hanging in midair, and then goes out. The doctor finds his way to the center – or focus – of the maze, which happens to be Asa’s crypt, reinforcing again its centrality to the issues at stake in the movie. There he finds her with eyes engorged, reintroducing the theme of discovery that had informed the young girl’s adventures.

Like the hearth, the labyrinth is another architectural conceit beloved of the ancients for its spiritual and allegorical resonance. Not for nothing was it seen to resemble the folds and patterns of the brains or intestines, for a journey into the labyrinth was a descent into both the self and the interior of the feminine unknown, one’s emergence a rebirth, restored and transformed. It was a favored device also of Bava’s, from its similar hearth-connection in I Vampiri and The Whip and the Body to its visual and metaphorical allusions in the tailchasing climax to Kill Baby…Kill! and the dense narrative perambulations of Lisa and the Devil.

Historically, according to Penelope Reed Doob in THE IDEA OF THE LABYRINTH (1990 Cornell University Press, Ithaca), the maze once figured in Easter rituals of the Middle Ages. There, the delving of its mysteries reiterated Christ’s harrowing of hell, which was itself a recounting of the slaying of the Cretan Minotaur, the outcome of

which was the promise of life everlasting that is spring. Initiation ceremonies frequently involved labyrinths as well, their wandering marking the passage through puberty into adulthood. As Seonaid M. Robertson has it in ROSEGARDEN AND LABYRINTH (1982 Spring Publications, Dallas, p.132), these rites often involved the search for or discovery of "now a Lost Mother, now a Dead Father, now a Hidden Brother" – each of which factor into Sunday’s plot.

The word "labyrinth" stems from the Latin labor intus, or inner work; our term maze derives from the Middle English amased, for "out of one’s mind, irrational, foolish" (Doob, p.98), from which we also get the similar amazed. A synonym in many texts was the domus daedeli,

or Daedalus’s house, for the genius who created the first labyrinth to keep the hybrid offspring of Queen Pasiphae’s illicit union with a bull, reminding us that every such structure has an architect, a purpose and a solution. The concept has been likened to, variously: paganism – the circuitousness of heathen thought being antithetical to the "straight path"of Christianity; Christianity – God himself an impenetrable mystery whose many twists and turns describe a logic and a wonder inscrutable to mortals; the female genitals, in Italian literature – particularly Bocaccio and Boreompagno da Signa (Doob, p.170); and snakes – the Mother-Goddess as Snake Goddess being the deity of Knossos, whose caves one entered to be purified by Mother Earth.

There are basically two types of labyrinth: the unicursal, consisting of one entrance and one exit, following a single, winding path throughout, and the multicursal, involving a series of ambages and errores which may trap the wanderer within. By ambages, Doob means "the circuitous labyrinthine process itself," from the Latin ambo, meaning "two" or "both," and related to ambiguitas, for "roundabout" or "equivocation" (p.53); errores refers to the labyrinth’s many blind alleys, wrong turns, or dead ends equally intended to befuddle. It is an ambiguous space, part of a process one goes through in order to either come out the other side or to retrace one’s steps after confronting the undifferentiated image at its center. As Doob points out, each type serves a similar purpose, "to carry the wanderer over just the right territory to achieve something that could not have been reached by a direct route" (p.56). It may seem arbitrary and entrapping from the inside but remarkable for the ingenuity of its design on overview.

Of course, Bava’s film is a labyrinth as well, from its physical properties – the celluloid reel resembling the architectural structure in overview – to its welter of plot threads involving the distant and intermediate past, familial intrigues, class relations, the vampire/witch conundrum, romantic involvements, and the twists and turns of everyone's personal psychology. Along the path from beginning to end – the film actually climaxing in its architectural center – are several seeming blind alleys as well in the question of Katia’s absent mother, the episodes with the peasant girl, Kruvajan’s meaningless death, and the dead Prince’s incestuous advances on his daughter. No wonder that perhaps the signature example of the film-as-labyrinth came out shortly after Black Sunday’s release, Last Year at Marienbad, with its similar reflexes along time frames and character interactions.

If Black Sunday is a labyrinth, Bava, then, would be its Daedalus. Taking the Cretan maze as a model, we might therefore consider the dual purposes of his "domus": What it was built to contain, and What the wanderer may hope to achieve by delving it.

To the first point, the mind erects many such systems of circumlocution and self-deception in order to isolate alternately precious or threatening memories or ideas from the self, only to have them breach these walls or seduce us inward in dreams. That the existence of this passageway is a surprise to the family which has lived here continuously at least two hundred years suggests something of the superficial nature of their character, ignorant of both the tangible face of desire as well as the mechanics connecting them to this elemental reality. In his commentary to the DVD of The Whip and the Body (VCI Entertainment, 2000), Lucas suggests the particular material the director may be

sequestering here when he refers to the Bava family’s ties to Mussolini and his deep shame concerning them, that film’s castle and the corrupt clan that inhabits it expressive of the director’s feelings toward his country and its fascist former leaders. The holding of the Minotaur Asa within the sepulchral heart of the Vajda estate then represents a similar concept, the structure as well as film having been designed to house this powerful force born of the repression it simultaneously embodies.

On the issue of intent there are at least two threads, woven together in the figure of the elder Kruvajan, a questing self going where the primary personality cannot. His discovery at the center of this maze

Not that this "soul" image is distinct from physicality, either, according to pagan theology, for finding Asa provides both a missing link in the women's attainment of sexual maturity as well as a recognition of the forces keeping this potential at bay. As Castillejo says, "Life insists on being lived, and anything else that belongs to one’s life which is allowed to lie dormant has to be lived by someone else" (p.41). It’s the psychological phenomenon of projection, and that "someone" turns out to be Asa. Not coincidentally, then, the scene climaxes with the explosion of the sarcophagus from around her corpse, the freeing of this awesome, if still paralyzed, energy out into the world.

For Andrej, her discovery suggests the intuition of a great change of his own to take place in the ending, the identification of a repressed feminine force within himself, as well. The emergence of this irrational erotic power

serves to overwhelm the cold, scientific faculty when Asa compels Kruvajan to submit to her will. "My lips will transform you," she promises, and transform him they do – into a halfworld being like herself, feminizing his iconic masculine persona so Andrej may more easily take his place both literally and figuratively in the action to follow.

In exchange for this lost father-figure, Andrej receives two brothers, in the form of Katia’s sibling Constantin and the elder monk he turns to for counsel when called to the castle on Kruvajan's abandonment of the Prince and disappearance after his death. At first met with chilliness, Constantin and his developing friendship with Andrej signals

an amelioration of the filial jealousy between Griabi and Javutich, fulfilled by the younger Vajda’s act of sacrifice in the end. As the religious Brother, on the other hand, is played by a 36-year-old actor in an obvious prop beard meant to age him – a device Bava would again employ in Whip – he suggests both the hero’s own borderline maturity (he is Andrej’s Masha) and the Spiritual Father risen from the ashes of the two dead physical ones.

The rapid flowering of Andrej and Katia’s regard for each other suggests an a priori knowledge or familiarity, as though each had recognized in the other a facet of themselves. They are in love, in the purest sense of the term: immersed in a romantic, mystical presence, and participating in a larger reality than their own individual one. Having reached the limits of each their own selves, as demonstrated by Katia’s fatalistic speech and the depressed setting in which their relationship is nurtured, in the Vajdas’ ruined garden, they now seek to transcend their mutual

confinements, like Asa her combusting coffin. Their first private dialogue takes place by a fountain reminiscent of the river and suggestive of a still-flowing font at the heart of the family’s nobility, opposite the tortured psyche of the hearth. Here, Katia confesses to feeling she is "being destroyed from the inside." She is desirous of new life, which Andrej, presumably, will plant there once what is inside – Asa; her own wanton, erotic self – is brought to the surface and incorporated into conscious life.

Andrej’s reassurances to her of a "light" that "will pierce the darkness" are literalized in the next scene, in which butler Ivan’s lancing of an ignited curtain leads to the discovery of a secret

passageway to Asa’s crypt behind the portrait of Javutich. It’s a metaphor for the opening up of so many other elements of the film as well, recalling, first, the peasant girl’s riverside discovery by the similar device of a piece of cloth. The winding of the labyrinth evokes the meandering stream and contrasts again the flowing water with the hearth flame, which Grimassi tells us was a symbol of the spirits of the Old Religion, passing through it an initiatory rite after the fashion of the Orphic<