Melusine as Emblem of Truth: Philosophical tentacles, themes and approaches explored in the audiovisual essay The Mystery of Melusine

Abstract

This article introduces the philosophical underpinnings, themes and approaches explored in the audiovisual essay The Mystery of Melusine (2021). Its footage consists of a dramatic performance in which I am enacting the contents of a philosophical poem authored by myself as the titular character. The narrative of the film essay explores the nature of truth and espouses an ontology of magic through a re-interpretation of the myth of Melusine. In European folklore, Melusine is the reclusive and mysterious wife who agrees to marry upon the condition that she is granted her privacy every Saturday. On Saturdays, she spends her solitude secretly bathing her fish tail until one day her husband peeps through the keyhole of her bathing chamber. She learns he has broken his promise to not impede her privacy, and so she evanesces. In my film essay, Melusine is a metaphor for the secretiveness and elusiveness of truth, and the way life unfurls itself in secretive and clandestine ways. The notion of truth as elusive and secretive derives its inspiration from the philosopher Martin Heidegger, and this film essay can be considered a mythic interpretation of some of his ideas. In addition to a mythic interpretation of truth, the film essay provides a narrative for the way life meets itself through otherness and recounts the journey of personal transformation in which the querent must reconcile to truth; this is elaborated as a process of self-seeing and self-recognition that takes place through the alien other.