Medusa's Theogenesis

Naked and cold, Eros falls helplessly to the end as Thanatos sits pained in a tortured silence. Gianni Versace knew this in his final years, when he was struck down with an illness. Long walks on Miami beach, seeing nothing reflected in shimmering water. Too tired to fuck, what was it for now? Eros, to which he had dedicated his life and brand to, was being shown for all its emptiness as Gianni faced the end. The statues grew hollow, the gold fell to water, the sex gave no pleasure. Eros, the arborescent growing beauty of life was falling apart at his feet with the end just inches from him.

As the human soul, the sexual life-energy, the Eros behind the Versace brand, Gianni would meet his end in 1997 at the hands of his Thanatos, Andrew Cunanan. At the apex of a killing spree stretching across the nation, tearing through the closeted-gay community, leaving four men dead and exposed in a metaphor to the uniquely desiccating death of AIDS, he approached Gianni at the base of Medusa’s palace and gunned him down before Andrew himself faded into nothing, disintegrating a few days later into the ocean.

When a binary pair of matching parabolic arcs is drawn, an ellipsoid forms, within which is a filled shape consisting of all numbers bounded between the two arcs. In a literary context, this becomes the basic theory behind one form of the mandala, a cosmological chart drawn by a filling-in between two opposite trajectories. Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow shows this elegantly, with the structural metaphor of the Herero village and the V-2 informing the meaning-creation process the rest of the book is built upon - the entire Modern era being built in the interior space between the y>0 arc of the rocket being fired upon England and the y<0 arc of Slothrop’s link to the rocket strikes.

If a God is anywhere, it is beyond. Beyond the trivial concerns of human materiality. The defining feature of a God, even a polytheistic one, is their ability to be above the concerns of the finite and material. When Abraham and his son descended from the mountain, when the early Christians saw Jesus rise again, Yahweh had demonstrated the nature of Godhood - the fact of transcending the seemingly impossible other of death, the final other which strikes a fatal emptiness in all life. A God is born from their ability to possess under their one sign both Eros and Thanatos. To the Yahwehist, God holds within his mandala both Eros (the Abrahamic lineage) and Thanatos (Hell/Heaven). Thanatos and Eros continually move under the power of one universal order, and thus all that exists within either sphere is granted meaning and immortality.

Between Andrew and Gianni one sign persists, that of the Medusa. Eros and Thanatos united, a new Goddess is born, one summoned violently in El Mayor Clasico’s 2015 video Versace, wherein El Mayor Clasico is driven to spastic writhings and tortured psychotic expressions as gold painted Medusa hypnotizes, poisons, accepts his sacrifices with her body as altar and church, the woman of mineral, the woman with the gaze of Thanatos and the serpentine dance of Eros. After Gianni and Andrew have perished, they return, united as two halves of Medusa, two halves of the equation of Theogenesis.