The Gulf of Mexico has nurtured diverse life forms in the region's estuaries and deltas, bayous and rivers. Gulf peoples have been at the forefront of cultural innovations while also enduring every plague known to humankind: extreme social stratification and environmental catastrophe, conquest and pandemics, the dehumanizing effects of plantation slavery, religious and capital predation, revolutions gone awry, gutted social systems and divisiveness. We have addressed a gothic realm and something older than gothic stirred up in horror or holy-dread where psychic gulfs meet the traumas of Gulf environments and history. Our notion of gothic gulfs encompasses a region across borders and beyond spatiotemporal disciplinary divisions—where submerged histories find enunciation on glyphed stone, in dance and song, novel and tale, on movie screen or YouTube posting for whoever seeks or evades a meeting point, actual or phantasmal as it may be. Our gulfs find us. And the undead realm where “rememory” engulfs us often takes gothic form.

“What's in the past is in the past,” the daughter of a genocidal ex-general tells herself at night in bed, in the family mansion as something spectral takes hold in Guatemalan filmmaker Jayro Bustamante's La Llorona (2019). But folk familiar with Faulkner, Fuentes, or La Llorona know better. Something from an Indigenous Split Place older than Spanish conquest seeks justice in this twenty-first century horror film. La Llorona's legend continues inspiring film directors, novelists, poets, and playwrights because it addresses ongoing traumas and anxieties experienced by children-of-the-corn. The weeping woman in Mesoamerican culture has acquired respect and instilled fear at the same time. Awareness of her haunting presence appears stronger than respect for her daughters or their land.

In Bustamante's La Llorona, an aging, ailing General Monteverde is freed on charges of genocide from the country's 36-year civil war, and a young Maya woman (Alma) dressed in white moves through the crowd of protesters gathered outside his mansion, as she starts work as a maid in the household after the staff has quit. Viewers gradually see that Alma (Soul) and her children were killed by the General's men and that she has emerged from death's waters for a reckoning. Alma brings a frog into the house, and the film floods with aqueous energy: a bathroom overflows, a faucet continually runs, the backyard swimming pool fills with frogs.

Reclamação do Brasil comprises a series of fifteen issues, published between January and May 1822, that discuss subjects related to the deterioration of relations between Portugal and Brazil during the lead-up to independence in September of the same year. Researchers such as Vianna and Lustosa only had access to the first fourteen of these issues from the archives of the Biblioteca Nacional. During my archival research, a hitherto unanalysed fifteenth issue dated from 31 May has been found in the Biblioteca Brasiliana.

The series is signed ‘Fiel à Nação’, meaning Loyal to the Nation, a pseudonym Silva Lisboa also used in other publications, and comprise three to four pages each. They were printed by the ‘Tipografia Nacional’ and the series is followed by six pamphlets: one edition of Defesa da Reclamação do Brasil, four issues of Memorial Apologético das Reclamações do Brasil and one issue of Falsidade do Correio e do Revérbero contra o Escritor das Reclamações do Brasil. They will be discussed separately.

Because most of them are undated, ascertaining the periodicity of the issues of Reclamação has been challenging, nevertheless Vianna claims that the first issue was published on the day of the Fico, 9 January 1822, and had an impact on this event:

Vianna assumed the last issue was number 14, which is dated 23 March, but was in fact published on 23 May 1822. This is known because Silva Lisboa comments in its epigraph on a famous speech given by Joaquim Gon.alves Ledo on 20 May 1822.

In September 1944, the SS’ statistical office compiled a comprehensive survey of personnel. Despite casualties the overall number was still ca. 800,000 men, of whom 200,000 were attached to the Allgemeine SS, whereas the Waffen-SS with 594,443 constituted the vast majority of the organization. This number included a considerable group of personnel serving in the concentration camps.

At this stage, the Waffen-SS was twice as large as in 1942 and had reached its numerical culmination point. Himmler could now boast seven armoured divisions and a number of corps commands, several of which would be employed in 1944's hot spots. The increased strength of the Waffen-SS mirrored the relative influence of the SS vis-a-vis other key institutions in The Third Reich. On 22 July 1944, the attempted assassination of Hitler further strengthened Himmler's already strong position in the Nazi hierarchy. On the same day, Hitler handed over command of the reserve army from the Wehrmacht to his Reichsführer-SS who thereby took charge of 1.9 million men. Thus, Himmler had made incursions deep into army territory, now being responsible for weaponry, prisoner-of-war camps and not least recruiting, training and allocation of personnel.

The year 1944 also saw the first SS generals appointed to army command. In July, Paul Hausser was appointed commander of the seventh army, and in August, Sepp Dietrich assumed command of the fifth armoured army – both of these were stationed in Normandy. These appointments were parts of a general trend with the armed forces elevating a new élite of Nazis into the top-tiers of the military hierarchy, frequently despite their limited experience with the conduct of major operations. This drift led to a de-professionalisation of the supreme military leadership culminating in the late autumn, when Himmler assumed personal command of the Heeresgruppe Oberrhein (Army Group Upper Rhine).

New Envelopments at the Eastern Front

During the first months, a mini-Stalingrad seemed to develop in the snow-clad landscapes of the southern part of the eastern front. After Kursk in the autumn 1943, Army Group South had to withdraw across the Dnieper. The plan was to consolidate the front there, but before the Germans were able to dig in the so-called Panther position, the Red Army had established several bridgeheads on the western bank interspersed among the Germans.

Since the millennium, Nordic crime stories have been widely consumed around the globe. They are often set in a bleak Nordic landscape and narrated from an afflicted detective's point of view, whose investigation exposes a morally complex society beneath the seemingly peaceful social surface of the Nordic welfare state. The popularity of these crime novels – sometimes called the Nordic Noir or the Scandi Noir – has given rise to adaptations and transnational fame. Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy (2005–7) and Henning Mankell's series about the Swedish police detective Kurt Wallander (1991–2013) have resulted in a number of Swedish and internationally produced films and TV series. The popularity of Nordic Noir is also due to several internationally successful TV series, such as the Danish The Killing (Forbrydelsen, 2007–12) and the Danish-Swedish The Bridge (Broen/Bron, 2011–18). The two TV series have given rise to several international productions. While the first one has resulted in an American version titled The Killing from 2011–14, the second one has inspired one French-British TV series, The Tunnel (2013–18) and one American adaptation, The Bridge (2013–14).

In the last two decades, a Gothic version of Nordic Noir has emerged that could be called Gothic crime in literature, film and TV productions. Within a realistic tradition of Nordic crime fiction, the police procedure is obstructed by apparently supernatural activities and the interference of uncanny characters. Beyond the well-known everyday world, a mythological world and a dark past appear to be operating and Gothic tropes and narrative strategies are used to mystify the background and the consequences of the committed crime. Although the crime mystery is eventually solved, the potential existence of supernatural powers is confirmed rather than negated. One of the most internationally awarded Swedish novelists of the genre hybridity is Johan Theorin with his quartet of Gothic crime novels set on the island of Öland in the Baltic Sea: Echoes from the Dead (Skumtimmen, 2007), The Darkest Room (Nattfåk, 2008), The Quarry (Blodläge, 2010) and The Voices Beyond (Rörgast, 2013). Another example is Cecilia Ekbäck's historical novels Wolf Winter (I vargavinterns land, 2015) and In the Month of the Midnight Sun (Midnattssolens time, 2016), both of which were first published in England..

When we humans set out to understand the world, and ourselves, and when we have to communicate our understanding, one of the ways we do it is by telling stories (Hydén, 1997; Brockmeier, 2018). This is where we grasp the sense of things. Stories allow us to picture things for ourselves to understand them and remember. This is also true when we have to define ourselves, for example, as sick or well (Frank, 1995). When we define ourselves as sick, we subject ourselves to a form of diagnosis; in other words, we create a picture for ourselves of the ex-tent to which we have a problem that can be solved by the health service. This is a process that often takes place in conjunction with our surroundings. The first decision we have to make is to determine if the degree to which the condition we Interventionshave or in which we find ourselves is significantly at deviance from the norm or whether it is a normal part of the life that we otherwise lead and see around us (Eisenberg, 1980; Hammer et al., 2012).

Introduction

The focus of this chapter is the teaching of narrative medicine in a master of science elective course in clinical nursing, midwifery, physiotherapy, occupa-tional therapy, and health science and a pilot course for pharmacists. Teaching narrative medicine includes the training of students’ narrative competence by means of close reading and creative writing (Charon, 2005). These methods Interventionsprovide training in attending closely to “the meanings of a story's language, images, voice, gaps and overall structure, which can strengthen students’ com-petences in listening to, interpreting and being moved to action by the stories communicated by patients” (ibid., p. 4). Following Charon (2006), narrative competence adds to healthcare professionals’ other competencies and helps them to “recogn ize patients and diseases, convey knowledge and regard, join humbly with colleagues, and accompany patients and their families through the ordeals of illness” (Charon, 2006, p. vii). Moreover, health care practiced with narrative competence allows healthcare professionals to reflect more mindfully on what it means to be a caregiver as individuals and as members of a team (ibid., p. 11).

This book examines the publications written between 1821 and 1822 by the economist, jurist, public administrator and historian José da Silva Lisboa (1756–1835), subsequently named Baron and Viscount of Cairu, and his assessment of the significance of the events leading to the Independence of Brazil in 1822. Generally neglected by the research of this period, Silva Lisboa was one of the main Brazilian commentators on political events from the signing of the Bases of the Constitution by Dom João VI (1767–1826) and the King's return to Portugal in 1821, as a consequence of the Liberal Revolution of 1820, until the early years of the Regency (1831–1840). He was a supporter of Brazilian autonomy during the period of The General and Extraordinary Cortes of the Portuguese Nation (1820–1822), or Cortes of Lisbon, and an important figure in the events that led to Independence, even if he did not fully embrace it.

In this book, I combine a literature review with the study of archival documentation to produce an account of Silva Lisboa's early career as a journalist and a new interpretation of his role in the independence process. To do so, I also bring to this project an overview of the impact of his thirteen publications on the work of other editors and, conversely, the impact of their publications on those of Silva Lisboa. The interpretation of these documents will bring to light the range of his ideas and how they can be related to concepts such as the Enlightenment, conservatism, liberalism, recolonization and despotism.

The work of Silva Lisboa as a journalist has always been seen by scholars of the twentieth century as sycophantic and reactionary, with his publications being revisited only recently in the context of a reformist Enlightenment; it is important to consolidate this interpretation further by analysing through the study of political philosophy his writings during Independence and by reassessing the many interpretations of the Enlightenment and of liberalism in this period. Silva Lisboa's contradictions are well documented. On the one hand, he was a ‘letrado’ (an intellectual) and introduced studies of political economy into the Luso-Brazilian world, being one of the responsible for the liberal decree opening up trade in the American possession to all friendly nations in January 1808, after the transfer of the Portuguese Royal Family to Rio de Janeiro, which ended Brazil's colonial history.

Since the early nineteenth century until the present day, Swedish Gothic is set in the Nordic landscape, often in the vast, dark forest, the snow-covered artic fells in the northern part of the country or on a remote wintry island in the archipelago in the Baltic Sea or the west coast of Sweden. The Gothic terror is located in untamed nature and in that kind of environments that Yi-Fu Tuan calls, the landscapes of fear, wild and uncontrollable nature beyond the human domain. From the human perspective of environmental experience, Tuan makes a distinction between place and space, where place refers to a location filled with human meaning, while space is an abstract concept and a site void of social significance. If place embodies enclosure, security and stability, space represents movement as well as freedom and threat. In addition, regional folklore and old local tradition are employed to enhance the Gothic atmosphere, and the protagonist's dark side is often bound to or triggered by untamed nature and the pagan pre-Christian past of the region. Thus, Swedish Gothic is a place-focused, or topofocal, version of Gothic, in which the landscape plays a central role and can be equated with a character in its own right.

An early example of the vital role of the setting is Emilie Flygare-Carlén's The Rose of Tistelön (Rosen på Tistelön, 1842) and Victor Rydberg's Singoalla (Singoalla, 1857) set in the harsh archipelago on the west coast and in the forest land in central Sweden respectively. By the end of the century, Selma Lagerlöf developed this tradition even further in her use of the Nordic wilderness and its local myths in order to explore the characters’ repressed desires by drawing on regional folktales and folkloristic motifs in novels such as Gösta Berling's Saga (Gösta Berlings saga, 1891) and Lord Arne's Silver (Herr Arnes penningar, 1903). Also, in some of Ingmar Bergman's most formative films, for example, The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet, 1957) and Hour of the Wolf (Vargtimmen, 1968), the scenery – and the characters’ place in it – is crucial to the Gothic imagery and the characteristic metaphorical and explorative qualities of Bergman's films. Since the millennium, untamed nature and its mythical creatures have an even more prominent part in for example Michael Hjorth's film The Unknown (Det okända, 2000), Sonny Laguna and Tommy Wiklund's film Wither (Vittra, 2012) and the Swedish computer game Year Walk (2013).

In January 1941, the Deutsche Zeitung in Norwegen featured an article about the Waffen-SS. The men in the black uniforms were described as ‘a new kind of German soldiers’, who were not only warriors but also ‘bearers of the revolution’:

In other words, the soldiers were expected not only to fight with weapons in hand – they were tasked with a broader and more wide-ranging mission: Through ideological training, they were to be moulded into SS champions of Nazism throughout Europe.

From the early days of the Waffen-SS the ideological teaching was comprehensive and zealous, and in some ways the ambitions only seemed to grow as the war progressed. An instructive example can be found as late as seven weeks before the end of the war. On 19 March 1945, Division Hitlerjugend's Feldersatz Bataillon (replacement battalion) received a 40-pages instruction describing in considerable detail the future ideological training. The core message of the planned teachings was that the Jews had caused the adversities of the previous years. The war could however still be won, because providence had sent Hitler to Germany and since all Germans devoted themselves unconditionally to victory, the Third Reich would prevail. Indeed, as we shall see in the following, the detailed and elaborate ideological instructions and training manuals were not a peace time phenomenon, nor a mere sideshow, but on the contrary a central SS objective.

Ideology and the Waffen-SS

From the early thirties, the SS spent considerable resources on creating and nurturing an ideological worldview among its members. Disseminating Nazi norms and values, not only served as a way of demonstrating that the SS was the elite of National Socialism, it was also an important remedy in amalgamating the SS and the police and in making sure that the different parts of the SS did not grow apart. Not only did the SS idealize martial and military values, but also war in itself because, according to the SS, it served to eradicate the weak and the inferior and it exposed true leadership.

Considerable parts of the post-First World War veterans’ movement helped pave the way for the Nazi Machtergreifung. Knowing this, it is hardly surprising that, in September 1945, the Allies forbade veterans’ associations and groups wishing to glorify the German military heritage. In December 1949, the ban was lifted in the western occupation zones, and a number of veterans’ societies sprang up. They comprised a wide variety of associations spanning from large communities of interests to small loosely organised bands of comrades sharing a common past in the same unit or arm. While some were based on common interests in material or nostalgic issues, others were founded by individuals who had obvious political agendas and ambitions of bringing back the soldier and militarism into German politics.

Many of these had existed secretly before and striven to ascertain the former regular soldiers’ right to receive a pension. During the early life of the Federal Republic, it was primarily the provision for war veterans and their bereaved as well as the re-establishment of German defence forces that characterised the relationship between the young state and the veterans it had inherited from the Third Reich. The existing pension schemes and provision for invalids had broken down when the victorious powers cancelled all pensions and social rights for public servants. In December 1950, the West German government passed legislation re-introducing pensions to disabled ex-servicemen, war widows and their children as well as returned prisoners-of-war. This law benefitted – directly or indirectly – a total of four million West Germans. Veterans of the Wehrmacht and the SS who were not disabled were not covered by this arrangement, and now a dispute began over what the Federal Republic owed to those who had fought for Hitler, including those of the Waffen-SS. In April 1951, this conundrum was partially solved as the pensions were restored to officers and NCOs of the Wehrmacht. Personnel of the Waffen-SS were not accepted as soldiers employed by the state and were, therefore, not comprised by the law. Thus, over the following years, a change in the legislation to also include the Waffen-SS personnel became a key activity for the HIAG – the main SS veterans’ organisation. Soon after, when the contours of a West German defence force emerged, the veterans’ struggle was extended to advocating for admission on par with former Wehrmacht servicemen.

Lost in the Post-war World?

With the demise of Nazi Germany, a historian faces difficulties tracing the approximately 600,000 SS soldiers who survived the war. Apart from the general chaos arising from the collapse of the Third Reich, there are several reasons for that. During the war, the Waffen-SS provided the basic framework for the soldiers’ lives, and it is, relatively speaking, easier to identify individual soldiers or groups of soldiers in this period. However, as the SS was disbanded this way of tracing SS-men ceased to exist. However, to some extent, the Allies kept tabs on the former Waffen-SS soldiers, whom they separated from other groups of prisoners, and it was not until their release from the prisoner-ofwar camps, from the late 1940s onwards, that most tracks of them went cold. From then on, the Waffen-SS no longer appears as a collective phenomenon. Because of the transnational and multi-ethnical character of the Waffen-SS, upon their release the soldiers dispersed in various directions; many of them adopting fairly successfully to the new circumstances, but a certain number nevertheless clung to the norms and beliefs they had been socialised into during their service in the Waffen-SS.

The trendsetting SS veterans’ association, the Hilfsgemeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit der Angehörigen der ehemaligen Waffen-SS (HIAG), was practically a continuation of the Waffen-SS. Nevertheless, HIAG never managed to organise more than a minor part of the veterans settling in Germany. The same goes for the relatively small Waffen-SS ex-soldiers’ organisations outside Germany. Among the challenges was also the fact that quite a few had emigrated to the USA, Latin America, the Middle East, Australia and South Africa. In the Soviet Union and the Soviet dominated parts of Eastern Europe, until the collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989, SS-veterans had to tread especially carefully.

A significant part of the veterans, though, were deeply marked by their experiences and the Waffen-SS mentality and carried an ideological SS-heritage with them into the post-war life – orally as well as in their deeds. Politically, they busied themselves on the extreme right wing. However, the Nazi underground resistance that some Germans had hoped for, and the Allies had feared, never materialised, and the SS-veterans never represented any serious threat to the new Europe rising from the rubble after 1945.

When Patricia Yaeger wrote in Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing, 1930–1990 that “the foundation or basis for this world is made out of repudiated, throwaway bodies that mire the earth” (15), she could have been addressing legacies further south and across deeper time. Peoples of the Gulf have long been reduced to the “bare life” conditions articulated by Agamben, “precarious life” per Judith Butler, “the biopolitics of disposability” as Henry Giroux observed (via Foucault) in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (175). Gulf inhabitants have sustained an inner life within economies of enslavement and extraction (gold, sugar, cotton, oil, tourism) and amidst an atmosphere of hyperviolence, with its heat, hurricanes, and vulnerability to climate change. Precariousness of life is revealed in contemporary gothic from the region: an embodied gnosis that Yaeger called “the unthought known” (12).

The literature of this space, for critic Richard Gray, presents a “regional rhythm” so thick with “the weather of the landscape and the weather of the mind” (26) that “ ‘Southern Gothic’ seems almost a tautology” (27). He may have been thinking of Kate Chopin's “The Storm,” Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Eudora Welty's “The Winds,” Linda Hogan's Power, and the flooded creeks of Yoknapatawpha. But this regional rhythm moves from sources beyond borders and beyond the gothic, stretching back to when “Heart of Sky, named Hurricane,” shaped the creation of the world (Tedlock, Popol Vuh 65). The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel also accounts for beginnings when “[t]he yearbearer winds / Spoke” (235) and prophesied a period of tragic destiny brought by aliens, “Christianizing us / And then treating us like animals. / That is the pain in the heart of God” that brought “Christianity here / To this country, / The plantation country / Of Yucatán” in “the year 1539” (Edmonson 242).

The hero mytheme that stands for the outer journey and maturing self is simply not possible without facing the uncanny and without the aid of the feminine. The journey cannot take place without the hero or the heroine being shuttered by the uncanny and then helped and transformed by the meeting with goddesses. However, the role of the symbolic feminine is far more than aiding the hero and shattering the ego. The symbolic feminine best captures the multiplicity (Irigaray 1985, 36) of symbols, the “many-sidedness of human nature” and “soul-making” (Hillman 1975, xiv). The purpose of this chapter is to explore and appreciate the crucial symbolic mytheme of the feminine in a deep culture perspective, identifying it in myth, popular culture, and religion. Here, we discuss two features of the symbol: multiplicity and ambiguity in classical and modern myths.

The chapter is divided into five sections. We begin with a quick overview of the way in which we are talking about the symbolic feminine. The next section discusses polyvalence of the archetypal feminine, focusing on prehistory, ancient myths, religions, and contemporary examples from cinema. Here, drawing on revisioning Neumann's seminal study, we emphasize the symbolic feminine as the expression of polyvalence within psyche and the world. The third section moves on to the ambiguity of the symbolic feminine, focusing on the oft-neglected dark side of the symbolic feminine in myth and culture. Drawing again on Neumann and folklorists, the section describes the polar, confounding-dark yet guiding-wise aspects of old and young witches, as well as one of the most powerful feminine symbols of Medusa Gorgon. The fourth section focuses on the unity in multiplicity of the symbolic feminine centered on the story of two Greek goddesses, Demeter and Persephone, archetypal mother and daughter. We show how the depth and multiplicity of these female figures were disclosed through a mystery religion, and how this myth continues to be a major metaphor for the journey of the psyche/soul today. The chapter concludes with a section briefly summarizing how we see the deep culture perspective disclosing representations of the symbolic feminine in myth and popular culture today, including its intersection with the sacred feminine in religious symbolism, as with Marian iconography.