Deborah Castellano
Kosmesis is the art(e) of adorning one’s self, and there are examples of it through out mythopoetic history as well as in real life customs. We’ll get into those, but my favorite examples are from pop culture. Think makeover montages: my personal favorites are Wonder Woman because Diana is not an idle doll-like recipient, and complains about functionality of World War I fashion and St. Trinian’s because Annabelle gets a makeover from all the school’s factions and she keeps the parts she likes best from each, making a new fashion statement.
But kosmesis and the makeover montage have existed for a while. A long while. Like, since The Iliad from 760 BC and Hesiod’s Works and Days in 8th century BC, so this is far from a new idea. In The Illiad, Hera was so pissed off that Paris called Aphrodite the prettiest she was willing to go to war about it. Literally. She constantly supported Greece because she didn’t like the Trojans and Paris. She gets Athena to agree to help her because Paris, and by default, all his friends, spurned her too. The Illiad is sort of a SyFy soap of its time, so there’s lots of fighting and changing sides, deity involvement and glory, but in order to be sure that those of us who like more of a soapy romance/betrayal sort of storyline keep tuning in, there’s a separate book called The Deception of Zeus, which was really scandalous for its time. Like little Rory Gilmore’s actress from The Gilmore Girls going onto be a badass gender traitor on the mini series version of The Handmaid’s Tale. And what they do to her for being a gender traitor, which, spoiler, was horrific.
Anyway, eventually Zeus is like “knock it off!” No more gods in this mortal war. I can’t deal with all of you doing all this crazy crap all the time. Hera’s like, challenge accepted, husband. So Hera does a full makeover montage (kosmesis) where she makes herself extra sexy for Zeus—she does her hair, her makeup, she puts on the perfume he likes, she puts on the dress Athena made her/said she looked hot in ( ... for her dad) and goes to Aphrodite and is like, look. Do you like men telling you what to do? Because I sure don’t. Also, I don’t like not being allowed to touch this war because we started it and we should be allowed to finish it too, am I right? And Aphrodite, in response, says I’m 110 percent not in favor of being told what to do by Zeus. But also I’m still the prettiest. Hera’s, frustrated, has a plan. So she seduces Zeus and Aphrodite puts him to sleep so they can go about their war business and not be bothered. Hera’s team, Greece, wins the war and she gets to have both the satisfaction of being a successful warmonger and the knowledge her husband still wants her.
Pandora is also a story of kosmesis. She may have started out as a goddess, but research about such matters gets a little shaky because this was a very, very long time ago. If she was a goddess, she was probably some kind of fertility demigoddess. Either way, mythos decided to make her human, and that’s the version we kept. In this particular version, she became the gods’ Barbie doll, where everyone wanted a chance to play with her. They named her, they adorned her, they gave her a bath, they gave her great hair, they gave her deception, and they gave her a mission. Pandora’s mission was to be the all-giver. Which meant that she was to be all giving of both misery and hope. Meanwhile, Promethus is getting a bad vibe from this whole crazy makeover party happening and he tells Epipmetheus not to mess with any gifts from Zeus. Epimetheus agrees, but then Pandora is like, hey, Epimetheus. And Epimetheus says, hey Pandora. I like your hair. Let’s get married. And Pandora is like, it’s great, right? Yeah let’s tie the knot, babe. Oh by the way, I’m going to just dump out the contents of my jar all over the place so humans can have the full spectrum of experience. You’re welcome! Fear is fun, right? I’m just going to keep hope here in my jar though. For today, let’s say humans still have hope.
Kosmesis was often used as a way to mark a rite of passage for women historically. When a bride would get married during ye olde Illiad days, there were strict rules about bathing before getting married. The water always had to come from a running water source and hauled back to where the bride was getting ready. It was such a process that the brides often kept the vase (loutrophoros) used to bring the water to her on her wedding day as a souvenir. While bathing is a lot easier in this day and age of indoor plumbing, it’s still often part of our modern kosmesis rites, partly because we’re really into hygiene as a modern society and partly because there’s still hints of magic about the process of bathing.
In daily life, there are actually intricate rules that guide what we wear to what and what we don’t wear to something. It can be argued that while our bodies are ours, all cultures have some form of adornment; there are few cultures where nudity is accepted with no jewelry, body paint, or some form of adornment. As such, while our bodies belong to ourselves, what we put on our bodies to make them socially acceptable belongs both to ourselves and our cultural norms, which we use as markers to determine what to do when we want to blend in and what to do when we want to stand out.
We make these decisions on nearly a subconscious basis of what we know by our cultural markers regarding what’s appropriate to wear where and if we want to stand out or blend in. For example, if you work in a very rigid corporate environment, you are probably not going to wear a corset and leather pants to work. Conversely, if you are going to a nightclub, you probably are not going to wear an immaculately pressed business suit. Think about what you would wear to a job interview, as a wedding guest, as a funeral attendee, at the bowling alley, at a cocktail party where there are people you want to impress, dinner with friends, dinner with your in-laws. Think about what you would wear to make a statement in each of these events and what you would wear to each of these events to not be noticed. Dress “code” is so important it tends to take on a moral ethic. When people describe how someone is dressed, words associated with morality are often used. Impeccably dressed. Badly dressed. This heavy amount of social pressure in how we are perceived in society by our dress leads most of us to feel embarrassed if we are underdressed because it illustrates that we don’t know how to behave in society; if our garments are stained it makes us seen as ill-kempt, or if our underthings are showing when we would not want them to be, we are inadvertently exposing our potentially naked bodies for unintended view by others. Because of the moral aspect to dressing, it is far more likely that you will feel self conscious about being somewhat under dressed because of the societal shame associated with it rather than being somewhat overdressed, which will feel conspicuous but also gives us an air of societal superiority. If we are too overdressed, however, we will loop back around to shame because, again, it shows that we did not know how to behave in this particular environment.
Think about the common stress dream that many people have about being completely unadorned (and naked) in front of a classroom or a boardroom. The dreamer often feels shame in those dreams because adornment is so finely and subconsciously linked to one’s sense of self. While just about everyone dresses unreflexively to do basic mundane tasks like running errands, taking your kids to after school activities, going to bed with a long term partner, this simply balances the scale for when we need to dress very deliberately for an important work event, for a new group of friends, for a first date. It’s also about context. Think about the example of a first date. What would you wear when you already have butterflies for this new person and want to impress them? What would you wear if you want to see how the date goes but aren’t sure if you want anything intimate to happen? What would you wear if you were going on this date out of politeness and definitely didn’t want anything intimate to happen? There would probably be some differences there, even if they were small like putting on more deodorant (or not), washing your mouth with mouthwash (or not), what scent you would chose to wear, what underthings you would chose to wear (or not), if you wore make up (or not), how you did your hair, which t-shirt or dress you would chose to wear, and if you would iron it or lint roll it first. There could also be larger differences involved going between those possibilities such as how revealing or tight your clothing choices are, how fashionable with the current trends you chose to appear, or if you intentionally dress “lower” than you usually would. Are you trying to match the other person in some way so that they feel closer to you (she always wears black, so I’m wearing black, he always wears a tie so I’m going to wear a tie)?
So, we’ve got the mythos and we’ve got the historical context. That can only leave witchcraft. Kosmesis is the first part most modern occultists want to ditch. But why? If you are practicing witchcraft in the twenty-first century, you are already doing something that’s scoffed at by the majority of society; why would adornment be the straw that broke your camel’s back? You’re already wearing robes, buying crystals, chanting, using spices not for their intended purposes, making up symbols and getting together with a bunch of fellow witches to do these things together, but somehow you feel that this knife fight that we call magic only requires the knives that you feel comfortable with already. Because as we all know, witchcraft is totally dependent on feeling safe and comfortable and never stepping outside your comfort zone or doing things we find strange and difficult to get the results we want.
Right.
If you’ve tried any version of kosmesis, you know how powerful it can be, and here’s an opportunity to learn how to really just get in there with it. If you haven’t tried a version of kosmesis before because you think that’s crap girl magic (regardless of your gender), then now would be an excellent time to challenge that preconceived notion.
Let’s talk summer solstice. It’s the first day of summer, the last hoorah of the light part of the year spilling over with fertility, abundance, and celebration. The air is awash in the heat of the festival season.
It’s also here in this heat, in this bounty of fresh strawberries, honey, elderflowers, and lavender that we start to welcome the return of the dark, every day becoming shorter from this day until winter solstice. We’ll be back in the belly of the beast of winter before we know it, it’s the last holiday on the light side of the year. Everything will begin dying soon.
But not yet.
It’s a bit of a head trip if you spend enough time really considering this tenuous bit of the tightrope we walk together as we circle the wheel of the year. So let’s use kosmesis to really dive into it.