#gello

hello. inso scared tumblrs scary .

i forgot that i even existed

... according to Church dogma, demons had no gender, making the existence of the female Gello demon an impossibility. Worse still was that the notion of independent demons challenged the omnipotence of God: the loss of a child was a punishment from God, caused by the sin of the parents. People whose children died were supposed to do penance, not blame the loss on a demon.

"It is also clear from these monsters that the loss of a child (or the inability to have one in the first place) was not thought of solely as a personal tragedy for a woman - it was a failure of womanhood. Lamia and Gello may be sympathetic, but they are monstrous nonetheless. Lamia is, fundamentally, a woman who is unable to keep her children alive, and whilst there might be understanding of the pain this causes her, she is nonetheless demonised for it. Gello, meanwhile, is tormented not just because she died young, but because she never married or had children. There is no suggestion that her lost life could have taken a different path - she is not driven to furious murder because, had she lived, she could have composed great poetry, or written works of philosophy, or become an athlete. The failure to marry or have children, or to keep existing children alive, turned Lamia and Gello from beautiful young women into monsters, demons who were entirely outside of civilised society. They had failed at being women, to such an extent that they were women no longer."