The Flying Goddess
- Wade Beauchamp
- Feb 20, 2024
- 2 min read
The first story I ever got published was called “Charles Sykes’ ‘Spirit of Ecstasy.’” It was about the famous Rolls Royce hood ornament and the real-life story of its sculptor and the woman who inspired it. (It was also about some non-traditional uses for hood ornaments…) That hood ornament has a cameo in The Purple Menace and the Tobacco Prince, as does another chrome lady whose story is even more tragic and romantic than the Spirit of Ecstasy.
The Flying Goddess, the hood ornament that adorned Buicks in the early 1930s was designed by Casimer Cislo (how’s that for a name?) who worked for Ternstedt Manufacturing, designers of automotive trim such as door handles and gas caps. Cislo sculpted the Flying Goddess, nude except for her billowing scarf, as a tribute to Isadora Duncan, a scandalous bohemian dancer who would have been right at home amongst the libertines of The Purple Menace and the Tobacco Prince.
On the night of September 14, 1927 in Nice, France, Duncan was a passenger in an automobile owned by Benoît Falchetto, a French-Italian mechanic. She wore a long, flowing, hand-painted silk scarf, created by the Russian-born artist Roman Chatov, a gift from her dear friend Mary Desti. Desti, who saw Duncan off, had asked her to wear a cape in the open-air vehicle because of the cold weather, but she refused, wearing only the scarf. According to legend, Duncan's parting words were, “ vais à l'amour!“ (“I am off to love!“).
Her silk scarf, draped around her neck, became entangled around the open-spoked rear wheel of Falchetto’s speeding car, pulling her from the open car and snapping her neck. According to dispatches from Nice, Duncan was nearly beheaded by the sudden tightening of the scarf around her throat. One witness was quoted as saying, “Affectations can be dangerous.”
Also of note is the fact that Duncan was an acquaintance of occultist Aleister Crowley, who included her as the character Lavinia King (his invented name for her) in Moonchild, his 1917 novel about a war between magicians over an unborn child (a primary influence on my favorite album, Iron Maiden’s Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, specifically its opening track). Furthermore, the giver of the deadly silk scarf, Mary Desti, was a collaborator and lover of Crowley's. Acting as a seer that Crowley referred to by the name “Soror Virakam,“ Desti would enter a trance during which Crowley believed a cosmic entity called Ab-ul-Diz would speak through her. Her statements during these trances guided Crowley in the writing of his magnum opus, Magick, Book 4.
-WEB3