The With
Placenta Imagery in Twin Peaks
The tulpas and BOB-orbs in Twin Peaks resemble placentas, and this is compelling when considering Indigenous beliefs around this strange organ (the only one manufactured for a purpose and discharged once that purpose is fulfilled), its biological role as “gatekeeper,” and its critical role, according to cultural historian Peter Sloterdijk, in the development of our contemporary, capitalist, American narcissism.
The Afterbirth
Sloterdijk: “There is some indication that modern individualism could only enter its intense phase in the second half of the eighteenth century, when the general clinical and cultural excommunication of the placenta began.” In his Requiem For A Discarded Organ, Sloterdijk explains that when we carelessly discard our primal companion, demons take its place. “Where, on the other hand, as in antiquity and popular traditions, a space was left open for the soul’s double in the cultural imaginary, people could — up to the threshold of modernity — assure themselves that they were not directly connected either to their mother, “society” or their “own” people; rather, they remained primarily connected throughout their lives to an innermost second, the true ally and genius of their particular existence.”
“I’ll catch you with my death bag.“
Emerson: “We cannot let our angels go; we do not see that they only go out that archangels may come in.”
I’ll catch you with my death bag. As an essential phenomenon of every birth, the placenta used to be received with great esteem, even religious awe. Hospitals today label it “toxic waste” and dispose of it/sell it off immediately. The child never hears of it again, and this placenta-denying attitude influences our separate self sense and establishes, according to Sloterdijk, “an imaginary solitary confinement of individuals in the womb.” We feel alone and that we have no control over our lives. Therefore, Sloterdijk, and J.R. Davidson in The Shadow of Life, after looking at the anthropological evidence, conclude that placenta rituals operate all over the world as “anxiety releasing mechanisms.”
Placenta imagery can also increase anxiety. We see it in popular science fiction films like Alien. It’s a facehugger trope. Its nourishing skin and umbilical cord protects but can also suffocate and kill.
The Gatekeeper
The child in utero does not exist as a direct part of the mother, but lives in an intermediate world with its placental guardian angel. Understanding how this organ operates for both mother and fetus may illuminate how the dark placental BOB and tulpa-orbs function in Twin Peaks.
Often called a filter, it’s more a gatekeeper between worlds. Its job: keep maternal and fetal blood separate while allowing nutrients to pass to the fetus and waste to pass out. It blocks some toxins (except radium, incidentally) but stores nothing. It passes harmful substances back to the mother for her liver and kidneys to deal with. This remarkable organ shares the amniotic sac with the fetus until the day it’s born.
When the cord is cut, we are severed not from our mothers, but from our placentas. We have placenta complexes. Tangentially, when the placenta looks like a lambda (λ), which strongly suggests a dichorionic twin pregnancy, it’s called a Twin Peak Sign. “It should be noted that the ‘twin’ in ‘twin-peak’ refers not to the presence of two peaks, but that it relates to twins.”
The Ally
We all grow into this world next to a dark purple partner made just for us, who sleeps with us, wakes with us, and follows us out of the womb only to suddenly vanish and be replaced by a comfort object. Our womb mate, first friend, first legible other-self we ever meet — ultrasounds at five months reveal fetuses “petting” it, for lack of a better term. In Red Medicine, a Peruvian woman is recorded saying, “When a woman is pregnant, she carries within her two lives — the life of the baby and the life of the placenta.” Indigenous wisdom is that failure to treat the placenta with special consideration “decenters” human beings.
The Reflection
In western medicine, too, doctors always examine the placenta for signs of disease, especially if the child is sick. What’s crazy is that studies show the size and weight of one’s placenta effects the child’s mental health later in life.
It’s always there, operating behind the scenes.
Placentas reveal secrets: Women who smoke or drink lots of soda give birth to blackened placentas, as do women who live near toxic wastelands like White Sands, New Mexico.
The placenta’s surface makes visible the invisible sickness. It’s a toxicology report.
The Horcrux
Are tulpa orbs misplaced dream placentas? Is Lynch re-membering his own lost soul-double? Medically, the placenta is a mirror, but spiritually its a kind of horcrux. Some pharaohs mummified their “secret helpers,” building temples with armed guards to protect them. See the 3,400-year-old Narmer Pallet that depicts a person carrying “the royal planeta” and umbilical cord in front of the pharaoh like a flag. The placenta-double was considered the incarnation of the outer soul, protecting both inside and outside the womb. According to Egyptologist Aylward M. Blackman, “while in one aspect the placenta-ghost is a protecting genius, in the other it is the force that controls and suggests a man’s thoughts and actions. In short, in the latter aspect it is his personality.” See BOB controlling Leland and Mr. C. See also Hildegard of Bingen Scivias 5, “The Creation of the Soul,” that depicts a diamond-shaped entity full of eyes connecting to the fetus through a golden cord.
Get David Titterington’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Holding onto the placenta was considered good luck. Plains Native traditions keep pieces in bundles and bracelets. Navajo mothers hang it in a tree near the house, or bury it near a place they hope the child will be drawn to — a university, a law firm. Pawnee women place the placenta in a buffalo-skin sack and hang it from a tree like an ornament.
The Bundle of Life
In Japan, the placenta is traditionally placed in a clay jar with significant objects and buried beneath the home. The contents of that jar are believed to shape the life of the child to whom it belongs. Thus, the placenta is wrapped in precious materials, buried with art — or, ideally, buried as art.
Inca hero Huayne Capac reportedly had a statue of his mother built to house his own mummified placenta, “along with much gold and silver,” creating a reliquary-safe known as Tumi Pampa Pacha Mama. Similarly, the Lakota craft beaded umbilical-cord bundles in animal forms, while some non-Native mothers dry the cord for dream catchers or folk art.
The With
The friend that accompanied our descent into spacetime; the missing half that remembers a time before the fall; the Oversoul; the silent, witnessing presence that never fully enters time; the invisible side of us — once projected onto the dark red placenta buried under a tree. Now projected onto god, nation, culture, mother, father, other.
The Pillow
Sloterdijk: “As soon as we prepare for the night, we almost always slide into a state in which we cannot help disposing ourselves towards a self-augmentation in the dark in which an appropriate With-successor will play its part.” A wine-red and royal purple pillow. Woodsmen paint Mr. C in his own blood while a placental orb emerges out of his belly button. (In FWWM, BOB takes blood out of Leland’s belly and calls it garmonbozia). Now I have to reconsider Maya practice of painting their temples red and depicted their leader Pakal in a fetal position on his sarcophagus lid. These artistic acts suggest a connection between afterlife and afterbirth, and a primary drive to “reunite” with our “other half.”
All blood was/is magical, but placenta blood was especially magical and healing in many cultures. Some Mayan people reportedly rub it into corn cobs, and over the years, harvests from these blood-stained kernels create a personalized strain of corn. We also find a wide-spread neolithic mortuary tradition of covering human remains in red ochre.
The Conclusion
“This is what I want.”
We are all haunted by placental dream orbs. Is this what Twin Peaks is really about? A Navajo friend once told me: “If you lose the child’s placenta, the child will lose its way.” Those placenta-affirming rituals were not superstition. They acknowledged that we never entered the world alone; we came with a twin — a partner who is not our mother. Beneath Twin Peaks’s most abstract, supernatural imagery lies something biological we all know and live with. Pointing beyond itself, the placenta symbol transforms into a symbol for our holy guardian angel, the missing half of ourselves, the With, our shadow, the fetishized other, the partial nature of our own story, the negative space, the not-being-in-the-world. The angel we discarded and the archangle who took their place.
As a metaphor, this organ is another way to think through Twin Peaks themes, and this may be why Lynch made sure the tulpa and BOB-orbs resemble placentas.
The Extra
See David Lynch’s short film Dream #7 (2009) for more tulpa-egg and golden seed imagery. See “Spirited Away by the Plasental Other-Self” for a deeper look at No Face.
Read this story about the unexpected role placentas [and foreskins] play in healing our eyes.
Sloterdijk claims that the ancient custom of carrying the pharaoh’s placenta ahead of him in procession survives in today’s national flag rituals — particularly resonant given Harold Bloom’s 1992 observation that fetus and flag are one within the post-Christian pro-life American religion.)
See Lakota umbilical cord bundles. The child’s ‘first toy.’ Turtles for girls, lizards for boys. These stay with the person their entire lives and are buried with them. Various “amulets” in museums are probably umbilical cord bundles stolen from the dead, like the beaded lizard at NAMA in Kansas City, said to contain Dull Knife’s “guardian spirit.” (Image not longer available).
Ithyphalic Zuni Ahayu:da ‘twin gods’ or ‘war gods’ appear as corn cobs/phalluses with umbilical cords that are also read as penises. Ultimate outies, the god’s umbilical cord is painted as a lightning bolt, making the placenta and/or mother the source of electricity. From shrines built on sacred hilltops, these spirits and their umbilical cords protect the entire world.
For more soul-twin imagery in art, see Alex Grey’s toroidal Möbius spheres that act as guardian angel and source of consciousness.
First published on 25YearsLaterSite, February 21, 2019
