Posted by LP on November 21, 1997 at 16:59:34:
Hi Cecilia! I tried to get this out as soon as I could so you might get to read it before the weekend. I think I got everything...
Have a good weekend, LP.
And by the way, by friends think I'm nuts to be arguing this so much. They couldn't believe how long and how many messages this debate is. Ah, well...they aren't obsessed.
: He abandoned the coven because he lost his faith...It says so in the book...When Akasha is confronting Armand and Santino about joining her, Lestat describes what Santino is feeling...His beliefs had bitterly been burnt away...That is why he left his coven...
You had to go and drag up that quote, didn't you. Well, might as well get it on the playing field if I now have to deal with it.
"I looked at the black haired Santino--a rather regal being, who was appraising me in a calculating fashion. He wasn't afraid either. But he cared desperately about what happened here. When he looked at Akasha he was awed by her beauty; it touched some deep wound in him. Old faith flared for a moment, faith that had meant more to him than survival, and faith that had been bitterly burnt away."
Now, Anne Rice does have a tendency to ramble, but by Queen of the Damned she really has mellowed out some. This is all one paragraph, and even Anne does not jump thoughts very drastically in the same paragraph unless you can follow the thought processes.
Plain fact is is that this paragraph can have lots of different meanings from a literary critique point of view. Both your argument and my argument will have little substantiation using this paragraph, because *we do not have enough canon about Santino*. All we have are Armand's *memories*, Khayman's observation, and a few other assorted paragraphs and sentences in the VCs.
The reason I said above that Anne doesn't jump around is because going on your argument (which yes, *could* help it, but not prove it) then he saw Akasha's beauty and his old faith in God flared. (Along the lines I'm assuming of vampires always supposing to be beautiful to scorn God.) My proposal is that it was actually his faith in the Mother (not Akasha, but the Mother) which flared.
Santino might very well have believed in the old legends. For him there were probably too many running around, and then topped with proof of Marius, it pushed the idea of the Mother and the Father into a very possible reality. He would naturally want to find more about these two legends. Where to learn this? Well, Marius, obviously. However Marius would most likely kill him, and Marius was also a threat to his standing as coven leader. Especially after he made Armand. So Santino had to kill Marius to keep his position safe, but he didn't have to kill Armand. So he tried to get information out of Armand, but he didn't. Why wasn't Armand killed, because he was easy to train into the rules of the coven. (However, Armand's even knowing what the phase was, his recognition of it though he did not know what they were was enough to validate any theories Santino might have.)
I'm going to go through a few areas of QotD to make a point:
pg 438: "'We are to play a role in this?...Or to be destroyed as the others have been destroyed?' His manner was impulsive rather than arrogant.
And for the first time the red-haired woman evinced a flicker of emotion, her weary eyes fixing on him immediately, her mouth tense."
Why was Maharet so tense with Santino's outburst, and no one else's? Why would Santino's talking to Akasha draw a sudden response from her, when nothing else did to that point. In fact, she stays rather mellow thoughout the ordeal, only asking Akasha questions and steadying Eric when his fear began to get the better of him. She had no reaction to anyone else, save "looking" at Lestat.
pg 440: "'I don't look for my mother's heart and brain in the dirt!'...A little bitter smile played on Santino's lips."
pg 444: "'You, Santino,' she said. 'You who governed the Roman Children of Darkness, when they believed they did God's will as the Devil's henchmen--do you remember what it was like to have a purpose?'"
An interesting choice of words. Every other person Akasha addresses she speaks personally to. Maharet, Marius, Lestat, Louis, even Armand in the very same paragraph she gives a personal, intimate rememberance and feeling of the vampire in question. *But not Santino*. "You who governed" "when they believed". Why does she not include Santino in this, unless she knew that he did not believe he was doing God's will, or the Devil's?
"Can you not reach for lost ideals?"
There's that interesting choice of words again. This was spoken to both Santino and Armand. "Lost ideals". Not lost beliefs, but lost ideals.
"Santino was horror-struck; the wound inside him was bleeding."
Santy didn't want the ideals. I'll address the rest below.
Santino's faith, or following (a hybrid of the two is even better), was with the Mother of the vampires. The King and Queen, whoever was the leader. We know that he and Maharet argued, but we do not know about what. We know that whatever it was it really ticked off Santino. My hypothesis is that it had to do with Maharet's open hatred for Akasha and Enkil. We are shown in the rest of QotD that Santino knew a good deal about the Queen, and so he probably knew some of the history. But, as he used to be a coven leader, and he created a Law about this, he most likely thought Maharet to be in the wrong for opposing Akasha, and advocating an uprising, and even participating in one, though from all apearances he did not know *why* she did what she did. But remember, "he knew her very well" (268).
Now we come to the coven gathering. Santino has listened to Maharet's compelling story. But not only that, Santino has heard and seen the rampaging destruction which Akasha has caused to both the humans and the vampires. His heart "shrunken and bruised" by their cries. Santino in no way supports Akasha's purge of the human males. So this lends more credibility to Maharet's story. So now my quotes:
That bitter smile quote: Santino originally believed Maharet to be in the wrong when she defied Akasha, and sought to overthrow her, helping in Khayman's creation of an army of vampires. However by this time he has now realized that he was wrong in his estimation of both Maharet and the Mother (again, not necessarily Akasha, just the general term). The smile was bitter because he couldn't fully enjoy Akasha's jab at Maharet, knowing the story behind it. He could appreciate the jab, because he probably still doesn't fully like Maharet, but he couldn't enjoy it. Hence the bitter smile.
Backtrack to the tense reaction of Maharet's. She has just finished telling her story, and now Akasha has arrived. She would have known that Santino had initially opposed her (Maharet), but she would not have known, at this time, if he was with her or against her. A good deal of havoc could have been created if Santino had gone to the side of the Mother, and Maharet didn't know whose side he was on. Especially with an ambiguous exclamation like this. I really think that a lot of Maharet's strength came from the other vampires supporting her cause at this point. Remember, she did absolutely nothing until Mekare arrived, and she tried very hard to show just how evil and cruel Akasha was.
The Santino's wound was bleeding quote: As stated above, Santino wanted no part of the "ideals" of Akasha, and her plans further alienated him from his originally beliefs in the Mother's superiority (for lack of a better term. Righteousness, maybe?) The wound which was bleeding was that there was no faith to be had with Akasha as the Mother.
Now I can go all the way back to the original quote on 436 which started this bloody letter:
"Old faith flared for a moment, faith that had meant more to him than survival, and faith that had been bitterly burnt away."
Old faith, not in any god, but faith in the ancient Queen of the vampires. Faith which had driven him to argue with Maharet heatedly, and faith which had been destroyed when Akasha awoke. Faith much like Marius'. Marius was quite bitter as well. Akasha said it best:
"'What you feel in this room is death, but it is the death of beliefs and strictures. Nothing more.' She looked at Maharet. 'The death of dreams, perhaps,' she said, 'which should have died a long time ago.'"
I'm actually curious where Lestat got this observation from (Santy's quote). Santino is the ex-leader of a large coven. I would think he knows how to keep his mental shielding in place. This is indicated by the fact that no where else in the *entire bloody book* is there another first person *sentence* from Santino. Not even a thought fragment. What? He let his guard down for that one paragraph? Another thing to prove my point in debunking this paragraph: Santino was looking at Lestat in a calculating fashion. Now, in TotBT David makes mention that if you close your mind off, just in your thoughts (this is explained very badly, I'm sorry), then your mental shielding will follow. On does not appraise someone calculatingly with mental shields open, especially when every other single person in the room is a mindreader. It doesn't happen. So where exactly did this paragraph come from?
Another example: on page 427 and 8 Lestat describes the vampires' reactions to the Great Family tree. Every single vampire. Except Santino. Only Marius, Jesse, Khayman, and Daniel allowed their minds to be read. Pandora's info came from others, such as Khayman. Same with Mael. Armand came through Daniel. Eric through his physical reactions only (fear, glances at Maharet, etc.). But there was no one around Santino whose mind was open to Lestat. And I honestly don't think that his mind would have been open to Lestat, since the whole trust thing was probably lacking. So *where* did this paragraph come from?