(W)omen out/of Time: Metis, Medea, Mahakali

“What if Truth were an Omen?” I ask (with a nod to Ni-etzsche4 — through a glass, darkly). What if Truth were a Nam-shub, a Magic Word/Work, the nomen of an omen? Such a truth advances here — in this essay — masked as women. Metis, Me-dea, and Mahakali — first, a Pelasgian Titan, the first wife of Zeus and unacknowledged mother of Athena, who was doomed to be swallowed up whole and usurped by the head of Olympus; second, a foreign priestess of the chthonic Hecate, who (as first told in Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautika and later immortal-ized by Euripides and Seneca) helps the Greek Jason retrieve the mythic golden fleece, and who eventually murders her entire family and escapes back to Colchis; and finally, a fringe Hindu goddess first worshipped by criminals and outcastes, a dark de-ity clothed in severed heads, who drinks the blood of her vic-tims and resides in the cremation-ground — one who comes to be adopted as an incarnation of great time (mahākāla) or death itself in Hindu religion.