A lot has been written about Raelle Collar as ‘Lesbian Jesus’, but I would like to redress the balance a little but examining Scylla Ramshorn as a St Paul like figure. Raelle is seen by many as a saviour figure, Scylla is the one who is initially the persecutor but who ends up as the one supporting and making sure that the Saviour’s message gets heard.
If anyone is not familiar with the story of St Paul, he was someone well educated and zealous for God, but initially he showed his zeal for God by persecuting members of the early Christian church. He was on his way to Damascus to try to arrest and kill members of the church there, when he had an encounter with God on the Damascus Road. God showed him that he was persecuting God’s people instead of serving them. He ended up in the hands of the leader of the local church.
The idea of a Damascus Road experience, is not a redemption story of someone turning from evil to good. Scylla was never an evil person. It is the story of a moral person realising that they are fighting for the wrong cause and changing their life. Scylla had always wanted to protect witches, that did not change. What changed was how she went about it.
How exactly Scylla came to join the Spree has never been fully explained. We know that the army killed her parents when she was 16. Alone, angry and in pain, young idealistic people like her are easy prey for grooming and radicalisation. Anyone recruiting for the Spree would have targeted her to join them, to give her the family she needed and somewhere to put her pain. But in doing that they gave her the wrong target.
The Spree attacked civilians, seeing them as the cause of witch conscription and so a major cause of the loss of lives of so many witches. Scylla believed that if she was to save witches, the way to do it was to kill civilians. We see her commit mass murder in the mall attack and kill more personally, when she kills Porter and Shane.
Scylla’s Damascus Road experience began when she got captured at the Bellweather wedding. She was strong, confident that she was right and that the army were fighting for the enemy. She was telling herself a simple story of good and evil. She had never listened to the other side of the story before.
Anacostia made her listen. And she made Scylla explain herself. Just as the head of the Damascus church had done for Paul, so Anacostia would forgive her, protect her and release her to continue her fight.
So, why did Scylla take Raelle as her moral compass and not Anacostia? Raelle had rejected her. Anacostia had taken the time to understand her and had shown her undeserved kindness, she was so much like Scylla herself. She made Scylla realise that even though her goal to protect witches was good, she herself was motivated by hate. The way out of that is to love. Raelle, and Scylla’s love for her, could reach parts of her soul that even Anacostia couldn’t touch.
After release, Scylla’s journey had many of the same highs and lows that Paul’s journey had. The highs of addressing councils and world leaders. The lows of further imprisonment and torture. The sacrifices to save others, such as when Scylla offers herself to save Tiffany or to save Edwin. Even a ship wreck (OK, a different kind of ‘ship’!)
If Scylla had delivered Raelle to the Spree or if Tally had not seen the balloon, then Scylla would not have had her values challenged. She would not have had to make the commitment to love above all else. She would have continued to fight the wrong battle. The Damascus Road experience that delivered her into the hands of those she thought of as the enemy, was the thing that made all her victories possible,
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