il Tao che non si può beffare - III

Francois Xavier Fabre, Oedipus and the Sphinx, c. 1806-08, Dahesh Museum of Art, NYX

II Contradictory and Conflicting Themes

Another mental characteristic of larger systems can be exemplified from themes of Greek drama. In that complex corpus of shared ideas, there existed side by side with the Oresteia a second cross-generational sequence of myths bound together by the concept of anangke and starting from a specific act. Cadmus incurred the wrath of Ares by killing a sacred serpent, and this set the stage for repeated episodes of trouble in the royal house of Thebes. Eventually, the oracle at Delphi predicted that Laius, king of Thebes, would have a son who would kill him and marry his own mother, Jocasta, the wife of Laius.

Laius the tried to thwart the oracle and thus, in spite of himself, precisely brought on himself the working out of the tragic necessity. First he refused sexual contact with Jocasta to avoid the begetting of the son who would kill him. But she made him drunk and the child was begotten. When the baby was born, Laius commanded that he be bound and abandoned on the mountainside. But again Laius‘ plan failed. The baby was found by a shepherd and adopted by Polybus, king of Corinth. The boy was named Oedipus, or Swollen Footed, because the baby‘s feet were swollen from being tied together when he was exposed on the mountain.

As Oedipus grew up, he was taunted by the other boys, who said he did not resemble his father He therefore went to Delphi for an explanation and was condemned by the oracle as the boy fated to kill his father and marry his mother. Oedipus, not knowing that he was an adopted child and believing that Polybus was his true father, then fled. He would not return to Corinth lest he should kill.

Fleeing thus, he met with an unknown man in a chariot who rudely refused him right of way. He killed that unknown man, who was in fact Laius, his true father. Proceeding on his way, he encountered a Sphinx outside Thebes and answered her riddle: “What is it that walks first on four legs, then on two, and finally on three?” The Sphinx then destroyed herself, and Oedipus found himself suddenly a hero who had conferred a great benefit upon the city of Thebes. He became king of that city by marrying Jocasta. By her he had four children. Finally, plague struck the city and the oracle attributed the cause of the plague to one man‘s horrible action. Oedipus insisted on investigating this matter, although the blind sage Tiresias had advised him to let sleeping dogs lie. The truth was finally exposed. Oedipus, the king of Thebes, was himself the man who had killed his father and married his mother. Jocasta then hanged herself in horror and Oedipus blinded himself with a pin from her scarf.

Oedipus was exiled from Thebes and wandered the world, accompanied by his daughter Antigone. Finally, old and blind, he arrived at Colonos, outside Athens. There he mysteriously vanished in the groves sacred to the Furies, presumably accepted by them into their afterlife.

It is immediately interesting to note a formal contrast between this tale and the Orestes sequence, for Oedipus went spontaneously to the grove of the Furies, whereas Orestes was chased by them. This contrast is explained in the finale of Aeschylus‘ Orestes trilogy, where Athena lays down the law that Athens is a patriarchal society in which wives are not fully kin to their offspring, who remain in the gens, or clan, of the father. The mother is a “stranger” and matricide is therefore no crime. (After all, Athena never had a mother; she sprang fully armed from the head of her father, Zeus.) The Furies, on the other hand, matriarchal goddesses, will forgive Oedipus, the boy who kills his father and has four children by his mother, but will not pardon Orestes the matricide.

In fact, the culture of classical Athens carried two utterly contrasting mythological sequences, The Oedipus sequence, which is the nightmare of crime against the father, and the Orestes nightmare of crime against the mother.

I personally am dissatisfied with Athena‘s explanation, in which she dismisses the Furies as a bunch of old hags, obsolete survivors of a more primitive matriarchy. As an anthropologist, I do not believe that there ever existed any society that was one hundred percent matriarchal not any that was one hundred percent patriarchal. In many societies, kinship is asymmetrical, so that a different kind of relationship is developed on each side of the genealogy. The child has different obligations and privileges vis-à-vis his maternal uncles from those implicit in his relationship with paternal uncles. But always there are benefits and duties on both sides. The whole play, Aeschylus‘ Eumenides, is very strange, and also is the Oedipus at Colonos of Sophocles. I can only read the Eumenides as either extremely jingoistic Athenian patriotism, or, more probably, a caricature of that patriotism. The Colonos, on the other hand, is surely a very serious piece, no less patriotic than the Eumenides, since it, too, deals with the ancient history of the city of Athens. Strangely, the members of the audience are expected to understand the old, blind Oedipus is now a sacred figure and there is almost a war brewing between Oedipus‘ descendants in Thebes and Theseus, the founder of the new city of Athens. Both parties want Oedipus to die on their national territory and to become somehow a guardian spirit for that land.

My suspicion – and it is to illustrate this that I have introduced the tales – is that each myth owes something to the other, and they are a balancing pair that is a product jointly of a culture divided in its emphasis on matriarchy or patriarchy. I would ask whether this double expression of the conflicting views is not somehow typical of the divided larger mind.

The syncretic dualism of Christian mythology provides a similar but more astonishing example. Jehovah is clearly a transcendent god of Babylonian times whose location is on top of an artificial mountain, or ziggurat. Jesus, in clear contrast, is a deity whose location is in the human breast. He is an incarnate deity, like Pharoah and like every ancient Egyptian who was addressed in mortuary ceremonies as Osiris.

It is not that one or the other of these double phrasings is right, or that it is wrong to have such double myths. What seems to be true is that it is characteristic of large cultural systems that they carry such double myths and opinions, not only with no serious trouble, but perhaps even reflecting in the latent contradictions some fundamental characteristic of the larger mentality.

In this connection, Greek mythology is especially interesting because its stories did not draw the line between the more secular and human gestalten and the larger themes of fate and destiny the same way as these lines are drawn among us today. The Greek classification was different from ours. Greek gods are like humans, they are puppets of fate just like people, and the interaction between the forces of what seems a larger mind and mere gods and humans is continually being pointed out by the chorus. They see that the gods and heroes and themselves are alike puppets of fate. The gods and heroes in themselves are as secular as our superman, whom indeed they somewhat resemble.

In mythology and especially drama, the eerie and the mysterious – the truly religious overtones – are contained in such abstractions as anangke or nemesis. We are told rather unconvincingly that Nemesis is a goddess and that the gods will punish the arrogance of power which is called hubris. But in truth these are the names of themes or principles, which give an underlying religious flavour to life an drama; the gods are at most the outward, though not visible, symbols of these more mysterious principles. A similar state of affairs exists in Balinese religion, where, however, the gods are almost totally drained of all personal characteristics. They (except for Rangda, the Witch, and Barong, or dragon) have only names, directions, colors, calendric days, and so on. In dealing with each of them it is the appropriate etiquette that is important.

il Tao che non si può beffare - II