Posts Tagged ‘taboo’

Greek Mythology – seminar 3

December 8, 2009

Incest

Greek myth (and perhaps even more so Roman, if we read Ovid) was full of intra-familial unions. This deserves comment, as the incest taboo is one of the most fundamental in just about any society. Even before the genetic problems of such intercourse became common knowledge, children of incest appear to have been considered in some way transgressive. This seems to have been one of the areas by which myth demonstrated, by means of negative exempla, the norms of human behaviour.

One group looked at father/daughter incest, and the myth of Thyestes and Pelopia. In some sources, Thyestes raped his daughter, unaware of who she was. In others, he received an oracle that he could avenge himself on his brother Atreus if he got a son (Aegisthus) on her, and another (in Hyginus) suggests she consented to this out of a sense of duty. Even so, the story ends with her killing herself when her son’s parentage is discovered, suggesting that not even the will of the gods can override the shame of such an act.

The second group looked at mother/son unions, and the myth of Oedipus is the obvious paradigm for this. Do we believe in Freud’s Oedipus complex? And why is there so much more ancient literature on this myth than other tales of incest? Have we sanctified and valorised the mother-son bond as a result of Western Catholicism? There are interesting parallels in the primordial myths, not only of Greece, but also of other cultures – mother/son intercourse tends to be the preserve of the early gods – Oedipus seems in that respect to transgress into the divine sphere.

The last group examined brother/sister incest, with the myth of the Aeolids. The Odyssey suggests the children of Aeolus were all happily married to each other; later versions highlight Macareus and Canace’s illicit affair, Aeolus’ wrath, and her suicide. What is allowable in the world of the ‘apologoi’ is less so in other genres. But again, cf. Zeus and Hera, a model picked up by the Ptolemies in Hellenistic Egypt. Mortals should not emulate the gods – where they do so, however unwittingly, it leads to death and the subversion, rather than continuation, of the oikos.

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Greek Myth 7: The Trojan Cycle 1

December 8, 2009

Ok, I know it’s been a long time since I posted, even on my teaching pages. The first semester of an academic job is…a bit busy. And given no-one had commented on these posts, I had (wrongly) assumed students weren’t using it. This proved a bit of a misconception, as the recent SET/SEM review of this module came back with the result that students found this blog a helpful resource, and regretted there wasn’t more discussion here. Only 1 thing to say to that, guys – someone has to make the first comment! If you don’t, no-one else will, and it only takes 1 person to start a discussion…

Lecture 7 kicked off the myth of the Trojan War, tracing its events from the ‘plan of Zeus’ and the marriage of Thetis to the death of Hector at the end of the Iliad. That’s a lot of material, and the need to get through it all exposed one of the weaknesses of this module. Next time, less narrative, more detailed discussion. The build-up to the war is perhaps the most interesting aspect – you get a real sense of the heroic age hurtling towards Armageddon as Zeus decides to depopulate the earth and make his daughter famous.

The lecture looked at the Judgement of Paris and Helen’s role in the affair – was she a passive token of exchange, or an active seducee? Several representations of Helen were looked at, as lascivious adulteress, innocent victim, and regretful sinner. In many versions (Aeschylus and Euripides especially) she is connected linguistically or by imagery to Iphigenia, so the sacrifice at the heart of the embarkation also played a major role in the discussion. The conflict of the Iliad could probably have done with a lecture of its own, as there is a lot there which is hugely influential on the later tradition.

What does all this mean? Well, some major points did come out, which perhaps should have been elaborated more. The massive East vs. West conflict is important, especially in fifth-century depictions, and is still relevant to the modern day. There is a sense that combining the two spheres is disastrous, and this also holds true on another level – the myth functions to separate the spheres of gods and mortals. It is the end of the age of the demigods, for good or ill. The next lectures will aim to build on that sense of ‘closure’.

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Greek myth 6: The House of Atreus

November 12, 2009

One of the bloodiest chapters in Greek mythology, this myth cycle seems to be all about taboos and what happens when you violate them: cannibalism, incest, violence, sexual transgression. Parallels can be drawn with the House of Labdacus in the Theban Cycle – no wonder Froma Zeitlin though Argos and Thebes functioned as ‘other’ places set against Athens on the tragic stage.

Oe thing that comes out is the building cycle of transgressions as the myth progresses through its generations – you have Tantalus’ serving of Pelops at the banquet of the gods, and any retaliation of Pelops against his father instead seems displaced onto his father-in-law, Oenomaus, in his fatal chariot race. It’s in the next generation, though, that things get really interesting – and really grisly. Pelops’ own sons, Atreus and Thyestes, turn first on their brother Chrysippus, then on each other. Agamemnon and Menelaus, the heroes of the Trojan War, and Aegisthus, the cousin who brings Agamemnon down, are begotten amidst treachery (the golden lamb), adultery, infanticide and cannibalism of Atreus against Thyestes’ sons, and incest in the pursuit of vengeance.

If this is the background against which the Trojan War is set, is it any wonder that Helen ran off with Paris? That Clytemnestra took up with Aegisthus when Agamemnon, who she claims in Euripides (IA) killed her husband and child and raped her, sacrificed their daughter at Aulis?

Nobody seems right or wrong in this myth – even Orestes, who is told to avenge his father on his mother, doesn’t exactly come up smelling of roses (epsecially in later, Euripidean versions). Eloping with his cousin Hermione after killing her husband, he is eventually killed by a snakebite and the line wiped out by the Heraclids. As in the Theban Cycle, the ancestral curse on the household eventually expunges itself in the destruction of the House.

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Greek myth 5: The Theban cycle part 2

November 5, 2009

This lecture continued our exploration of the House of Labdacus, from the death of Oedipus to the sack of Thebes by the Epigonoi. I wanted to start to do more with this course this week, moving away from a straightforward narrative and identification of themes to a more detailed explanation of the representation of the myth in various texts, and to think about why it might have been manipulated in these ways – but without just giving the answers to the students (never an easy task!).

Yet even on its most superficial reading, the myth still makes some interesting points. For example, in the epic Thebaid, Oedipus curses his sons because they, like he, violated some sort of taboo – this contrasts markedly with the expression of the curse in tragedy, which seems to occur simply because they mistreated him, and may show the hero as remaining the transgressive character he appears in Sophocles’ OT.

The violation of taboos and the transgression of social norms seems to lie at the heart of this myth – even taking aside the violation of divine imperative, crossing of gender boundaries, parricide and incest of the last lecture, we see the cycle continuing in curses, treason against one’s fatherland, fratricide, desecration of the dead, violation of the will of the gods and the demands of the state, multiple suicides, vengeance, and matricide in the second half of the myth. If myths are, as Csapo (2005) states, representative of social ideologies, norms of behaviour must be defined in this myth through the exploration of their extreme opposites.

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