Medea

What do you think of Medea so far?  What about Jason??  There is no doubt that this play is unique and without equal in the ancient world.  Perhaps the Welsh counterpart to Medea would be a goddess such as Ceridwen.  She was a powerful woman who possessed great knowledge and was able to create and destroy.  She was the creator of the famous bard Taliesin which means "Shining Brow" in Welsh.  He later had adventures with other heroes and found himself intertwined with Arthurian Legend. 

Like the primordial waters of creation, Medea has the power to create, transform and kill; a famously female role in myth.  Because of their powers these women became the archetypal witch or hag lurking in the shadows dealing in petty evil.  Remember the beginning of Macbeth with the three hags, or if you have seen Clash of the Titans, Perseus must face the three sisters with one eye between them.  Clearly there has been a misunderstanding and misinterpretation of their function and power for these great women to be so maligned.   The aged woman who has lost her beauty or "hag" has moved fro the realm of generativity and creation of life to post menopausal sterility and becomes in her wisdom a threat to men in western culture.  Her domain is that of death.  Thus she is feared and reviled in our culture.  Others would revere her wisdom and the natural function she represents and serves.

Remember, there is no journal entry today but be sure to do the one for Medea tomorrow.

The Tragic

For tomorrow you will get a little break as you will be exempt from the journal entry.  Please make a comment here on how the reading is going but no journal necessary.

I felt we needed to continue with tragedy here because it is the realm if Dionysus and directly inspired by him. The tragic stories we will read emphasize the suffering attached to the human condition as opposed to comedy which focuses on the human spirits triumph over suffering. It is very interesting to think about Medea as a heroine, albeit a tragic one. She was prone to lose control as we will see, but her power as a woman was not respected. There were definitely two sets of rules for men and women. Medea was not the usual character depicted by the Greeks and her bold action would even catch attention, and possibly scorn, today.

As you begin to read the play keep in mind that the Greeks did not allow violence to occur onstage. Therefore the gruesome acts you read about are embellished simply because they cannot be shown. As the text suggests, this allows violence to retain its noble character when the context is "appropriate". However, in this case the descriptions you will read will hardly ennoble anything or anyone. In fact the story of Medea remind a little of the story of Job who could not catch a break by following his heart. Sometimes heroes are ahead of their time, or even not of this world and their actions attract censure because they are not understood. We will get more into that next week when we begin our exploration of the monomyth and talk more about Joseph Campbell and his work.  For now, keep your eye on Medea and stay focused on tragedy.

Also think about why this might have been as popular as it was: The festival of Dionysus attracted as many people as a modern NFL game would attract. This was thousands of years before flush toilets, modern food convenience etc. Why would people come from all over Greece for this festival and to see this theater?

Dionysus

The sculpture above is called Michelangelo's Green Man and is one representative example of Dionysus in art.The two images below are also folk representations carved into Christian churches by the non-Christian stone workers in early Britain.  Most of the churches built in the first millennium in western Europe are covered with such images which are all folk interpretations of a god similar to the Greek Dionysus.  The natives never really gave up their old ways of worshiping nature and the unconscious aspect of man.

Maybe one of the least known and most misunderstood of the Greek gods, Dionysus is a god whose influence most of us have first hand experience of and enjoy greatly. As the god of the vine, grapes, wine and all the things that result from its consumption, i thank Dionysus every night when i sit down with a glass of Cab or Shiraz. Somehow that long, bad day at work seems a little less bad, my spirits rise, and the world seems a bit brighter. My neighbors also seem to enjoy the Dionysian things in life and much to my detriment as they stay up late partying and keep me awake.

The loss of control facilitated by alcohol was one of the trademarks of Dionysus and his retinue. The Maenads would often reach a spiritual ecstasy through dancing and loss of control. In this Dionysus is the opposite of Apollo. One way of gaining the religious experience is through structured ritual, prophecy and following the rules (Apollonian), the other way is through a complete dispensation of any type of rule and an embrace of the irrational. Through giving in to unconscious desire and impulse, Dionysus allows the taboo acts which are normally forbidden to be acceptable. St. Patrick's Day or New Years Eve, are perfect examples of times when the usual rules of polite society do not apply. One can get drunk, wear a lampshade and the next day face fellow office workers with little more than a smirk.

If Apollo is the god of civilized society and the conscious and rational mind, then Dionysus is the patron of the wild forest where the unconscious mind is free to play out its own agenda of conflicts. Most fairy tales mirror this convention, placing the realm of unconscious action in the forest which is historically representative of the unknown. Dionysus would have you "know your self" through this avenue rather than Apollo who would have you "know your place".

Because Dionysus is a vegetal god he is also a god who is capable of resurrection and his rites very closely resemble those of Christianity. He was destroyed and resurrected and his followers eat of his flesh and drink his blood in similar rites to attain the mind and mystery of God. If you look back at page 284 in the text you will find a great comparison sheet between the two makes clearly links their stories and worship.

For the coming week we will be looking deeper into tragedy and getting a sense of its importance to myth and life. We will start be revisiting a tragic female figure in "Medea" and then move further into the story of Dionysus in "The Bacchae". Since the theater of Dionysus allowed for the creation of the Greek stage, (different from our modern stage) it was a great vessel for the collective purgation of negative emotion. It seems as though it was a natural creation in the progress of a healthy society.

I hope you enjoyed reading about my favorite of the gods, and we'll see you tomorrow for review of tragedy.

Apollo

Anyone who has ever suffered from "middle child syndrome" will most likely become a Red Sox fan and hate Apollo nearly as much as the New York Yankees. Apollo is the favorite son of the most powerful god in the Greek pantheon. He was also one of the most beloved by the Greeks themselves. The god of music, prophecy, rationality and civilization, Apollo embodied many of the qualities the Greeks emulated in themselves. He was held up as a paragon of society and what the social order stood for and was rightly embraced.

Apollo's unusual birth circumstances are something he shares with most figures who are destined to be great. Hera decreed that he could not be born on land or sea and so with some help from the gods Leto is able to deliver Apollo on the "floating" island of Delos.

One of his first great deeds, as is normal with patriarchical systems, is to slay the serpent Python. Python is of course a symbol of the old religion that existed before his arrival and is most likely a goddess worshiping tradition. This solidifies his rule as the major deity in the region.

It is a bit troubling though that he basically kidnaps sailors to serve as the tenders of his temple.

As the god of prophecy Apollo was very important to the life of Greeks . He was the conduit the Greeks had to the realm of Olympus and becomes an attenuated version of Zeus. I will leave to you the question of his failure in love. It seems probable that the kind of release in letting go of your inhibitions to embrace love wholeheartedly would be impossible for him.