Once upon a time when the world was new there was just Chaos. Then Darkness. Then Light. There was Gaia (the Earth) and Uranus (The Sky). First Gaia and Uranus produced twelve magnificent sons and daughters (Thea, for example, mother of both the Sun and the Moon, so very important). Then they had some less magnificent children: The Cyclopes triplets (ugly and one-eyed) and the Hecatonchire triplets (a very bad combination of Fury, Long-limbed and Sea Goat). Each of these had fifty heads and 100 hands and were fierce and violent. Gaia loved them nevertheless, but apparently, Uranus did not. He could only peek at them through his fingers, and even then he just couldn’t stand them. By all accounts he was both horrified and afraid. So, in a powerful act of denial and cruelty, he shoved them back into Gaia’s womb.
One can only imagine Mother Earth’s agony and anger. All those mutant submerged heads and hands waving around inside her. She wanted revenge, so she made a very very sharp sickle which she hid in a slit in the mountain. She found an accomplice – her power-hungry son Kronos (who according to some was dark, gorgeous and in personality a combination of Hamlet, MacBeth, Hannibal Lecter and Morrissey) – and they waited. When the moment came, Kronos, reportedly without a moment’s moral hesitation, swept the sickle up in a giant arc and sliced his father’s genitals off his body. And from the blood and semen on the site of the castration sprang even more horror: Remorselessness, Jealousy, Rage and Vengeance.
Then Kronos picked up the severed bits and he threw them, oozy, bloody and slippery across Greece. And they landed, plop, right in the exact place (36.224047, 23.061508) where now, July 2018, Jack and I were swimming: Palaiopolis, Kythira. Neither Jack nor I are Creationists, but I must say, when our watches went “beep beep beep, you are here at the place where they landed”, the water seemed thicker and saltier, and Jack was looking rather peaky and saying “I feel a bit weird.”
And many I’m sure will say what type of mother reads her prepubescent son such utter frightening nonsense and then swims around in it. Some even said it out loud. One said, “I think Pythagorus, Socrates and Plato would be better as a Prologue to a holiday in Greece. The founders of Western Rationalism”. These guys were very important, of course and I looked up my notes from Philosophy 101. But frankly at the moment I’m a bit bored of everyone being so rational. And Jack is fine at Maths and Knowledge. And I’m tired of the Socratic Method. IE: I have a good idea. I tell people and then they all pick at it and ask a zillion clever critical questions until I realise it was a rubbish idea. How can one enjoy and take seriously that as a method of enquiry?
So instead, in preparation for our holiday we read the Greek myths (a variety of sources: the Collective Unconscious, Wikipedia, Apuleius, Ovid, Hughes, Fry, others), and excerpts from The Birthday Letters (I did leave out The Dogs are Eating Your Mother).
Think of Artemis and Actaeon, I suggested to my son, as we bobbed around in the warm foamy water. Now that was maybe worse. Artemis: totally glorious chaste Goddess of Hunting and the Wilderness, was bathing in the forest when the hunter Actaeon happened upon her. This was not his fault. Even according to Ted Hughes’ translation: “Destiny, not guilt, was enough/For Actaeon. It is no crime/To lose your way in a dark wood.”
But as I said to Jack, Actaeon should have known better than to simply stare transfixedly at her, which he did. Men need to pull their socks up. She was in fact so angry she threatened a terrible fate upon him should he ever speak again. Either he doubted her power, forgot, was scared or didn’t listen to her properly as he fled, because he immediately called out to his hunting party, was therefore changed into a stag, ravaged and killed, and I’m afraid by some accounts also dismembered by his very own hunting dogs. #metoo wrote Artemis on Facebook.
There are tons of these stories I could tell you. Like never ever give your boyfriend a ball of string for his birthday. Even if the very next day he intends to go into a twisty labyrinth and slay a minotaur and the string will be beyond useful for getting back out again. If you do this, it will end in tragedy, I promise you. I know this absolutely for sure. It actually happened to me, and I really wished I’d read about Theseus earlier. He will go on to rule Athens, but he will desert you and for a period of time you will become an alcoholic. Rather use the string to knit yourself a comforter, which you then will not need.
Others too are very useful: like the one that says you might get turned into a cow if you become enchanted with a married philander. Or how if you start off all chatty and beautiful, but fall in love with a narcissist by mistake, you will eventually only be able to repeat the last words he says to you and then fade away, like Echo, into nothing (nothing) (nothing).
Some support the patriarchy, need revising and are just not true. Like the one where if you have small delicate feet you end up with a prince. Or the one that says you will eventually please your mother-in-law if you know your grains from your poppy seeds, love all ants, cut the wool off dangerous golden sheep, and descend to the underworld and barter with Persephone for beauty cream.
But anyway, back to dismemberment. Jack and I were not swimming around Kythira Island for hours and hours because we like scary sadistic literature. Or because Ted said “the dismemberment of the hero symbolises the obliteration and death of the Ego that must occur before the poet can find his true voice” [Regeneration]. Or in order for me to lecture him about consequences. But because it is Beautiful.
Kythira island is all dark crevices, full of flowers and grapes and dripping with honey. And the sea is ridiculously sparkly and aqua, with exquisite patterned pebbles on the floor and zillions of super cute and merry silver fish everywhere. We swam for hours because the place we wanted to get to, the resting place of patricidal castration, was also exactly where Love and Beauty was born.
From the fizzy whirlpool of the blood and semen of a tossed out gonad, writes Fry “Out of the spindrift of surf and seed emerged the crown of a head, then a brow and then a face. But what kind of a face? A face more beautiful than creation has yet seen or will ever see again. Not just someone beautiful but Beauty itself rose fully formed from the foam.” She lifted herself from the spume and the spray and transported herself via shell to Cyprus. Aphrodite, of course. We wanted to say hello.