Book of the Sphinx

by Willis Goth Regier

Sought, the Sphinx seems everywhere, whether the guardian of the pyramids on Egypt's Giza plateau or the beautiful man-eater with a deadly riddle, to be approached with awful caution. The Sphinx, that icon painted, sculpted, engraved, and exalted in poetry, fiction, and music, so impressed the philosopher Hegel that he pronounced the creature “the symbol of the symbolic itself.” With a wealth of illustrations, Book of the Sphinx confirms Hegel's lofty judgment, finding the Sphinx in tragedies, paintings, opera, murder mysteries, brothels, bars, and advertisements.

 

Pursuing the Sphinx through kaleidoscopic sightings and encyclopedic observations, Willis Goth Regier plumbs the symbol's mysteries, conducting the reader down ever more perplexing and intriguing paths. Wonderfully readable, his highly idiosyncratic tour of the ages and the arts leads at last to a conception of the Sphinx that embraces nothing less than all that is unknowable—proving once again that confronting a Sphinx is one of the most dangerous and exhilarating adventures of the imagination.

301 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Lanny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very nicely done work compiling an attempted 'total picture'
of the sphinx, which is certainly about something not being totally graspable. This book is reference heavy and fun, and quite illuminating. Great to take to a coffee-shop. Anecdotal
and amazing.

[xDEAD ENDx · Rating 4 out of 5]

My main reason for reading this book was to start thinking about the sphinx in terms of mystery, enigma, and symbolism. While this didn't totally have what I was looking for (and to be fair, it was a shot in the dark with no expectations beforehand), it's a very nice look at a profound number of ways the sphinx has been used and interpreted throughout history. It was particularly helpful in helping me establishing the overlap, relationship, and (if not intentional, acutely poetic) contrast between the Egyptian and Greek sphinx tales.

I would have liked a little bit more about symbolic interpretations of Oedipus and the Sphinx (stemming from my appreciation for Foucault's multiple readings of power and Oedipus throughout his lecture series), but the foundation this set for future books is solid.

[DAJ · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a compendium of examples of the sphinx motif and what it has meant to people over the centuries—both the Egyptian kind (which Regier dubs "Horemakhet", after the deity the Egyptians thought was manifested in the Great Sphinx of Giza) and the Greek kind (dubbed "Phix", from the Theban dialectal variant of the Greek word σφίγξ). It is organized by subject: the titles of the middle chapters are "Secrets", "Confrontations", "Riddles", "Body", "Eros", "Mind", and "Symbol of Symbols". It is emphatically not a history of the motif, merrily jumbling together examples of whatever point it's making, no matter how far apart in time they are. Therefore it doesn't discuss the riddle I'm most interested in: why and how the Egyptian and Greek beasts came to be called by the same term. For that matter, it doesn't even say much about what sphinxes signified to the ancient Egyptians. The focus is how sphinxes are perceived in Western culture; Regier rarely cites examples east of Ephesus. Within that constraint, the examples are numerous and wide-ranging, from philosophy to psychology to music, but they're not analyzed at length. Anyone wanting more detail would have to trace the originals through Regier's footnotes, which are fortunately thorough. His eccentric writing style is likely to divide readers: an academic review of the book by Joshua Katz called it "laugh-out-loud funny", while I mostly just find it distracting.

[Anne Mc · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not to my taste, but can imagine someone else might like it--swirls around w series of literary nonfiction vignettes

[Wythe Marschall · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like a Whaler's Dictionary, a single-minded florilegium of sphinxes (andro- and gyno-), revolving around the dipoles of Phix, the sphinx who riddled Oedipus, and the Great Sphinx, whose origins and purpose are the very mystery that "sphinx" signifies. A quick, dope read, esp. if you're writing about monsters and signs...