Mythos: The Greek Myths Reimagined (Stephen Fry's Great Mythology, #1)

by Stephen Fry

Was Chaos a god—a divine being—or simply a state of nothingness? Or was Chaos, just as we would use the word today, a kind of terrible mess, like a teenager’s bedroom only worse?

Think of Chaos perhaps as a kind of grand cosmic yawn. As in a yawning chasm or a yawning void. Whether Chaos brought life and substance out of nothing or whether Chaos yawned life up or dreamed it up, or conjured it up in some other way, I don’t know. I wasn’t there. Nor were you. And yet in a way we were, because all the bits that make us were there. It is enough to say that the Greeks thought it was Chaos who, with a massive heave, or a great shrug, or hiccup, vomit, or cough, began the long chain of creation that has ended with pelicans and penicillin and toadstools and toads, sea lions, seals, lions, human beings, and daffodils and murder and art and love and confusion and death and madness and biscuits.

Seminal semantic semiology from the semen of the sky.

Brooding, simmering, and raging in the ground, deep beneath the earth that once loved him, Ouranos compressed all his fury and divine energy into the very rock itself, hoping that one day some excavating creature somewhere would mine it and try to harness the immortal power that radiated from within. That could never happen, of course. It would be too dangerous. Surely the race has yet to be born that could be so foolish as to attempt to unleash the power of uranium?

We return now to the great arc in the heavens traced by Ouranos’s severed gonads. Kronos had flung the Sky Father’s junk, if you recall, far across the sea. We can watch it now. Near the Ionian island of Cythera it drops, splashes, bounces, rises up again, and finally falls and half sinks beneath the waves. Great ropes of semen trail in its wake like ribbons from a kite. Where they strike the surface of the sea a furious frothing is set up. Soon all the waters bubble and boil. Something arises. From the horrors of patricidal castration and unnatural ambition it must be—surely—something unimaginably ugly, something terrible, something violent, something appalling, that promises only war, blood, and anguish? The whirlpool of blood and seminal fluid foments, fizzes, and foams. Out of the spindrift of surf and seed emerges the crown of a head, then a brow, and then a face. But what kind of face? A face far more beautiful than creation has yet seen or will ever see again. Not just someone beautiful but Beauty itself rises fully formed from the foam. In Greek “from the foam” can be rendered as something like APHRODITE, and this is the name of the one who now lifts herself from the spume and spray. She stands on a large scallop shell, a demure and gentle smile playing on her lips. Slowly she alights onto a beach on Cyprus. Where she steps flowers bloom and clouds of butterflies arise. Around her head, birds fly in circles, singing in ecstasies of joy. Perfect Love and Beauty has ...

Kronos had seen by now that his wife was expecting, and he readied himself for the happy day when he could consume the sixth of his children. He was taking no chances. The prophecy of Ouranos still rang in his ears, and the superstitious pangs of paranoia that ravage all despotic usurpers grew fiercer in this ur-Stalin each day.

“A true leader forges alliances. A true leader is admired and trusted.”

Percy Jackson and Theseus to name but two.

Greek myth is replete with infants cast into the wilderness or abandoned on mountaintops to die, either because some prophecy foretold they would one day bring disaster on their parents, tribe, or city, or because they were considered accursed, ugly, or malformed. Such outcasts seemed always to survive and return to fulfill the prophecy or win back their birthright.

Those who speak truth to power usually end up in chains or an early grave, but inside Zeus’s head Metis could never be silenced. She would be a prudent check on the reckless excesses and headlong passions that often threatened to get the god of thunder into trouble. His storms of temper, lust, and jealousy needed to be balanced by her calm voice, a voice that could urge his instincts into more rational and enlightened channels.

Zeus saw the path of his duty clear before him. He must father the twelfth and final god. Or, to put it another way, his sex-crazed glance fell on yet another appetizing immortal.

“The close confines of this cramped cavern are occasioning me uncomfortably acute claustrophobia,” he said, inventing both alliteration and the family of “-phobia” words as he spoke. “I shall see you presently. Get on with your spinning or knitting or whatever it is, there’s a good mother.”

“This world,” Zeus went on, affecting not to hear, “is quite extraordinarily beautiful. Everything in its place—rivers, mountains, birds, beasts, oceans, groves, plains, and canyons . . . But you know, when I look down, I find myself sorrowing at how empty it is.” “Empty?” “Oh Prometheus, you have absolutely no idea how boring it is to be a god in a complete and finished world.”

Perhaps we only imagined these first days of beautiful simplicity and universal kindness so that we could have a high point of paradisal sublimity against which to judge the low, degraded times that came after.

First he commanded Hephaestus to do as Prometheus had done, to shape a human being from clay moistened by his spittle. But this was to be the figure of a young female. Taking his wife Aphrodite, his mother Hera, his aunt Demeter, and his sister Athena as models, Hephaestus lovingly sculpted a girl of quite marvelous beauty

Illness, Violence, Deceit, Misery, and Want had arrived. They would never leave the earth. What Pandora did not know was that, when she shut the lid of the jar so hastily, she forever imprisoned inside one last daughter of Nyx. One last little creature was left behind to beat its wings hopelessly in the jar forever. Its name was ELPIS, Hope.

Nyctimus had little time to reign in his father’s stead, however, as his forty-nine brothers ravaged the land with such violence and behaved so disgustingly that Zeus decided it was time for the whole human experiment to be brought to a close. To that end he gathered the clouds into a storm so intense that the land was flooded and all the people of Greece and the Mediterranean world were drowned.

“O gods above, never let this youth and me part! Let us always be one!” The gods heard her prayer and answered with the callous literalness that seemed ever to delight them. In an instant Salmacis and Hermaphroditus did indeed become one. The pair fused into a single body. One body, two sexes. No longer the naiad Salmacis and the youth Hermaphroditus, but now intersex, male and female coexisting in one form. Although the Romans were to regard this state of being as a disorder that threatened the strict militaristic norms of their society, the more open-minded Greeks prized, celebrated, and even worshipped the hermaphrodite gender. Statuary and representations on pottery and temple friezes show us that what the Romans feared, the Greeks seemed to find admirable.94

The great museums of the world have hidden away treasures that represent intersex figures like Hermaphroditus. Many of these have only recently come to light, with exhibitions at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and other leading institutions setting a trend for rediscovery of this neglected area. It coincides with a greater, society-wide understanding of the fluidity of gender.

The Greeks untangled love’s complexity by naming each separate strand and providing divinities to represent them. Aphrodite, the supreme goddess of love and of beauty, was attended by a retinue of winged and naked godlings called Erotes. Like many deities (Hades and his underworld cohorts, for example) the Erotes suddenly found themselves with much to do once humanity established itself and began to flourish. Each of the Erotes had a special kind of amatory passion to promulgate and promote. ANTEROS—the youthful patron of selfless unconditional love.96 EROS—the leader of the Erotes, god of physical love and sexual desire. HEDYLOGOS—the spirit of the language of love and terms of endearment, who now, one assumes, looks over Valentine cards, love letters, and romantic fiction. HERMAPHRODITUS—the protector of effeminate males, mannish females, and those of what we would now call a more fluid gender. HIMEROS—the embodiment of desperate, impetuous love, love that is impatient to be fulfilled and ready to burst. HYMENAIOS—the guardian of the bridal chamber and wedding music. POTHOS—the personification of languorous longing, of love for the absent and the departed.

The Greeks had at least four words for love:

AGAPE—this was the great and generous kind that we would describe as “charity” and which could refer to any holy kind of love, such as parents for their children or the love of worshippers for their god.98 EROS—the strain of love named after the god, or after whom the god is named. The kind that gets us into most trouble. So much more than affectionate, so much less than spiritual, eros and the erotic can lead us to glory and to disgrace, to the highest pitch of happiness and the deepest pit of despair. PHILIA—the form of love applied to friendship, partiality, and fondness. We see its traces in words like “francophile,” “necrophilia,” and “philanthropy.” STORGE—the love and loyalty someone might have for their country or their sports team could be regarded as storgic.

There was no graver sin in Zeus’s eyes than the betrayal of xenia, the sacred duty of hosts toward guests, and guests toward hosts.

Failing in the duties as a guest was considered as heinous as failing in the duties of a host.

Nephele had cause to save the life of Phrixus—an Isaac to his father’s Abraham—when Athamas tied his son to the ground and made to sacrifice him. Just as the Hebrew god revealed a ram in a thicket to Abraham and saved Isaac’s life, so Nephele sent a golden ram to rescue her son Phrixus. The golden fleece of that ram gave rise to the great quest of Jason and his Argonauts.

To the Greeks hubris was a special kind of pride. It often led mortals to defy the gods, bringing about inevitable punishment of one kind or another.

This is so similar to the story of Apollo and Hyacinthus that you wonder if some bard somewhere got drunk or confused.

The two most celebrated seers of Greek myth were CASSANDRA and TIRESIAS. Cassandra was a Trojan prophetess whose curse was to be entirely accurate in her prognostications yet always just as entirely disbelieved. The Theban Tiresias underwent an equally stressed existence. Born male, he was turned female by Hera as a punishment for striking two mating snakes with a stick, something which annoyed her greatly at the time, for reasons best known to herself. After seven years of serving Hera as a priestess, Tiresias was returned to his original male form, only to be struck blind by Athena for looking on her naked while she bathed in the river.

Narcissistic personality disorder, much talked about these days, is marked by vanity, self-importance, a grandiose hunger for admiration, acclaim, and applause, and above all an obsession with self-image. The feelings of others are railroaded and stampeded, while such considerations as honesty, truthfulness, or integrity are blithely disregarded. Bragging, boasting, and delusional exaggeration are common signs. Criticism or belittlement is intolerable and can provoke aggressive and explosively strange behaviors.185 Perhaps narcissism is best defined as a need to look on other people as mirrored surfaces who satisfy us only when they reflect back a loving or admiring image of ourselves.

For safety’s sake Galatea took Leucippos and sought refuge in a temple of Leto (the Titaness mother of Apollo and Artemis), where she prayed that her daughter might change her sex.

Leto answered the prayer and on the instant Leucippos was transformed into a masculine youth. Hairs pushed through where they should on a male, the correct bulges appeared, the incorrect bulges disappeared. Lampros was none the wiser and they all lived happily ever after. For generations after this, the city of Phaestos celebrated a festival they called the Ekdusia.188 In this ritual all young Phaestian boys lived amongst women and girls, wore female clothes, and had to swear an oath of citizenship before they could graduate from their agela, or youth corps, and acquire full male dress and status.189

Two strangers stood on the threshold, a bearded man and his younger, smooth-faced companion. His son perhaps. “Hello,” said Philemon. “How may we help you?” The younger man smiled and removed his hat, a strange round cap with a shallow brim. “Good afternoon, sir,” he said. “We are a pair of hungry travelers, new to this part of the world. I wonder if we might trespass upon your good nature . . .”

Philemon and Baucis were amazed, not only that there was enough wine in the pitcher to fill their beakers to the brim, but that its quality was so much better than either of them remembered. In fact, unless they were dreaming, it was the most delicious wine they had ever tasted.

“Leave the cottage and climb the hill,” said Astrapos, rising. “Do not look back. Whatever happens do not look back. You have earned your reward and your neighbors have earned their punishment.”

They turned and looked down. They were just in time to see the great flood inundating Eumeneia before Philemon was turned into an oak tree and Baucis into a linden.

The great Gordian knot lay unsolved for more than a thousand years until a reckless and brilliant young Macedonian conqueror and king called Alexander rode with his army into town. When told of the legend he took one look at the great tangle of rope, raised his sword, and swept it down, cutting the Gordian knot and earning the delighted praise of his own and future generations.

When I first heard this story I thought not more of Alexander but less. “He cheated!” I said. Suppose I “solved” a randomized Rubik’s cube by jemmying it open with a screwdriver until all the pieces fell out and then pressing them back again in the right order? Who would praise that? But Alexander is congratulated by history for “thinking outside the box” and called “the Great.” One rule for the genius warrior kings of the world and another for the rest of us.

“I got lost,” said Silenus. “This kind fellow—” he pushed the reluctant Midas forward to face the god, “—took me in to his palace and gave me the run of the place. I drank most of his wine, ate most of his food, pissed in his water jars, and sicked up over his silk cushions. Never complained. Thoroughly good soul.” Silenus slapped Midas on the back.

Midas smiled as best he could. He hadn’t known about the water jars and the silk cushions.

Much as a pearl is formed around grit, so a legend is taken to have been built up around a grain of truth.

Prayer, ritual, and sacrifice, the taxation paid to the invisible forces of nature, those are different things.