Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

by Edward Slingerland

Oedipus faces another crisis in the form of a terrible plague. Some, like the soothsayer Teresias, turn to the gods for guidance, hoping to discern the proper way forward from clues found in the flight of birds or other omens. Oedipus castigates them, recalling his encounter with the Sphinx: Tell us, has your mystic mummery ever approached the truth? When that hellcat the Sphinx was performing here, Tell us: What help were you to these people? Her magic was not for the first man who came along: It demanded a real exorcist. Your birds— What good were they? or the gods, for the matter of that? But I came by, Oedipus, the simple man, who knows nothing— I thought it out for myself, no birds helped me!15 What vanquished the Sphinx was not magic or divine intervention, but the power of human creative insight. As the cultural historian Johan Huizinga notes, riddles that must be solved, upon the pain of death, are a common feature across the world’s sacred mythical cultures. “In its mythological or ritual context,” he observes, “it is nearly always what German philologists know as the Halsrätsel or ‘capital riddle,’ which you either solve or forfeit your head. The player’s life is at stake.”16