Athena's Remorse

Pallas Athena: we know of her name from Ancient Greece as the great warrior goddess of peerless wisdom. She is often shown with an owl, the all-seeing bird of the night, and by association the owl has itself become linked with the goddess’s own qualities of wisdom. But it is unusual for a goddess to have two names, and we might wonder how this came to be. 

Once in the morning of innocence Pallas and Athena were two individuals. Pallas was the daughter of the sea god Triton, and she and Athena became inseparable friends. Being inclined to a warrior’s way of life, both of them loved to practice combat together, and these shared skills only seemed to bring them closer together. They would engage in mock battles, each vying for the upper hand and the friendly victory which followed. 

One day these fights became just a little too real, as mock fights perhaps inevitably tend to. As Pallas was about to strike the victory blow, Athena’s father Zeus intervened and tripped Pallas, causing her to stumble. Seizing her chance Athena instinctively struck her friend a telling counter-blow. In that terrible moment Pallas lay dead at her friend’s feet.

Overcome with the enormity of what she had done, and distraught with grief and remorse, Athena in that moment decided to take her dear friend’s name and place it even before her own. In such a way the goddess perhaps hoped that her lost friend would live on through her, and that by taking her name Pallas would always be a part of her. And so Athena the goddess became Pallas Athena, and the two became one.

The ancient story speaks powerfully still. Grief, regret and loss are part of the human experience. Like Athena the goddess we might strive in some way to recapture what has been lost to us. And that loss might be felt even more keenly if we feel that in some way we have been to blame, whether such a feeling is truly justified or not. How often we hear stories of someone who has survived some terrible accident or ordeal of survival feeling guilty towards the victims for no other reason than that they have survived while others have not. It is as if we owe a debt to the dead, even when we might not have known them personally.

And perhaps we do. Perhaps what we owe them is an increased awareness of the gift of life as it is lived in every moment. And that is something we owe even more to ourselves. Those who have passed out of our lives can be honoured by our memories of them. As with Athena, who chose to honour her dear friend by absorbing that fundamental part of her – her own name – into her own being, those memories become a part of us. To feel guilty or regretful about things which already have happened, particularly if those things involve loss, is natural. But we need not make ourselves prisoners of that grief. We are alive, and it surely is our duty, like the warrior goddess, to live our lives worthily and with a sense of wonder.

Painting Mourning Athena by Sandro Botticelli

Golden Apples

Far to the west, so far that it almost balances on the rim at the edge of the world, lies an island. Being an enchanted place, this particular island is the home of beings not encountered in our own everyday world, but if we are fortunate we may perhaps visit it in our dreams. Were we to do so, we would encounter three beautiful nymphs known as the Hesperides, who are the daughters of the sunset. For when at day’s end the golden sun slips beneath the world to begin its journey through the starry realms of night, the nymphs are the last beings to bid it farewell until the following dawn.

On this enchanted isle grows the sacred tree of Hera, the consort of great Zeus. This remarkable tree, which was grown from the fruit that was a wedding gift from Gaia, the earth goddess, bears apples of pure gold whose possession will grant precious immortality to anyone who owns them. It is the task of the Hesperides to guard these apples well, and to keep a watchful eye on the three nymphs and to make sure that they are fulfilling their task, a huge and terrible serpent twines its glinting coils around the tree’s trunk.

In this idyllic scene we recognize all the elements of enchantment: a sunset island set apart from the world, three beautiful nymphs, a fearsome guardian serpent, and a tree which bears miraculous fruit. It echoes other such scenes familiar to us from other stories and other places: Idun, goddess of spring and rebirth, who, in the Islandic Edda, took care of the golden apples, the poisoned apple in the story of Snow White, and the tree and the serpent that dwells in the Garden of Eden. And like the Eden story in the Book of Genesis, we are aware that in order for things to happen, in order for the story to progress further, the walls of enchantment have to be breached.

On the island of the Hesperides that disruptive influence arrives in the form of the goddess Eris, whose very name means ‘Discord’. Exactly how this troublesome goddess managed what she did is unclear. Perhaps she tricked the guardian serpent, or perhaps she caused some quarrel to break out between the three peaceable nymphs. The result is the same: Eris leaves the enchanted island with one of the apples in her possession. Being the devious goddess that she is, Eris has little interest in keeping the apple for herself. She is, after all, already immortal. No, her plan for the precious apple is much more insidious. The goddess writes on the apple the three beguiling words: “To the fairest”, and tosses it into the midst of a feast of the gods on Olympus. 

The goddesses Hera, Aphrodite and Athena naturally all claim that the apple is intended for them, and the mortal, Prince Paris, is brought in to settle the dispute. Beautiful Aphrodite sways the outcome in her favour with a simple but irresistible bribe: she promises Paris the hand of the fairest of mortals, Helen, who would become known as Helen of Troy, if the prince will decide in her favour. With such a prize on offer, the outcome is never in doubt. Paris claims what the goddess of love has granted, kidnaps Helen – and the terrible and tragic seed which leads to the drawn-out and deadly Trojan War is sown.

One small act carried out with mischievous intent can set in motion a whole chain of events whose outcome cannot be foreseen – not even by the individual who set those events in motion. Neither gods nor mortals can control those events, which, like ripples which disturb the surface of a still pond, continue to spread beyond the cause that started them. The three Hesperides must mourn the loss of the precious fruit entrusted to them. But perhaps the apple of Discord did grant a certain measure of immortality. So many centuries later, we still know the names and can relate the stories of those who feature in these ancient tales. And we can trace the events in our own lives which might reflect them, and each in our own way work, like the Hesperides, to come to terms with what has been taken from us. 

Painting: The Garden of the Hesperides, by Frederic, Lord Leighton.

The Daughter of the Air

Is it possible for a daughter to come before her mother? It is, but to find such an example we need to visit the world of myth. Today, 28th of February, Finland celebrates the day of its national epic, the Kalevala. As with Homer’s epic stories, the verses of the Kalevala originally would have been sung to an audience by a bard. Such performances not only kept these stories alive; they also helped to give their listeners a strong sense of their national identity, of being aware of who they were as a people. 

Sitting listening to their bards of long ago, the Finns would have heard the story of Ilmatar, the Daughter of the Air. No one knew who her parents were, or even if she had any. She was simply there, living alone in an airy palace of eight thousand rooms. Beyond the palace there was nothing to see except drifting mists and the shimmering curtain of the Northern Lights. But the Daughter of the Air felt that somewhere beyond her echoing palace there must be more. She was sure that if only she could just reach out of one of the windows far enough, she at last would be able to catch a glimpse of what might lie far below.

One day, determined at last to satisfy her curiosity, she stretched herself as far as she dared from her window. Too far. Suddenly she was falling, falling. It seemed as if she would fall forever. She fell so far that when she turned to look above her, the airy palace which was all that she had known already had been lost to view beyond the Northern Lights. She fell even farther, until at last she felt a watery stirring beneath her. Suddenly a great wave seemed to rear itself up to meet her, and in the next moment she plunged into a vast ocean. 

Half-submerged in the ocean, buffeted by the huge waves, she drifted for long centuries, feeling at last the mysterious stirrings of life within her. No longer the Daughter of the Air, she had now become the Mother of the Waters, who eventually would form the land so that all creatures would have a place to flourish, both in the seas and on dry land. In time she would give birth, and her son would be the great Finnish hero Vainamöinen, whose father was the wild wind and the waves, and who himself would play his own part in further creating the world and singing new life into existence.

The daughter comes before the mother – because the daughter becomes the mother. It is the story of our generations. A young girl grows to womanhood and has children of her own. What makes this story from the Kalevala ‘mythic’ is that the daughter apparently had no mother to begin her life. She simply was. Perhaps there is a sense in which this, however mythic it might seem, could also be true.

We carry ourselves forward in time, through the passing years. In his poem ‘The Rainbow’, William Wordsworth famously declared that ‘the child is father of the man’, meaning that we as children, in our upbringing, and in the values which are instilled into us, bring these values into our own adult lives. The child is also the mother of the woman, and it is this awareness which needs to guide us in the care and upbringing of our own children. We as mothers might not always give birth to mighty heroes such as Vainamöinen, but we as parents - and as children – always have the chance to be heroes in some way if that is what is needed of us.

Painting Ilmatar by Joseph Alanen

Tiamat’s Tears

“In the beginning…” These opening words of the Old Testament have a ringing familiarity, perhaps even to those who might seldom visit a church. But the human imagination allows for many ‘beginnings’, and each culture and belief creates its own beginning appropriate to itself. So…

In the beginning there was only Tiamat. Tiamat, the mother of all which will be, out of whose celestial womb all life will flow, fills all of space. She is the primordial salt ocean, and the rising and falling of her fertile waves are but the outward signs of the momentous acts of creation which are even now taking place beneath her surface, in the dark depths of the cosmos. At first it is as if there is only a vast nothing, a void without form. Then gradually, gradually, small flashes appear. At first they are only scattered sparks, shining briefly at random. Then come more and more, until the darkness is pierced by countless stars.

But Tiamat knows that more is needed: something to complement her own salt body. From her void emerges her husband Apsu. Her husband is also of water, but his waters are sweet. His waters are freshwater. It is this mingling of saltwater and freshwater which produces the potential for all the other gods to emerge. But in the eons to come a great sacrifice will be needed if the world itself – our world – is to be created.

The gods, who are Tiamat’s own creation, rise up and rebel against Apsu. Apsu is slain, and Tiamat, in her attempts to win justice for her lost husband, is herself torn in two. Out of this rending, this great separation, dry land at last emerges. Tiamat’s defeat and sacrifice have made it possible for life on earth to begin – and so for us to exist.

This particular ‘beginning’ myth of Tiamat is from Mesopotamia. In it we recognize many key elements of such stories: the creating Great Mother, the ‘alchemical wedding’ of opposing but complementary forces, the resulting struggle, and the need for sacrifice to drive things forward if further creative goals are to be achieved. Sacrifice is of course also at the heart of the Christian story, and it is the idea of sacrifice in such stories which also contains within it the promise of redemption. And what is redemption but an act of sacrifice with a further purpose? Tiamat’s sacrifice was needed to create the separation of land and sea, and so allow life on land to flourish.

But is there perhaps a further meaning that we can draw from the myth of Tiamat? Why was Tiamat specifically the salt ocean? Men wage war, and women weep. Strife and struggle are mingled with the salt tears of those who are left to mourn, and those who are left are the wives and the mothers who remain to grieve. Our mother is the earth, whose freshwater rivers that are the remains of Apsu always flow to be reunited with his beloved ocean. And our mother is also that ocean, containing the salt tears of Tiamat who, as mothers do, knows both the pains of sacrifice and the sweetness of redemption.   

Painting by David Bergen

The Mystery of the Cathedrals

The architects of the great medieval cathedrals and their builders are unknown to us. Their achievements remain, and have become a part of our cultural heritage – and these buildings still fulfill their original functions. Their airy soaring spaces continue to provide a haven of peace and contemplation, whatever the beliefs or non-beliefs of those who visit them.

The builders of Russian Orthodox churches refined their interiors still further. During the building process rows of earthenware pots were cemented into the walls high up near the roof, with the exposed necks of the pots still visible. This feature, unique to these churches, is what provides the enhanced echo when an orthodox choir sings, giving the voices an ethereal resonance entirely appropriate to the music itself. We feel swept aloft by this music, with the entire building becoming itself a vast musical instrument of – literally – architectural proportions.

Such cathedrals would once have dominated the skyline, even in the centre of a city. With some exceptions such as the cathedral of Chartres standing in the open French countryside, and with its magnificent labyrinth set into the floor, such city cathedrals, as we well know, are now overshadowed by the towering commercial buildings that now surround them: a telling-enough statement of the way in which economic concerns have come to dominate spiritual matters in our present day and age.

And what of the churches of today? Why, with their determinedly modern designs, do they not seem to offer the same spiritual experience as the cathedrals of past centuries? The personality of the individual respective architects is what seems to impose itself upon us, rather than the anonymity of the medieval architects who placed themselves and their creativity in the service of a higher ideal. But there is more to it than this, of course – a lot more.

A whole body of knowledge which involved knowledge of sacred proportions went into the building of such medieval masterpieces in stone. This knowledge was itself inherited from the ancients. The builders of Greek temples, and even the unknown builders of the Egyptian pyramids, used this same knowledge and these same proportions when building their own structures. These proportions have an astonishing universality, and also can be found in nature, from the human body to sea shells and the seed patterns in sunflower heads.

The cathedrals, perhaps unconsciously, connect us to this sacred knowledge. When we are in such a space we feel the ‘rightness’ of its presence, even though we might not be openly aware that it is there, and present all around us. For these unknown architects, it provided an attempt to create the ‘holy city’ – the perfect architecture of the heavens – here on Earth. Even though this way of thinking has been lost to (or perhaps ignored by) today’s architects, we all of us still have the chance to attempt to build such a cathedral within ourselves, to create such an inner sacred space, and so allow ourselves to connect with the beautiful mysteries and call heaven down to Earth within us.

Wells Cathedral by Albert Goodwin

The Angel of the Labyrinth

Resourceful Ariadne saw me not at all, although I am sure that she felt my presence as I glided silently at her shoulder. How ingeniously she wound the skein of thread that would be unwound by Theseus, there in the tortuous corridors of the Labyrinth. Ah, bold Theseus, claimed by myth as a hero for slaying the Minotaur that waited for his arrival at the heart of the winding ways. Hero indeed! The wretched monster already knew its own destiny, and needed only to await the arrival of the son of King Aegeus for it to be fulfilled.

I tell you that Ariadne’s deed was more heroic, providing as she did the means for Theseus’ return. And what was her reward? To be deserted by him on the island of Naxos, left behind like any castaway, to be rescued by a god who showed clever Ariadne more honour than he ever did.

All these things I have seen, for I am the witness of history, although history sees me not. Secretly I stand at the gate of every labyrinth, and as you enter the gate of your own labyrinth you will be sure to pass me. But you as well will not notice as I slip my skein into your hands. Unknowingly, you will begin to unwind it as you enter the turning ways. And at every turn it will be laid down, and every measure of it records the event which you experience. Here at this turn you made the decision to go either to the right or to the left, never being sure which path might be the right one to follow. Here farther along, you fell in love, and the path ahead changed for you because of this. And here, you suffered a loss, and the path changed direction once again.

All this is known, because all of these things, these life events, are recorded on the unwinding skein as they happen. Look closely: you can see them written on the skein. All which you experience is faithfully set down, a true document of your passage inwards. 

But what you cannot know is what will be written on the part of the skein which has yet to be unwound, because you can only discover that by unwinding it. And you can only unwind it by travelling farther on your journey. And since you cannot see what is ahead of you, you must have trust. You can read readily enough what has been written as it unwinds behind you. But what is yet to be written is negotiable, and up to you, and dependent upon the paths of choice which lie ahead of you in the labyrinth. And I, who have wound the skein which you now unwind, will help you to make those choices if, like Ariadne, you allow me to help you to reach the labyrinth’s heart.

Painting: Labyrinth, by Jake Baddeley.

Inanna and the Old Woman at the Gate

This is dangerous work, this thing we women do, feeling everything, passing through the gate that way. This is our play with the spirits: we gain what we risk. So it is with Inanna; what she would gain and therefore what she must risk is life itself. Inanna hears Ereshkigal crying, so she has to go. She has to go: after all, isn't Inanna a woman?

We stand on the crack between the worlds in our women's bodies. We look both ways on the horns of life, forward, to see our children through, backward, to remember. That's why our love takes so much courage. Inanna comes through here, asking me the way. I know her symptoms - haven't I seen them a hundred times before? I would have cried for her if she hadn't so many tears for herself already. I am Daughter of the Sun, Inanna says, but I am so wet, I am so wet, I am rain without a river to collect me, I am a flood with no banks to embrace me, and still I cannot stop crying. Old Woman, what can I do with all my water?

"You have the water of life itself in you", I tell her, "It is your responsibility to cry it home." How Inanna cries! She cries as if she has already become the wind: It's not enough, she says, the way I've made myself up, it's not enough; my crown and my kingdom, it's not enough, all my light - not enough, my stores of wealth - not enough, the soldiers who would trade away everything for one night with me - not enough. My sweet companion Ninshubah, who has stepped her path from childhood to womanhood alongside my own - not enough. Even Dumuzi, my king, flesh of my flesh, not enough. My own beloved sons - who are to me as life itself, not enough. There are some kinds of tears that cannot be wiped away. Like prayers, they announce us.

My body! Inanna cries, this hopeless beauty of mine is like the skull of a melon. I don't know who has eaten my insides. This candle of flesh I carry only illuminates everything yellow as bones of sand. I know what Inanna is saying when she asks me how to get through that gate, when she asks me how to dream. Old Woman, Inanna says, teach me how to dream.

"Don't ask me that!" I tell her, "We all know how to dream. Just some of us listen to our dreams. So you just listen to whatever it is stampeding inside you, pulling you over. You just ride it where it takes you. Aren't you yourself the morning and the evening star? There's no woman can't walk through walls, navigating her dreams. There's no woman can't walk through time - don't you have two sons to prove it?"

Can't I give her something more? Inanna wants to know. Something to make it safe? But all I can give her are the words I keep as the witness at the gate: "Ereshkigal is your own sister, and all the scribes in Sumer haven't any more power than what's written in the mother's milk you shared: that's the ink that draws us into this world. And what draws us in draws us out again, both directions."

I didn’t tell her the rest. What good would it do? What must be, must be. But even the underworld rewards the courage of love.

Text: The Descent of Inanna ©Madronna Holden

Photo: model Anna Chipovskaya by Nicolay Biryukov

The Fragile Voice of Sappho

She was short and rather unattractive. She was tall, and her beauty was transcendent. Even these descriptions of her appearance, which were themselves written long after her death, conflict completely with each other. But one aspect of her life was generally agreed upon: in a society which tended to view women as second-class citizens, she was widely regarded as the greatest poet of her age. What survives of her poetry is as fragmented as the few facts which we know of her life. It is as if we were to try and assess the genius of Shakespeare through only a few surviving lines from Hamlet or The Tempest. But even if those few lines of Shakespeare were all that existed, we still would know that we were in the presence of a voice of true greatness, and so it is with Sappho of Lesbos.

Sappho lived her life twenty five centuries ago on the large island of Lesbos in Ancient Greece, composing poems which were intended both to be sung in performance for special occasions such as weddings and other celebrations, and as personal expressions of her thoughts and emotions. Today we take the idea of poetry as self-expression for granted, but such was Sappho’s originality that this idea was thought to have begun with her. Before Sappho, poetry was confined to the formal reciting of epic ideals and traditional stories. What I find so touching about her work, and what speaks to me, is the sense of passion for life which she clearly retained even into her later years. True art needs such passion to express itself – and to communicate itself to, and so to touch, others.

Most of Sappho’s poetry was almost certainly lost when Crusaders sacked Constantinople in the 13th-century and destroyed its libraries and cultural treasures. Fragments from other locations have been discovered in such places as ancient refuse pits, inscribed on shards of pottery, and even among the padding used for the wrappings of mummies. What we have managed to rescue from the jaws of time is but a fraction of what once existed, which from contemporary accounts we know to have been a substantial body of work. We are fortunate that other writers who admired her work also quoted from her in their own writings, for it is these which have provided another source of her poetry for us.

Sappho’s is a voice which has endured against all the vagaries of history. I also think of the Gnostic Gospels, buried in a jar in the Egyptian sands, and lying undiscovered for sixteen long centuries – or the charred and blackened manuscript which is our only known copy of the epic of Beowulf, which was so very nearly destroyed by fire. It is as if some voices are simply not meant to be silenced, in spite of all apparent efforts to erase them from history, either wilfully or by the misadventures of time.

Voices are so fragile, and reflect the very fragility of life itself. But their very survival also paradoxically reflects the tenacity of life: the tenacity to endure, to reach beyond the time in which these voices speak, so that they may be heard by others in a future unimaginable to them. Delicate and exquisite, passionate and refined, Sappho’s words remain like rare flowers pressed between the pages of the book of centuries. My slim edition of her poems, which contains all of the few known surviving fragments of her work, seems to speak of a fragile hope, and of that hope’s will to endure against all the odds. 

Artistic rendering of Sappho by William Adolphe Bouguereau

SAPPHO: Stung With Love: Poems and Fragments.
Translated and with an introduction by Aaron Poochigian, and with a preface by Carol Ann Duffy, published by Penguin Classics. 

The Song of the Sirens

The poet Homer is of course famous for his two epics The Iliad and The Odyssey. The first recounts the events of the Trojan War, and the second tells of the ten year-long voyage home from that war of its hero, the brave Odysseus (Ulysses). But Homer was no simple teller of tales, however stirring to our imagination these tales can be. Beneath the surface of these stories we can discover deeper truths which have resonated over the span of millennia, and which we even can find reflected in the first two books of the Old Testament.

On this deeper level, The Iliad – and Genesis – relates the spirit’s awakening awareness of its primal condition, and its expulsion from that condition into a world of turmoil. The Odyssey – and Exodus – tells of the spirit’s ‘long journey home’, its seeking for a promised land (which really is its former state) after its sojourn on earth. These connections need not surprise us, when we remember that the mythical figure of Homer – and the equally mythical figure of Moses – had their connections to the ancient mystery schools: Homer, naturally enough, to those of Ancient Greece, and Moses to those of Ancient Egypt.

One of the best-known episodes from Homer’s Odyssey is the hero’s encounter with the sirens. Ships whose course brought them close to the sirens’ island suffered a terrible fate, for the singing of the sirens in their meadow was so alluring that those sailors who heard it immediately fell under such a spell that they lost their wits, jumping overboard in their frenzied efforts to reach the sirens, and wanting to hear only their song, which made them forget their intended destination, and even their own identity.

But cunning Odysseus, whose scheming wits had carried him through other hazardous encounters, employed a plan suggested to him by the sorceress Circe in his previous adventure. As his ship neared the sirens, he had his men stop their ears with bees' wax. Then he instructed them to bind him securely to the ship’s mast, with orders that under no circumstances were they to loosen his bonds. The ruse worked. His crew, hearing nothing, rowed safely on as the sirens' singing filled the air around them. Odysseus, under the spell of the sirens’ song, implored his crew to release him even as he struggled to break free. But the ropes held, and Odysseus became the only voyager to hear the song of the sirens and live to tell of its magic.

Almost three thousand years later, this story still has its hold upon our imagination, perhaps because we recognise, and so can relate to, the hazard of the sirens’ singing. The world – and our own lives – has its sirens. They might not take the form of beautiful and seductive women, but they weave a powerful spell all the same. We all have our sirens to resist, whether they come in the form of desirable material possessions, or as stories which (perhaps against our better judgement) we choose to believe are true, or as dreams which we chase after, or even as the distractions of social networking.

Our deeper selves know instinctively that if we are to remember our true destination, our true identity, then these are things which have to be navigated past.  Because the sirens are still singing, and their song can sound like the most alluring sound we have heard, or like a short tweet! 

Painting by Herbert James Draper