Information Archives > Parnassus On Wheels

07/09/201828/09/2018

Lorum Ipsum No. 1

But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing of a pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?

On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralised by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain. These cases are perfectly simple and easy to distinguish. In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammeled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided. But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted. The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse.

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05/09/201811/10/2018

Notes on Sarpedon

“In a late version of the Medusa myth, related by the Roman poet Ovid (Metamorphoses 4.770), Medusa was originally a ravishingly beautiful maiden, “the jealous aspiration of many suitors,” but because Poseidon had raped her in Athena‘s temple, the enraged Athena transformed Medusa’s beautiful hair to serpents and made her face so terrible to behold that the mere sight of it would turn onlookers to stone. In Ovid’s telling, Perseus describes Medusa’s punishment by Minerva (Athena) as just and well earned”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medusa

The origin of my own story lies in my having read a description of the island where the Gorgon lived — Sarpedon. The island seems to have been conceived as being part of a chain. Another island in the group, “the Red Island”, was reputed to be the one along whose shores Odysseus sailed a generation later and where he encountered the Sirens (?).

In any case, this mythical chain of islands was, according to various ancient sources, located somewhere to the west of Gibraltar in what today we know as the Atlantic Sea. As indicated, the trope of the young Medusa and her rape by Poseidon can be be found in Metamorphoses. Despite the non-consensual nature of rape, Medusa and her sisters are punished by their transformation into monsters. It is of course ironic that the Sea God is actually the Uncle of the Goddess who metes out their punishment.

I have made a more sympathetic Perseus as it fits better into the piece, and allows for the oblique acknowledgement of the Gorgons’ super-power of turning their victims to stone. The Perseus of the original myth, as opposed to the somewhat young, sensitive one who inhabits my own narrative, would just as likely have dealt with the young Medusa in a fashion not dissimilar to the God. Something of his nature in this respect is reflected in his pursuit of Andromeda later in his mythic progression.

Some more material from Wikipedia on Perseus and Medusa:

Graves, Robert (1955). The Greek Myths. Penguin Books. pp. 17, 244. ISBN 0241952743. “A large part of Greek myth is politico-religious history. Bellerophon masters winged Pegasus and kills the Chimaera. Perseus, in a variant of the same legend, flies through the air and beheads Pegasus’s mother, the Gorgon Medusa; much as Marduk, a Babylonian hero, kills the she-monster Tiamat, Goddess of the Seal. Perseus’s name should properly be spelled Perseus, ‘the destroyer’; and he was not, as Professor Kerenyi has suggested, an archetypal Death-figure but, probably, represented the patriarchal Hellenes who invaded Greece and Asia Minor early in the second millennium BC, and challenged the power of the Triple-goddess. Pegasus had been sacred to her because the horse with its moon-shaped hooves figured in the rain-making ceremonies and the instalment of sacred kings; his wings were symbolical of a celestial nature, rather than speed.

Jane Harrison has pointed out (Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion) that Medusa was once the goddess herself, hiding behind a prophylactic Gorgon mask: a hideous face intended to warn the profane against trespassing on her Mysteries. Perseus beheads Medusa: that is, the Hellenes overran the goddess’s chief shrines, stripped her priestesses of their Gorgon masks, and took possession of the sacred horses—an early representation of the goddess with a Gorgon’s head and a mare’s body has been found in Boeotia. Bellerophon, Perseus’s double, kills the Lycian Chimaera: that is, the Hellenes annulled the ancient Medusan calendar, and replaced it with another.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medusa

The most interesting feature of Graves’ take on the myth is the rendering down of the story to an over-arching metaphor for the conquest and subjugation of the coastal Pelagasians (c.i.f Thucydides The Peloponnesian Wars for their actual historical existence) by the migratory tribes of the Achaeans and the Daanaids — literally the Mother worshippers vs. the Sky Horse clans. Given he is right in his analysis, any student of the myths as symbolic social history is left with a very particular problem: how is that Kore or Athena survived in her own city of that name, apparently untouched?

Finally, my young Medusa is really the tragic victim of my story. Perseus will be forced by his circumstance to receive from her a heart of stone, the last thing he probably wants as a life long burden to the end of his days. I would think it is also the last thing Medusa really wants to bequeath to him after his kindnesses on the beach. But such it seems is the legacy left to both of them by a bitter Kore.

The full text of the Wikipedia article on Medusa and her sisters can be found here and my full text of Sarpedon is here …