The story of Heracles, better known as Hercules, has been told in many ways for many reasons, but the overwhelming motif heard is one of power and manliness. So it comes as a big surprise to see in the Neuchatel Museum, a painting in which Hercules -- the ultimate male -- sits at the feet of Queen Omphale of Lydia, every inch of his muscled body focussed on `woman's work' of spinning thread. What's going on here?Influenced by a sudden rush of madness, Hercules once imagined his family to be wild beasts and slew them all. Once he came to his senses, appalled at his action, he prowled the forests, making his way to Delphi where the oracle directed him to present himself to Eurystheus, king of Mycenae and to submit to his will. So he was set to complete the twelve tasks or `labours' for which he is so famous.
What is strangely not recorded in most accounts of these labours is this: After being successful at eleven of the tasks, Hercules was forced to interrupt his mission when Jupiter punished him for one of his fits of temper. This punishment for our very male hero, was to live as slave in Lydia to Queen Omphale, where she compelled him to dress like a woman and spend his time spinning and weaving for several years.
The anthropologist G Geichel-Dolmatoff, writes of the Tukano tribe of the Columbian rain forest, who define the human being as ``one who sees and hears the echo and thus knows''. This `echo', or keori, is `the essence of things', and ``hearing with the echo'' refers to knowing what it is that is being perceived, what it is that is being symbolised; not all people can hear it all the time. I find this a beautiful image for story-hearing.
If we listen `without the echo' this sounds like yet another punishment for his arrogance. Listening `with the echo', however, leads us to the deeper meaning of this story.
Now, the act of spinning and weaving, in the language of myth and symbol, represents a connection with the creative, formative power of nature. According to J J Bachofen, anthropologist and mythologist, these actions of spinning and weaving are understood to ``lend articulation, symmetrical form, and refinement to crude matter.... The crossing of the threads, their alternate appearance and disappearance, seemed to present a perfect image of the eternal process of natural life.'' Mythology teaches that it is the two sexes -- dual poles of life -- that together give to visible creation its beginning, its continuous renewal and its eternal rejuvenation.
Hercules, described as the irreconcilable foe of matriarchy, the misogynist in whose sacrifice no woman takes part, by whose name no woman swears, and who finally meets his death from a woman's poisoned garment, is expected to find wholeness through being made to perform what was essentially `woman's work'.
One of the functions of mythologies and associated rituals is to preserve the hint of a way back to lost unity, although the price that has to be paid for this is a form of descent, sometimes descent at it's ultimate -- death. This may be death in its most literal sense, or it can be metaphorical: a dying to old ways, to old partial patterns, and so to a claiming of one's wholeness of being.
Mythology, through story and ritual enactment upholds the principle of wholeness as a complementary play of the feminine and the masculine. Tiresias, the blinded seer, was both male and female. In India, the image of Ardhanarishvara, part masculine, part feminine, wholly divine, conveys more than the story; it holds and transmits the philosophy of the one. Ancestral images of certain African and Melanesian tribes have both -- the beard of the father and the breasts of the mother.
As Joseph Campbell has pointed out that while the hero is the one who comes to know, ``Woman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what can be known.'' As he progresses in the slow initiation which is life, the form of the woman/goddess undergoes for the journeying, questing hero a series of transfigurations; she lures, she guides, she helps him break his fetters. Without her, he is unable to fully access his own latent power.
May story teach us to listen more deeply.
Marguerite Theophil
Beyond the lines
Inside the world of story, our minds run free –
to do what children do when they are drawing –
to color beyond the lines, all over the pages.
~ Jimmy Neil Smith
