The Perseus myth may be understood as follows:
SHOWER OF GOLDEN RAIN
According to one version of the Perseus myth, the father of Perseus' mother, Danaë, had been told by an oracle that a grandson would depose him. For that reason he had his daughter locked up in a brass-walled dungeon to keep her apart from men. But Zeus came to her in the chamber as a shower of golden rain by which she conceived Perseus. Another version had it that Danaë was seduced by her uncle, the hostile brother of her father, and because of this illegitimate conception, she was confined to the dungeon
ED ¶ 0IS THIS A DIVINE CONCEPTION
OR AN ILLEGITIMATE ONE?
This is the ambiguity that appears repeatedly in the myths; like the double parentage theme, it poses a question about the origins of the hero, in this instance: is this a divine conception or is it an illegitimate one? Symbolically, the two are equivalent, because if the conception does not occur under human auspices, if it is not legitimized by human mores, then it is beyond the pale and takes on transpersonal meaning and the quality of divinity. We are on familiar ground if we think of the legends surrounding the birth of Christ. The canonical sources speak of the birth as a conception through the Holy Spirit, something like the shower of rain that came to Danaë. However, some legends current at the time had it that Mary became illegitimately pregnant by a Roman centurion
ED ¶ 0DREAMS DEALING WITH THE
EMERGENCE OF THE SELF
The phenomenology of this image is important in dreams. Very often, early dreams dealing with the emergence of the Self depict the birth of an illegitimate child, or perhaps the birth of the child unites the racesmaybe the child is half black and half white. Just those things that are beyond the pale and have been considered unacceptable by conscious standards accompany this birth, because the Self, by its very nature, transcends the rules of the ego
ED ¶ 0THE IMAGE OF DANAE
It is worth noting how the ancient writers used the image of Danaë. Sophocles compared her to Antigone, who had dared to defy the tyrant Creon's decree that her dead brother, Creon's rebellious enemy, be left unburied. Burial was profoundly important to the ancient Greek mind, and Antigone proceeded to bury her brother despite the prohibition. In punishment she was walled up in a cave to perish. Sophocles then says this about her:
ED ¶ 0Even thus endured Danaë in her beauty to change the light of day for brass-bound walls; and in that chamber, secret as the grave, she was held close prisoner; yet was she of a proud lineage, O my daughter, and charged with the keeping of the seed of Zeus that fell in the golden rain ( Sophocles, Antigone, The Complete Greek Drama I, lines 943-949 )
Sophocles perceives that Antigone, in observing the divine law even when breaking man's law, was of the same nature as Danaë, who kept the seed of Zeus to give birth to the hero Perseus. Psychologically, this image suggests that the birth of the individuation principle is a dubious, ambiguous happening that entails being shut off from the world at large. That was where Zeus encountered Danaë, shut up in her brass-walled prison
ED ¶ 0BIRTH OF PERSEUS
The birth of Perseus was characteristically followed by the hero's rejection and abandonment. Perseus and his mother were cast into the sea in a wooden chest, that is, were thrown into the unconscious, with the assumption that they would perish and never be heard from again. But in a miraculous way they landed on the island of King Polydectes and there Perseus was brought up
ED ¶ 0WEDDING GIFT IS THE
HEAD OF MEDUSA
At a time when wedding gifts were being presented to the king, the young Perseus, having nothing material to give, impetuously offered the most extravagant service conceivable, namely to bring the king the head of Medusa. The rashness and arrogance of the offer are built into the myth so that we have to take them as expressing some aspect of the individuation process: they apply to those stages where a careful and deliberate weighing of the odds would never allow one to get moving. If one had awareness in advance of what the prospects were, psychological development would not get very far; it probably would not get out of the womb. If Perseus was going to get somewhere, he had to make a daring leap. Then he was in for it; he had to go through with it
ED ¶ 0GORGON MEDUSA
This brings us to the image of the Gorgon Medusa and how we are to understand her. She is a common motif in Greek art, Greek pottery and some of the older Greek sculpture and architectural friezes show again and again the picture of the Gorgon, a ghastly woman with teeth and tongue protruding and hair made up of writhing snakes. The prominence of this image of horror in early Greece seems to portray what Nietzsche recognized so forciblythe closeness of the Greek mind to the primordial depths out of which it had recently emerged. Thus the Greek sensibility encompassed a keen awareness of the horror of existence just below the surface, in a way that we pampered, civilized people are usually spared, and it was this that gave everything they did and everything they produced an intensity that has never been equalled
ED ¶ 0GAZE UPON MEDUSA AND
BE TURNED TO STONE
Medusa is an expression of that dreadful level of existence that, if one looks at it very long, has petrifying effects, and we are told that her image was so fearsome that to gaze upon it was to be turned into stone. She can, of course, also be seen as the negative mother archetype in its most terrifying aspect, able to immobilize the ego so that all that is moving and flowing and changing and spontaneous is utterly halted. This is the very image that the young person must encounter and deal with if he is going to make his way into life. He has to confront the horror of existence itself if his life is to proceed and develop. That is what Perseus did
ED ¶ 0HELPING DEITIES OF THE
GREEK PANTHEON
In this myth we find excellent examples of the helping deities of the Greek Pantheon. The two that came to Perseus' assistance were the typical helpers: by Hermes he was furnished with what is usually called a sickle, a blade with which to cut off Medusa's head, and from Athena he obtained a polished shield that was also a mirror, which enabled him to kill the Gorgon without having to look directly at her and become frozen in stone. There were some initial skirmishes with the female powers, since he had to seek out the Graiae in order to learn the way to Medusa. He stole the single eye and tooth they shared and so extracted from them directions to the three Gorgons
ED ¶ 0OUT OF THE SEVERED HEAD
FLEW PEGASUS
Finally, viewing Medusa by means of his mirror shield, he cut off her head. Instantly, out of the decapitated body sprang Chrysaor, a warrior who fathered future monsters, and more significantly, out of the severed head flew Pegasus, the winged horse. Here is a striking image of released libido. It is as if the decapitation of the Medusan horror had the effect of transforming the negative energy contained in her and releasing it into positive, creative power, signified by the horse, a symbol of physical energy that is at the same time winged. Pegasus later started the Peirene spring flowing, the spring of the Muses, with the powerful stamp of his moon-shaped hoof. So the arts derived from Pegasus' libido but their ultimate source was Medusa, since Medusa was the mother of Pegasus
ED ¶ 0PERSEUS CAME UPON ANDROMEDA
On his way back from his encounter with Medusa, Perseus came upon Andromeda, who was chained to a rock as a sacrifice for the crimes of her mother and was being threatened by a sea monster. Perseus destroyed the monster and released Andromedaa typical image of the captive anima who must be freed. It is another version of the freeing of Pegasus through the destruction of the Medusa monster, but on a more developed level, signifying the emergence of the feminine relatedness function out of its instinctive, monstrous origins, here represented by the sea monster
ED ¶ 0ATHENA'S MIRROR SHIELD AS IMAGE
OF THE CIVILIZING PROCESS
The reflecting shield of Athena is of particular importance, because without that device Medusa could never have been faced and transformed. Given to the hero by the goddess, the embodiment of wisdom herself, Athena's mirror shield is an image of the civilizing process, how it takes place, and how human consciousness is able to overcome the primordial horror represented by the Medusa. The myth tells us that it takes a mirror to overcome or deal with the elemental terror of what exists in the unconscious
ED ¶ 0MIRROR'S ABILITY TO PRODUCE IMAGES
The primary feature of the mirror is its ability to produce images; it shows us what we otherwise cannot see for ourselves because we are too close to it. Without a mirror, for instance, we would never even know what our face looks like; since we are inside looking out, there can be no self-knowledge, even the elementary self-knowledge of what we look like, unless there is some device that can turn the light back on us, unless there can be a reflexive movement
ED ¶ 0The whole process of consciousness, in both the individual and collective sense, is served by an instrument that produces reflections, images giving us an objective sense of what we are. Athena's mirror, we should remember, is showing us an image of something we dare not look at directly; to grasp what we are dealing with, we need an image of it, we need to see it indirectly, which allows a more objective view. Surely it is not an accident that the term “reflection” refers to the specific capacity of human consciousness, the capacity to consider itself. That is the function of the mirror, and it is also the capacity of human consciousness to turn back on itself in self-critical, self-observing, self-scrutinizing reflection
ED ¶ 0