Whose story do we believe? Grab a tea for a thoughtful conversation.
In reading the legend of Cassandra of Troy, the parallels to today’s conversations are uncanny. We seem to be listening, but perhaps we are not hearing. Poor Cassandra is doomed to tell the truth to all those who listen, but what they hear, they do not believe.
Cassandra was the most beautiful daughter of King Priam of Troy, who famously lost the war to the Greeks with the ambush in the Trojan horse. One of nineteen children, the storyline that follows her through all retelling is that she was given the gift of prophecy by the Greek god, Apollo, and was subsequently cursed by him because she refused his sexual advances. She would speak the truth, prophecize about the fate of Troy and no one believed her.
Her story is a tale told by the victors. There are no ancient writings that speak from Cassandra’s point of view. Her fate is lamented in a Greek tragedy, Aeschylus’s Agamemnon:
Apollo, Apollo!
God of all ways, but only Death’s to me,
Once and again, O thou, Destroyer named
Thou hast destroyed me, thou, my love of old!
She is said to have been a novice or a priestess in the temple of Apollo, that is how she came to his attention. There are mixed stories as to how she came upon her gift from Apollo. Some say that he courted her and bestowed the gift as a demonstration of his love, as a god loves, fast and furious. Others say that she had already promised herself to him and the gift was payment for her sexual favours. From both scenarios, we hear that she refuses his advances, either in fidelity to her duties as a priestess, or as a malcontent vixen. He then either spits on her or forces a kiss and breathes a curse on her lips. Her earlier gift of prophecy could not be taken away, but her stories, now, would not be believed.
Throughout history, even to the present time, Cassandra’s story is told as an illustration of a hysterical woman. In ancient times, it was considered a “tangible, concrete, and logical reaction to an organic imbalance of the body resulting from the uterus being out of rhythm with its own nature.” (The Cassandra Complex, pg 38). Through the twentieth century, Freud and other psychoanalysts divested the dis-ease of its mystical overtones and labeled it a neurosis. (ibid, 48). In the intervening centuries, it was used to murder women in witch hunts or commit them to asylums. Cassandra was driven to the point of madness because she could see terrible visions: of the fall of Troy at the hands of the Greeks in the Trojan horse debacle and even her own murder at the hands of Clytemnestra, King Agamemnon’s wife.
Historically, the myth of Cassandra came out at a time when an egalitarian society gave way to a patriarchal culture. Apollo goes from a being a bully: He came down furious from the summits of Olympus, with his bow and his quiver upon his shoulder, and the arrows rattled on his back with the rage that trembled within him. He sat himself down away from the ships with a face as dark as night, and his silver bow rang death as he shot his arrow in the midst of them” (Homer, The Iliad, line 44) To become “the god of purity, only at a later period, his sharp clarity, his superior spirit, his will that enjoins insight, moderation, and order, in short all that we call Apollonian to this day.” (The Cassandra Complex, pg 21) And Cassandra is hysterical.
What is Cassandra’s side of the story? We can’t know for certain. I can extrapolate some scenarios based on my basic knowledge of human nature:
As the nineteenth child, Cassandra is sent to the temple to be a priestess. Even as a king, too many children can mean buying divine favours by sending extras to the temple, I suggest. A beautiful young girl vows to honour the god, Apollo, who murderously took over the oracle of Delphi (ibid, pg 23). In those vows, she agrees to celibacy.
In this, or any time period, Apollo is a man in a position of power. We do not know how old Cassandra is. I suspect young. Whether wooed into accepting Apollo’s gift of prophecy or cajoled into it, the modern issue of consent rears its head in this story. Cassandra has the right to withdraw her consent at any time. And spiteful Apollo curses her. Cassandra’s tale now becomes he said, she said. In a society moving to a strongly patriarchal worship of the gods, Cassandra is not believed, never believed.
Although, intellectually we know that we are all going to doe, Cassandra knew that when her father gave her away as a spoil of war, she would be raped by Ajax the Lesser and murdered by Queen Clytemnestra.
And I see the death-steel glancing
And the eye of murder glare;
On, with hasty strides advancing,
Terror haunts me everywhere.
Vain I seek alleviation;–
Knowing, seeing, suffering all,
I must wait the consummation,
In a foreign land must fall. (Cassandra by Friedrich Schiller)
None of her pleading, lamenting or beating of her breast could change the trajectory of her life. Madness ensues.
As I reflect on this story, I hear the young girls of the Salem witch hunts (The Crucible by Arthur Miller); I hear Anita Hill challenging the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas; Christine Blasey Ford challenging Brett Kavanaugh; I hear everyone who stands up to #metoo and #blacklivesmatter.
History does not teach us a solution. It can teach us to hear. What Cassandra prophecized did come to pass. She spoke the truth. Is it time to hear and believe it?
It feels hard to hope now. Ah, the gift of hope from Pandora’s box. That is a story for another day.