Fairy Tales

 

We pay too little attention to hero legends, fairy tales, and fables. We value them too little. “Tall tales” and “fairy tales” are commonly scorned as mere lies. Yes, we encourage our children to read them; but mostly for idle entertainment. They are “escapism,” and childish; not worth adult attention. And they are bowdlerized or perverted each generation. In the Disney versions circa the 1950s, they were all laundered to the message that romantic love (in other words, sex) solved everything. In recent years, they are invariably recast from the point of view of the villain. Shrek the ogre turns out to be misunderstood. 

It seems a deliberate perversion or undermining of the tales.

They are not traditionally studied in the academy as serious literature. Perhaps they may be studied for anthropological interest; perhaps as supposed expressions of a diseased psyche; but always from an alien perspective, and not in standard Literature classes as we would study real art.

When I was a kid, many parents did not allow their children to read comic books as somehow corrupting. They are classic hero legends, but we are so disconnected from this literary tradition that they are rarely recognized as such. Even those who compose them have been remarkably clumsy in their composition. They seem commonly to think that all that is needed is to come up with some new super-power and a catchy name, for a new hero or a new villain. Stan Lee’s effect on the genre in the early Sixties was electric simply because he understood the conventions. 

I imagine they are shunned because here, of all places, we find truth. The stone that is rejected is the cornerstone of the temple. Jesus spoke in fairy tales and fables—the parables. As did the Buddha.

The fairy tales, hero legends, fables, and parables are the literature of the common people. The literature studied in the schools and academies instead is the literature written to appeal to the upper classes. There is nothing wrong with that, but such literature is more likely to serve the purposes of the earthly powerful and maintain them in power. The folks who wrote and are the audience for the fairy tales and legends are those less connected with worldliness and the game of thrones, those Jesus identified in the Beatitudes.

Fairy tales are, proverbially, written by “Mother Goose”: a composite figure representing generations of illiterate women who passed these stories on nursery to nursery, village green to village green.

The hero legends were the male equivalent: told old hand to new hand in the lumber camps, in the barracks, on board ship at twilight. 

The fables were supposedly composed by Aesop, a slave. The New World equivalent, the Uncle Remus stories, were also told by a slave. They too represent the wisdom of the lower classes.

The lower classes have not been, at most periods, the less intelligent. Class was arbitrarily assigned by birth. And there were at all times a lot more of them. Accordingly, this literature is actually going to be better than the canon of the salons. The fact that it was oral also meant it had to be worth memorizing, generation after generation. That is a good test for quality and relevance.

And yet, we mostly ignore it. We rarely read it. We mock it.

The Death of Comic Books

Left to right: Snowflake, Safespace, Screentime, Trailblazer, and B-Negative.

Marvel Comics has released a series supposed to be hep and with-it for the youngsters of Generation Z, “The New Warriors,” showcasing heroes named “Screentime,” “Safespace,” and “Snowflake.” The brainchild of a writer named Daniel Kibblesmith.

This looks like the end of Marvel Comics; perhaps of comics generally. If not the world.

I was, in my younger days, a fierce devotee of Marvel Comics, back in the Silver Age. Like everyone else, I’ve also enjoyed the recent movies, for the most part, with my own kids.

I do not love the movies so much as I did the comics, and I have not followed the comics for some time.

This is because I discovered mythology; I discovered the stories in their original versions.

The secret to the success of 1960s Marvel was that Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and their gang knew the stories. Probably because they were all Jewish kids growing up reading the Torah. They were retelling the essential stories in modern Spandex.

The “super-hero” is simply the legendary hero, as he always has been. Heroes have superpowers. Perseus could fly; Herakles had superhuman strength.

Superhero comics before Fantastic Four, however, were missing an essential element: heroes lead troubled lives. They have problems; they are outcasts. Robin Hood; the Heroes of the Water Margin; Samson and Delilah. The creators of Superman and Batman missed this.

Superheroes—heroes—come from the storehouse imagination. We are inclined to think that the imagination is random and limitless. To the contrary, to the imagination only some things are real—vivid to the mind’s eye—and they are a limited set. Every culture has dragons, and dragons have certain known features. There are no dragons in nature. Every culture has unicorns, and unicorns have certain identifiable features, although there are no unicorns in nature. Every culture has fairies, elves, ogres, and so on.

The bright colours and the solid line art are also part of the mix; it is no coincidence that the art in comic books resembles the art of the stained glass window. This is how things appear in the imagination: bright and distinct. Lines are solid; there are few shadows or gradients. Things simply are, or are not.

Kibblesmith seems to have no sense of any of this. He has read nothing. Hero legends, tapping the storehouse consciousness, speak of things eternal. Trying to be “trendy,” regardless of the trend, is anathema to the genre. It is like putting contemporary references in a cowboy movie.

One problem faced by the comic book author is that there are only a limited number of compelling superpowers. This is why there are so many near-duplicates in the DC and the Marvel universe. Iron Man, for example, the man made of metal with a fatal flaw, is Talos, the bronze giant of the Argonautica. The Thing is the Golem. The Flash, of course, is Hermes, Mercury. Everyone dreams of flying, like Superman. Everyone dreams of being invisible.

Kibblesmith does not get this, and tries to invent new powers. “Snowflake” throws projectiles shaped like snowflakes. There’s the stuff of legends. “Safespace” generates forcefields that arbitrarily protect others, but not himself. Not too useful in a bar fight. “Screentime,” thanks to the effects of “Internet gas,” is directly connected at all times to the Internet. Meaning, I guess, that he does not need to pull his iPhone out of his pocket like everybody else.

Snowflake and Safespace are plainly meant to reflect current ideas of fluid “gender identity”: the visibly male “Safespace” is pink, the visibly female “Snowflake” is baby blue, and supposedly “non-binary.” The message is the postmodern message that the imagination and its archetypes and associations are purely arbitrary and subject to conscious manipulation.

This is the opposite of the core message of comic books.

It is all mythically illiterate. Kibblesmith and the current Marvel are, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, playing with powers they do not comprehend. It will not go well for them.

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The Book of Consolation

The Andromeda Strain

Rossetti, The Damsel of the Sangreal

In many cases, the reward for slaying the dragon is human, rather than or as well as an object. Our general-issue handsome prince, when he downs Sir Dragon, traditionally wins the hand of a lovely princess. Andromeda is Perseus’s reward for conquering the dragon Cetus. Gilgamesh’s conscious goal is to find the old man Utnapishtim, not at first the herb of immortality. Jason gains the Golden Fleece, and also the hand of Medea. Theseus, after conquering Herr Minotaur, makes off with Princess Ariadne. Rama’s goal and grail is his wife Sita. Ragnar Lodbrok kills his twin serpent adversaries for the hand of Princess Thora.

Given that the magical objects won by slaying dragons represent transcendental values, it seems reasonable to assume that the humans rescued in the same way also represent something transendental. In many cases, indeed, this human is portrayed as differing from your average lovely princess in being or becoming immortal—transcendental. Gilgamesh seeks Utnapishtim because he has become immortal and must then know the secret of immortality. Andromeda is granted immortality by Athena, and becomes a constellation in the starry heavens. Ariadne is taken by Dionysus to Olympus to be made a goddess. Medea is the granddaughter of Helios, the sun, and, depending on sources, semi-divine. Sita, rather than dying the way a conventional woman might, is swallowed up by the Earth, her mother, at the end of the Ramayana.

What does it mean for a human to be a transcendental? After all, in this shared word, humans are actually rather commonplace.

But there is something else, which is not commonplace at all, and yet is best illustrated by a human face. Love.

Not romantic love, not sexual love, not married love, but what is also called agape, caritas, charity. “God is love,” as Jesus or St. Paul or St. Augustine put it. “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” (1 John 4:8)

St. Paul famously outlines its form:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. (1 Corinthians 13:4-7, NIV)

This is not a common sort of love. It is the stark opposite of what a narcissist calls “love”: it is unselfish love.

Tristan and Isolde

But how to portray it? How to convey the point? What is our objective correlative here?

It is natural enough to portray it by the more familiar, more common affection of male for female, female for male (eros), or friend for friend (philios). So transcendent love may sometimes be portrayed here as the beautiful princess of the legends. Just as agape is expressed as romantic love in the Bible’s Song of Songs, or in St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul, or in the Krishna-Radha cycle in India, or in the Sufi poets, or indeed in Medieval romance.

As a matter of effective storytelling, too, note that simply gaining possession of some object is a far inferior motivation for a character, a far inferior climax for a story, to finding “true love.” We naturally care more about the latter. In comparison to the committed presence of a living, breathing person, any mere object, whether gold cup, fleece, apple, Maltese Falcon, or cache of coins, seems unworthy.

And this instinctive human preference perhaps tells us something important, about life, the universe, and everything. An object, after all, has only one dimension of existence, the physical. A person is both physical and spiritual. This gives humans a greater reality, a greater moral worth, a greater potential transcendence, and, I suggest, a greater potential beauty. William Blake argued that the greatest thing any person can conceive is necessarily a perfected person:

Man can have no idea of any thing greater than Man as a cup cannot contain more than its capaciousness. … Think of a white cloud. as being holy: you cannot love it. But think of a holy man within the cloud: love springs up in your thought. For to think of holiness distinct from man is impossible to the affections.i

Accordingly, the best image of the goal of life is a good and beautiful person. The best image of the divine is a good and beautiful person. And the greatest value, which transcends all transcendentals, is a perfect love—a living and complete relationship of love with a good and beautiful person.

However, portraying said true love by a lovely princess is also fraught with risks of misinterpretation. It is all very well to offer romantic love as an image of eternal love, but it is then too easy for literal-minded listeners to mistake the one for the other, and raise up either the possibly selfish, possessive aspect of marriage or the physical pleasure of sex as a golden calf.

St. George and the dragon

Accordingly, it seems wise for the legends to strike a note of ambiguity or deliberate contrast here.

And so Gilgamesh is probably wise to reject the goddess Ishtar. “Which of your lovers did you ever love for ever?” he asks. “What shepherd of yours has pleased you for all time?”ii Sexual or romantic love, which she represents—cognate to the Greek Aphrodite—is not the thing we seek. Nor, ultimately, is philios, the affection one feels towards a friend, represented here by the friendship with Enkidu. Such a love, although admirable, is not eternal. Enkidu dies.

Many legends seem to show the human transcendental as at once somehow the same as, and somehow different from, the transcendental object. Perseus wins Medusa’s head, his transcendental object, then battles a second opponent to win Andromeda. The two “prizes” seem to contrast: the fearsome dead Medusa, to look upon whom brings death; the lovely living Andromeda, who potentially offers children and new life. Jason’s two prizes are presented in parallel: “Proud of his prize, and taking with him a further prize, the one who had helped him gain it, the hero, and his wife Medea, returned to the harbour at Iolchos.”iii In killing the dragon Fafnir, Sigurd/Sigmund wins a horde of gold and a collection of nifty magical objects. No fair maid. But drinking Fafnir’s blood allows him to understand the language of birds, and the birds direct him to Brynhild.iv Herakles wants two immortal horses for killing his sea monster, but takes Hesione later as consolation, when he is not given his prize and sacks Troy in revenge. Gilgamesh reaches his human goal, Utnapishtim; Utnapishtim then directs him to the herb of immortality. And the Holy Grail, by its nature, points beyond itself to a human transcendent—to the perfected human, Jesus Christ.

Jason returns with Medea and the Golden Fleece

It is notable that the hero then often loses the princess in these tales. This is a sad note in many classic hero legends. They lack that fairy tale ending. They are closer to tragedy.

Jason, having pledged his life to Medea, dumps her for Glauce, leading to a terrible cycle of revenge. Theseus seems to abandon Ariadne on the next island, despite vows, and despite her having saved his life. As the epic poet Nonnus eulogizes her: “you know your thread was his saviour: for the man of Athens with his club would never have found victory in that contest without a rosy-red girl to help him.”v Ragnar Lodbrok slaughters dragons left and right to win the lovely Thora. But by the same feat, he deserts his lawful wife, Ladgerda; which seems less than honourable, and less than an advertisement for true love. Thora then, rather than living happily ever after, dies of a fever. Rama, having expended epic efforts to rescue Sita, rejects her over suspicions about her chastity. When Sigurd stifles Fafnir, and is led to the lovely Brynhild, they plight their troth, as the kids used to say. Sigurd then forgets Brynhild and marries Gudrun. Brynhild has him killed in revenge.

Herakles, mightiest of classical heroes, is also conspicuously unlucky in love. He kills his first wife, Megara, in a psychotic fit. Having won Hesione, he gives her away. He is killed by his last wife, Deianira, unintentionally, but ultimately because she suspects him of adultery.

Launcelot develops an unhealthy addiction to Guinevere, who is awkwardly already married to King Arthur. This does not go good places. Sir Tristan is passionate about Isolde, who is also married to his king. Indeed, the worthy knights of the Round Table seem to fall all over themselves for the opportunity to commit adultery.

Launcelot and Guinevere end their days not as lovers, but as priest and nun. They have, graphically, realized that their love was false love, and have embraced agape in the cloister.

Samson too, like Herakles, gives his first wife, won by killing the Timnean lion, away: “And Samson’s wife was given to one of his companions who had attended him at the feast.” (Judges 14:20, NIV)

His second marriage, you may remember, to Delilah, does not work out better.

For that matter, Hamlet had obvious difficulties coming to terms of endearment with Ophelia.

This relentlessly unromantic ending may be to pre-empt idolatry. Romantic love resembles, but is not, agape or caritas. And so the overly-simple solution must not be allowed to stand. True love itself is beyond the physical sphere; romantic love is only its physical image.

And perhaps too there is another reason.

Tristan and Isolde

Consider again the word of the abused child. He has not known love growing up. He has been betrayed by his first and greatest natural love, his parents. Love from then on is going to be a problem for him (or her). If, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church says, the family is the school of love, he has grown up never having learned to read or write. He is bound to have problems in this field.

For one thing, he (or she) will feel himself ultimately unlovable. And so he will fear love. The other will sooner or later discover how awful he truly is. They cannot possibly really love him.

For another, he (or she) will have no good idea of how to express love, if he genuinely feels it. He is likely to be clumsy, naive, and awkward. He will flunk on “emotional intelligence.”

For another, having experienced abuse from those he (or she) loved most, he is liable to suppose abuse is all he deserves, or is a legitimate expression of love. Accordingly, he is vulnerable to an abusive, masochistic romantic relationship in adult life.

For another, having been taught by parental example both that all his own natural inclinations are bad, and also that hurting others is normal human behaviour and an inclination in the best of us—for we all want to believe our parents are the best of people—he is likely to develop a generally unfavourable impression of human nature. This obviously makes it hard to develop love for another.

For another, having experienced abuse and/or betrayal from those he most loved, he is likely to fear betrayal from anyone professing love ever again. One bitten, as they say, twice shy.

And last, but not least, these fears are fully justified. If the common motive for parental abuse is envy, resentment of a child who is exceptional in some way, that motive is going to apply as well with anyone else they meet in later life. Any other narcissist is likely to react in the same way as did their narcissistic parent: they will want to either destroy or possess them.

Success in some hero quest actually makes this last problem worse. With any public profile of accomplishment, this motive for malice has now grown. Narcissists in the admiring crowd will now seek them out to either kill or own them. As narcissists sought out Martin Luther King Jr., or the Kennedys, or Gandhi.

The various romantic troubles encountered by our various heroes and heroines can perhaps be seen as ringing the changes on these depressive difficulties.

Start with this last problem first.

In the case of Jason and Medea, Medea has betrayed her father, then killed and dismembered her brother, for the sake of her desire for Jason, a man she has just met. This does not bode well: that she approached Jason, rather than the reverse, reinforces the impression of willfulness. She sounds a lot like a narcissist. Creon, Jason’s father, says, “I fear thee, … lest thou devise against my child some cureless ill. Many things contribute to this fear of mine; thou art a witch by nature, expert in countless sorceries...”vi And Medea proves him right: she brings down the curtain in that play by slaughtering her own children for revenge. She was and is exactly the sort of person who caused Jason his trouble in the first place. And she has latched on to him.

Ariadne, similarly, although often portrayed as an innocent victim of Theseus’s betrayal, has shown similar disturbing character traits. She has betrayed her father Minos and helped Theseus kill her brother; again, for the sake of a man she has just met. How can she be trusted? On the evidence, she does not love anyone but herself.

Theseus suffers a terrible betrayal from his later wife, Phaedra. She develops a lust for his son Hippolytus. Hippolytus rejects her. She perjures herself to have Hippolytus killed. She, too, is obviously a narcissist. Theseus apparently attracts the type.

Ladgerda, Ragnar Lodbrok’s rejected first wife, offers a similar example. When Ragnar wooed her:

She spurned his mission in her heart, but feigned compliance. Giving false answers, she made her panting wooer confident that he would gain his desires; but ordered that a bear and a dog should be set at the porch of her dwelling, thinking to guard her own room against all the ardour of a lover by means of the beasts that blocked the way. Ragnar, comforted by the good news, embarked, crossed the sea, and, telling his men to stop in Gaulardale, as the valley is called, went to the dwelling of the maiden alone. Here the beasts met him, and he thrust one through with a spear, and caught the other by the throat, wrung its neck, and choked it. Thus he had the maiden as the prize of the peril he had overcome.

She had, in sum, feigned affection in order to kill him. For no decent reason, it seems, but only out of malice; she could have simply spurned his advances.

Ragnar’s response, in turn, perhaps illustrates a separate problem for the depressive: the tendency to suppose that abuse is normal to affection. He seems slow to grasp the significance of this assassination attempt. Only eventually, according to Saxo Grammaticus, “he thought ill of her trustworthiness, remembering that she had long ago set the most savage beasts to destroy him.”

She goes on to kill her second spouse, because she “thought it pleasanter to rule without her husband than to share the throne with him.”vii

Samson᾿s story hinges on the same problem: the abused hero (or heroine) is both prone to being latched on to by a narcissist, and constitutionally unable to understand that he is being abused. Samson is betrayed by his first wife, the unnamed woman of Timnah, as soon as she has the opportunity. She reveals to her countrymen the solution to his riddle at their wedding, costing him a large sum. His second wife, Delilah, betrays him in the same way, by revealing his secrets. Repeatedly. Nevertheless, he does not seem to learn the lesson. He does not seem able to accept that something is wrong here. To him, then, abuse is normal and what affection looks like. 

So Delilah said to Samson, “Tell me the secret of your great strength and how you can be tied up and subdued.”
Samson answered her, “If anyone ties me with seven fresh bowstrings that have not been dried, I’ll become as weak as any other man.” 

Then the rulers of the Philistines brought her seven fresh bowstrings that had not been dried, and she tied him with them. With men hidden in the room, she called to him, “Samson, the Philistines are upon you!” But he snapped the bowstrings as easily as a piece of string snaps when it comes close to a flame. So the secret of his strength was not discovered. 

Then Delilah said to Samson, “You have made a fool of me; you lied to me. Come now, tell me how you can be tied.” 

He said, “If anyone ties me securely with new ropes that have never been used, I’ll become as weak as any other man.” 

So Delilah took new ropes and tied him with them. Then, with men hidden in the room, she called to him, “Samson, the Philistines are upon you!” But he snapped the ropes off his arms as if they were threads. 

Delilah then said to Samson, “All this time you have been making a fool of me and lying to me. Tell me how you can be tied.” 

He replied, “If you weave the seven braids of my head into the fabric on the loom and tighten it with the pin, I’ll become as weak as any other man.” So while he was sleeping, Delilah took the seven braids of his head, wove them into the fabric and tightened it with the pin. 

Again she called to him, “Samson, the Philistines are upon you!” He awoke from his sleep and pulled up the pin and the loom, with the fabric. 

Then she said to him, “How can you say, ‘I love you,’ when you won’t confide in me? This is the third time you have made a fool of me and haven’t told me the secret of your great strength.” With such nagging she prodded him day after day until he was sick to death of it. 

So he told her everything. “No razor has ever been used on my head,” he said, “because I have been a Nazirite dedicated to God from my mother’s womb. If my head were shaved, my strength would leave me, and I would become as weak as any other man.” (Judges 16: 6-17, NIV)

The strange story of Herakles having to serve as a slave to Queen Omphale seems meant to make the same point. He is required for a year to wear women’s clothes and do women’s work, while she wears the skin of the lion and carries his club. Leaving aside what it might say about traditional sex roles, this sounds like a description of an abusive relationship. The name of Herakles᾿s last wife, Deianira, in turn, is, literally, “man destroyer” or “husband destroyer.” That sounds straightforward. And she does, indeed, destroy Herakles, by giving him the shirt of Nessus, which burns him alive. In her defense, according to the legend she thought it was a love charm. However, administering a love charm to a husband suggests a narcissistic desire to control. So does the image of a shirt: a fatally close embrace, a perfect possession.

Herakles and Hesione

The story of Herakles and Hesione seems to illustrate yet another depressive love problem: the inability of the abused to accept real love when offered. We have warrant to see Hesione as an abused child, like Herakles: she has been sacrificed to the sea monster by her father for his own sins. That ought to make them a good match. She is unlikely to be a narcissist; narcissism cannot, almost necessarily, emerge from an abused childhood or adolescence. In contrast to Medea or Ariadne, Hesione is dutiful. Rather than betray her father, she is ready to die for his sake. Rather than killing or helping to kill a brother, like Ariadne or Medea, she ransoms one of hers from death, Priam. Moreover, she seems by her situation to echo Andromeda, similarly rescued by Perseus, who was Herakles’s grandfather. One surely expects here a marriage and a “happy ever after” ending.

Instead, Herakles shows no interest. He does not seek her. When he acquires her, he gives her away.viii

Hesione, as the sister of Priam, is the aunt of another familiar figure, Paris. Later, when Priam becomes king, Paris is sent to bring Hesione back to Troy, in gratitude for her saving his life. Paris gets distracted, and brings Helen back instead.

This looks like a parable, of neglecting sincere and selfless love (Hesione) for the sake of sexual and romantic love (Helen). Paris earlier preferred physical attractiveness and sexual love in choosing Aphrodite over Athena or Artemis in the Judgment of Paris. It is his characteristic fault.

Perhaps, by extension, then, this shows the same mistake being committed by Herakles. He was unable to recognize real love when it was available. He seems to have made the same mistake with the loyal Auge. Instead, he chose or attracted abusive women.

Sir Launcelot too seems to have been approached by abusive women. At one point in his travels, the damosel Hellawes demands a kiss. When he refuses, she confesses “And, Sir Launcelot, now I tell thee, I have loved thee this seven year, but there may no woman have thy love but Queen Guenever. But sithen I may not rejoice thee to have thy body alive, I had kept no more joy in this world but to have thy body dead.”ix This is the narcissistic response: possess or destroy. At another point, Launcelot is kept for some months in prison by Morgana la Fey, who says she will kill him if he does not marry her.

Launcelot more famously had an improper relationship with Guinevere. Her character too is in question. When King Arthur explains to the all-wise Merlin that Guinevere is the woman he seeks to marry, Merlin warns: “Sir, ... as of her beauty and fairness she is one of the fairest alive, but, an ye loved her not so well as ye do, I should find you a damosel of beauty and of goodness that should like you and please you, an your heart were not set; but there as a man’s heart is set, he will be loath to return.” In other words, she is beautiful but lacks “goodness.”x

Obviously, both she and Launcelot are guilty of sin. However, of the two, her sin is the greater. Launcelot, frequently propositioned, shuns all other women for her sake; this demonstrates that his love for her, if misplaced, is not selfish. She is married, and is breaking her marriage vows; he is not. It is possible to believe here that Launcelot is emotionally naive, as an abused child is apt to be, and she is using him.

We have already seen that Guinevere drives Launcelot mad by a sudden emotional betrayal; wrongly accusing him of being unfaithful. This is triply problematic: firstly, as is explained to us, Launcelot has not really been unfaithful, but was deluded by a spell to believe he was sleeping with Guinevere herself. Secondly, as they are not married and may never marry, she has no right to demand faithfulness from Launcelot. Thirdly, she is herself being unfaithful to her husband King Arthur, and so is guilty of hypocrisy.

Dame Elaine, daughter of King Pelles, seems to stand in contrast to Guinevere here. Elaine is a figure more like Andromeda, Ophelia, or Hesione. To begin with, like them, she too has been abused. Launcelot himself rescues her from imprisonment in a tower, where she has been tortured for five years—since adolescence—for her great beauty. When she is rescued, her first thought—demonstrating her good character—is to go with Launcelot to a chapel for prayers of thanksgiving. She is associated with the Grail—it is in her father᾿s possession, and she might therefore actually be the otherwise unidentified maiden who regularly appears in the legends holding the Grail. She does, it is true, seduce Launcelot by sorcery, which is not a righteous act. However, she does this firstly, out of dutifulness, out of obedience, like Ophelia, to her father. And secondly, not out of lust but to conceive Galahad, another human transcendental. 

“My lord Sir Launcelot, I beseech you see me as soon as ye may, for I have obeyed me unto the prophecy that my father told me. And by his commandment to fulfil this prophecy I have given the greatest riches and the fairest flower that ever I had, and that is my maidenhood that I shall never have again; and therefore, gentle knight, owe me your good will.”xi

Then, like Launcelot and unlike Guinevere, like Auge when seduced by Herakles, she is strictly faithful to Launcelot from then on, despite the approaches of others; even though he rejects her for Guinevere. At one point she confesses to him, “I will live and die with you, and only for your sake; and if my life might not avail you and my death might avail you, wit you well I would die for your sake.”xii

She seems, in sum, an image of faithful, selfless love, in contrast to Guinevere. Despite this, Launcelot repeatedly prefers Guinevere. Even though Guinevere is at times cruel to him, enough so that it drives him mad. Even though, at the very time Elaine is testifying to her love, Guinevere is “wroth, and gave many rebukes to Sir Launcelot, and called him false knight.”xiii Perhaps, an abused child, he cannot recognize or accept the healthier, more sincere love of an Elaine.

There is a second Lady Elaine in the Launcelot cycle, Elaine of Astolat, and she seems a similar figure. Like Elaine the daughter of Pelles, she nurses Launcelot in illness. “Ever this maiden Elaine did ever her diligent labour night and day unto Sir Launcelot, that there was never child nor wife more meeker to her father and husband than was that Fair Maiden of Astolat.”xiv Unlike Guinevere, her character is not in question: “she is a full fair maiden, good and gentle, and well taught.”xv She asks him to marry her; he refuses. So she dies of grief:

I take God to my record I loved never none but Sir Launcelot du Lake, nor never shall, and a clean maiden I am for him and for all other; and sithen it is the sufferance of God that I shall die for the love of so noble a knight, I beseech the High Father of Heaven to have mercy upon my soul, and upon mine innumerable pains that I suffered may be allegeance of part of my sins. For sweet Lord Jesu, said the fair maiden, I take Thee to record, on Thee I was never great offencer against thy laws; but that I loved this noble knight, Sir Launcelot, out of measure, and of myself, good Lord, I might not withstand the fervent love wherefore I have my death.xvi

Launcelot allows her to die rather than forsake Guinevere. Who, in the meantime, is rejecting him: “Queen Guenever was wood wroth with Sir Launcelot, and would by no means speak with him, but estranged herself from him.”xvii

His attachment to Guinevere seems, in essence, a co-dependency, an addiction like alcoholism.

It is because of this adultery, and this choice of false love over agape, that Launcelot, despite his other fine qualities, is judged unworthy to win the Grail. And it is for their other various adulteries that all the other knights, bold and chivalrous as they are, are also found unworthy. The task is left to Launcelot’s son by Elaine, Galahad, because he is pure of heart. It is explained to Sir Gawain in these words: “Sir Galahad is a maid and sinned never, and that is the cause he shall enchieve where he goeth that ye nor none such shall not attain, nor none in your fellowship.”xviii

Hamlet seems to have a comparable problem with Ophelia, preventing him from accepting and returning her affection. He seems to have very little good to say about humanity in general.

To be honest, as this world goes, is to be
one man picked out of ten thousand. (Act 2, Scene 7) 

Man delights not
me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling
you seem to say so. (Act 2, Scene 7) 

Use every man
after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping? (Act 2, Scene 7) 

What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more. Act 3, Scene 4) 

We are arrant knaves,
all; believe none of us. (Act 3, Scene 1)

Accordingly, he must doubt her motives, all mortals being scoundrels, and the very possibility of love, although her own reaction to his rejection seems to demonstrate that her motives were pure.

Ophelia, for her part, seems to illustrate an alternate symptom of being abused. She seems unable to judge Hamlet’s intentions, and unaware of how to respond; she is socially awkward. Low EQ. Leaving herself to be manipulated by her father Polonius. “I do not know, my lord,” she tells her father, referring to Hamlet’s approaches, “what I should think.” (Act 1, Scene 3). To which he responds, seizing the opportunity, “Think yourself a baby.”

It is hard here to miss certain lessons for the treatment of depression. First, the depressive can find initial relief in “art therapy”—our first helper figure. Which is also to say, in the hero legends—they are themselves this art therapy. This is the first line of treatment.

Second, the depressed should seek in fear and trembling a firm religious faith. This is the hero quest.

Third, they must take care to avoid the danger of new abusive relationships.

Fourth … it seems they must work their way towards agape, a true and selfless and fully reciprocal love. Besides being the final perfect transcendental, agape is the obvious remedy for a lack of love growing up. It directly addresses the problem. It answers the prophecy given to Telephus: to heal his existential wound, he must resort to the thing that caused it. True love is the cure to false love.

However, the hero legends do not clearly show us how to get there. They tend to end with the hero still in a state of suffering, or perhaps released from suffering only by death. Granted, the hero legends show that the abused child can have a meaningful, productive, life, but can he or she not also find happiness? This is a bit disappointing, if what we came for is a “cure” to depression, as opposed to a guide for living with it.

For this final solution, it seems, if there is one, we must still look elsewhere.


i William Blake, “Annotations to Swedenborg’s Divine Love and Divine Wisdom,” London, 1788.

ii Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet 6, N.K. Sanders trans.

iii Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 7, ll. 100-158, Kline trans.

iv Völsunga Saga, Chapter 19.

v Nonnus, Dionysiaca 47. 434 ff. Rouse trans.

vi Euripides, Medea.

viiSaxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum, Book 9.

viiiOvid, Metamorphoses Book 11, ll, 194-220, Kline trans.

ixMorte d’Arthur, Book 6, Ch. 15.

xMorte d’Arthur, Book 3, Ch. 1.

xiBook 11, Ch. 3.

xii Morte d’Arthur, Book 12, Ch. 5.

xiii Ibid., Book 4, Ch. 6.

xiv Ibid., Book 18, Ch. 17.

xvIbid., Book 18, Ch. 19.

xvi Ibid, Book 18, Ch. 19.

xvii Ibid.

xviii Ibid., Book 13, Ch. 16.

The Depressive and the Holy Grail

Through conquering the dragon, the hero typically acquires some magical object: the pearl of immortality, the Golden Fleece, the Golden Apples, Medusa’s head, Gilgamesh’s herb of immortality, the impenetrable hide of the Medean lion, the cornucopia; the Grail. Samson finds honey in the conquered lion’s carcass. Enkidu and Gilgamesh obtain sacred cedar logs. Perhaps not so special to us, but Enkidu on his death bed eulogizes them: “There is no wood like you in our land.”i Moses and the Israelites attain the Promised Land, prefigured by the burning bush and the tablets of the law.

Do these images all represent one thing? For what might they stand as “objective correlative”?

Being indestructible seems one most common theme. The Chinese cintamani around which the dragons dance is an elixir of immortality. So is Gilgamesh’s herb. Utnapishtim informs Gilgamesh,

“There is a plant that looks like a box-thorn, it has prickles like a dog-rose, and will prick one who plucks it. But if you can possess this plant, you’ll be again as you were in your youth.”ii

When Herakles rescues Hesione from the sea monster, similarly, his stated reward is two immortal horses. The skin of the Nemean lion, or the blood of Fafnir, promise invulnerability, surely a related concept.

Draper: The Golden Fleece

Many of the prize objects seem to be made of gold: the fleece, the apples of the Hesperides, Fafnir’s hoard, Beowulf’s dragon’s golden cup. The value everyone everywhere places on gold, in turn, has much to do with its being an incorruptible, an “immortal” metal, resistant to oxidization. Cedar, Enkidu’s and Gilgamesh’s first prize, is evergreen—it does not die back in winter—and, says Wikipedia, it is “exceptionally durable and immune to insect ravages.” Again, a possible image of permanence. Honey has the same salient characteristic: kept for centuries, it will not spoil. Moses’s burning bush “burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed”—an immortal fire.

As for the Holy Grail, it heals fatal wounds; similarly defying mortality.

Sir Percival and Sir Ector have just battled, and given each other mortal blows. They are then brought into the presence of the grail:

... and forthwithal they both were as whole of hide and limb as ever they were in their life-days: then they gave thankings to God with great mildness. O Jesu, said Sir Percivale, what may this mean, that we be thus healed, and right now we were at the point of dying?iii

The head of Medusa, conversely, is an invincible weapon: it brings instant death. But it is a particular kind of death, being turned to stone. This also implies permanence; like the stone tablets of the Mosaic law. Perseus says to Phineas, in exposing to him the gorgon’s head: “I shall make of you a lasting memorial; you will always be seen, standing in my father-in-law’s palace.”iv

Burne-Jones: The Garden of the Hesperides

In the Golden Apples, found hanging on a branch at the place where the sun sets; in the Golden Fleece, found hanging on a branch at the place the sun rises; and perhaps in Moses’s burning bush; we see hints of solar symbolism. The golden objects here, given their locations, seem cognate to the golden sun. Very often, indeed, to achieve his quest, the hero must go to the place where the sun rises or sets: Jason, Herakles, Gilgamesh, Perseus. The sun too is a common image of immortality: sol invictus, the unconquerable sun. It rises again every morning.

The goal of the hero quest, then, is apparently something permanent, something eternal. What is permanent or eternal? God, yes, and heaven; Plato’s ideal forms, if you are a Platonist; and those qualities both Plato and Aristotle called the transcendentals: notably, the moral good, truth, beauty.

The sun is an especially apt correlative for the transcendental: not just because it is immortal for all practical purposes, but because it is the primary source of light and vision. It is to light or to sight what a transcendental is to value, or a Platonic ideal is to a particular object. A thing is of value because it is true, or good, or beautiful. Gold is a comparable image: as coinage, it is accepted as a universal exchange, an abstract symbol of value.

The solution to Samson’s riddle suggests that here honey is also a superlative, and so a possible stand-in for ultimate value:

“What is sweeter than honey?
What is stronger than a lion?” (Judges 14:18)

Honey is thus, at least implicitly, the measure of all sweetness. And so it was, in a world before sugar.

Given that the abused or emotionally betrayed child is deprived by their family experience of any sense of personal worth or any sense of meaning in their life, this quest for absolute value may be necessary to gain some solid ground on which to stand and then to build. With no relative ground of being supplied to them by those around them, such as most of us have from our upbringing, they must find the ultimate ground of being or remain at sea.

A challenging, a heroic task; not everyone is called to be a knight errant. But having attained it, they have attained something not just of personal, but of universal value. They are able to bestow this blessing, this soul-wisdom, on others. That makes the hero.

Ovid describes Pythagoras as a hero in this sense:

Though the gods were far away, he visited their region of the sky, in his mind, and what nature denied to human vision he enjoyed with his inner eye. When he had considered every subject, through concentrated thought, he communicated it widely in public, teaching the silent crowds, who listened in wonder to his words, concerning the origin of the vast universe, and of the causes of things; and what the physical world is; what the gods are; where the snows arise; what the origin of lightning is; whether Jupiter, or the storm-winds, thunder from colliding clouds; what shakes the earth; by what laws the stars move; and whatever else is hidden.v

This all begins to sound mystical: the ultimate goal, after all, the perfect transcendental, must be God himself. Indeed, Sir Galahad, when he achieves the Grail, ascends to heaven:

And therewith he kneeled down to-fore the table and made his prayers, and then suddenly his soul departed to Jesu Christ, and a great multitude of angels bare his soul up to heaven, that the two fellows might well behold it. Also the two fellows saw come from heaven an hand, but they saw not the body. And then it came right to the Vessel, and took it and the spear, and so bare it up to heaven. Sithen was there never man so hardy to say that he had seen the Sangreal.vi

Knights of the Round Table

That may sound a little too ambitious for most of us. According to the legend, after all, a Galahad comes along only once a creation or so. More humbly, the typical depressive’s quest may achieve something like the second of Alcoholics Anonymous’s famous Twelve Steps: “We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” This more common grail may be an awareness that there really are transcendent values, and then some sense of what they are. The fundamentals of a religious faith.

On this rock, the depressive may build a life.

Significantly, when he achieves the grail, Sir Launcelot is healed of a “mental illness.” Now that he is lucid, Dame Elaine must explain matters to him:

Sir, said Dame Elaine, into this country ye came like a madman, clean out of your wit, and here have ye been kept as a fool.

Earlier:

These four men and these ladies laid hand on Sir Launcelot, and so they bare him into a tower, and so into a chamber where was the holy vessel of the Sangreal, and by force Sir Launcelot was laid by that holy vessel; and there came an holy man and unhilled that vessel, and so by miracle and by virtue of that holy vessel Sir Launcelot was healed and recovered.vii

Launcelot also has a dream in which the Grail is said specifically to heal an illness called “sorrow”: melancholy.

And so he fell asleep; and half waking and sleeping he saw come by him two palfreys all fair and white, the which bare a litter, therein lying a sick knight. ... All this Sir Launcelot saw and beheld, for he slept not verily; and he heard him say: O sweet Lord, when shall this sorrow leave me? and when shall the holy vessel come by me, wherethrough I shall be blessed? For I have endured thus long, for little trespass. A full great while complained the knight thus, and always Sir Launcelot heard it. With that Sir Launcelot saw the candlestick with the six tapers come before the cross, and he saw nobody that brought it. Also there came a table of silver, and the holy vessel of the Sangreal, which Launcelot had seen aforetime in King Pescheour’s house. And therewith the sick knight set him up, and held up both his hands, and said: Fair sweet Lord, which is here within this holy vessel; take heed unto me that I may be whole of this malady. And therewith on his hands and on his knees he went so nigh that he touched the holy vessel and kissed it, and anon he was whole; and then he said: Lord God, I thank thee, for I am healed of this sickness.viii

Rossetti: The Damsel of the Sangreal.

As for the Golden Fleece, note the story of its origin. It was the fleece of a golden ram (which later became the constellation Aries) sent by Nephele to save two children about to be sacrificed by their father.ix The ram saved them by carrying them off on its back. The fleece thus represents an aid for abused children; fit antidote for an abused childhood.

There is a similar reference in the legend of the Holy Grail. Once recognized, through his ability to sit on the Siege Perilous, as worthy of the grail quest, Sir Galahad is led to a tomb. 

Now, said the good man, go to the tomb and lift it up. So he did, and heard a great noise; and piteously he said, that all men might hear it: Sir Galahad, the servant of Jesu Christ, come thou not nigh me, for thou shalt make me go again there where I have been so long. But Galahad was nothing afraid, but lifted up the stone; and there came out so foul a smoke, and after he saw the foulest figure leap thereout that ever he saw in the likeness of a man; and then he blessed him and wist well it was a fiend. Then heard he a voice say Galahad, I see there environ about thee so many angels that my power may not dere thee. Right so Sir Galahad saw a body all armed lie in that tomb, and beside him a sword. Now, fair brother, said Galahad, let us remove this body, for it is not worthy to lie in this churchyard, for he was a false Christian man. And therewith they all departed and went to the abbey. And anon as he was unarmed a good man came and set him down by him and said: Sir, I shall tell you what betokeneth all that ye saw in the tomb; for that covered body betokeneth the duresse of the world, and the great sin that Our Lord found in the world. For there was such wretchedness that the father loved not the son, nor the son loved not the father; and that was one of the causes that Our Lord took flesh and blood of a clean maiden, for our sins were so great at that time that well-nigh all was wickedness. Truly, said Galahad, I believe you right well.x

The Grail exists, then—indeed, it seems perhaps Jesus himself came into world—to heal a lack of love between parent and child. That is the specific demon to be exorcised by the grail quest.

Every new discovery in science or in culture may also be understood as a hero quest for truth; every decisive moral act a hero quest for the good, “heroic virtue,” as is said of saints; every inspired creative act may be considered a hero quest for the beautiful. The depressive, driven to this quest by personal circumstances, may be expert in this questing business. Hence, perhaps, as Aristotle observes, the great philosophers, or poets, or artists, or military leaders or lawgivers, are almost always melancholics.



iThe Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet 7.


ii Ibid. Tablet 11.


iii Malory, Morte d’Arthur, Book 11, Chapter 14.


iv Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 5, ll. 215-250, Innes, trans.


v Ibid., Book 15, ll. 31-108.


vi Morte d’Arthur, Chapter 22.


vii Ibid., Book 12 Ch. 5


viii Ibid., Ch. 18.


ix Pausanias, Description of Greece, Book 9, Chapter 34.




x Morte d’Arthur, Book x, Chapter 12.

The Helper

Siegfried at Regin's forge.

Joseph Campbell identifies, as a standard feature of hero legends, a guide or helper figure who appears near the outset of the hero’s quest to advise him or her.

For those who have not refused the call, the first encounter of the hero-journey is with a protective figure (often a little old crone or old man) who provides the adventurer with amulets against the dragon forces he is about to pass.i 

In fairy lore it may be some little fellow of the wood, some wizard, hermit, shepherd, or smith, who appears, to supply the amulets and advice that the hero will require. The higher mythologies develop the role in the great figure of the guide, the teacher, the ferryman, the conductor of souls to the afterworld.ii

He cites Theseus’s Ariadne, Dante’s Beatrice, or Faust’s Gretchen.

This figure, says Campbell, represents “the benign, protecting power of destiny”; “all the forces of the unconscious,” “Mother Nature herself.”iii But these seem only awkward circumlocutions to avoid using the word “God.” Nature does not have a will or an intent, nor is there any “destiny,” without some divine will to make it so.

Very well; God is present in the hero quest. In the Samson legend, his birth is even announced by an angel, who designates him as a hero. In the story of Moses, Yahweh God himself is the helper figure.

Moses and the burning bush. Bouts the Elder.

But so what? Have we learned anything? After all, if God exists, everything comes from God, or if you prefer euphemisms, “destiny” or “Mother Nature.” And God is always with us, in principle; especially, proverbially, in times of trial. So why the need in these legends for a particular figure simply to assert God’s presence? It seems there must be more to it than this.

But first, is Campbell correct that a helper figure is a standard feature of these legends? Surely he is. Have we not already seen such helper figures?

Recall the aged priest St. Gerebernus who accompanies St, Dymphna when she flees her father King Damon; and the secondary, less commonly remarked, figure of the court fool.iv

We have seen as well that these two are remarkably similar to Lear’s two companions in his wanderings, the fool and Kent: the one an artist, that is, an actor, comedian, musician, and juggler; and the other apparently a religious figure, surprisingly monotheist in a pagan milieu.

There is also such a figure, easily missed, perhaps, in Hamlet; although there seems to be only one of the two: Yorick, who was a mentor to Hamlet in his youth.

“I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times.” (Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 1)

Yorick is, yet again, a court jester. And he is a guide, surely, to Hamlet in his assumed role as feigned madman. “A whoreson mad fellow,” as one of the gravediggers describes him.

Young Hamlet with Yorick. 1868.

Interesting: three legends, three court jesters.

There seems to be no clear parallel of Father Gerebernus in Hamlet; no religious guide. The ghost of Hamlet’s father might seem to qualify; but it is unclear whether he is a helpful guide or a demon and the ultimate source of the problem. The latter seems more likely. What about Yorick, now dead and so having a solid connection with the spiritual world, serving both functions? He might because of this circumstance combine both figures. Hamlet does appeal to him for supernatural aid, as one might commend oneself to Saint Dymphna or Saint Gerebernus:
Now get you to my ladyʼs chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that. (Act 5, Scene 1)

But so far this is all Shakespeare. Are there similar guides in the hero legends?

Indeed, we seem to find the same two figures in the world’s first known epic, the story of Gilgamesh. Assuming that Utnapishtim, the immortal old man who lives beyond the sea of death, is more the goal of the quest than a helper at the threshold, Gilgamesh comes upon two guides in seeking him: first Siduri, the “gentle girl who sits by the sea”; then Urshanabi, the ferryman who “rows the seas of death.”v Both give directions, help, and advice.

And Siduri is apparently an artist, just as are the court fools we find in Shakespeare. 

She crafted the first gold bowl
while peeking at the sun
through a slit across her face veil.

Urshanabi is a priestly figure, a psychopomp (guide of souls to the afterlife), the one who ferries souls across the sea of death. “He is one who plays with deadly snakes,” says Siduri. As Gerberinus serves as confessor for Dymphna, so Urshanabi scolds Gilgamesh for impiously breaking sacred columns and handling sacred stones.

We seem to find the same two in some of the Greek hero legends. Heroes are typically guided and aided by the twin figures Athena and Hermes. According to Apollodorus:

With Hermes and Athena as his guides Perseus sought out the daughters of Phorkys who told him where to find the Nymphai (Nymphs) who kept certain treasures of the gods‒winged sandals, the kibisis (a sack), and the helmet of Hades … He [Perseus] also received from Hermes a sickle made of adamant … [After his quest was complete:] Perseus gave the sandals, kibisis, and helmet back to Hermes, and the Gorgonʼs head to Athena. Hermes returned the aforementioned articles to the Nymphai.vi

Athene helps Perseus kill Medusa

When he completed his quest, according to Ovid, “he built three turf altars to three gods, the left to Mercurius [Hermes], the middle Joveʼs [Zeusʼ], the right the warrior queenʼs [Athenaʼs], and sacrificed a cow to Minerva [Athena], to the wing-foot god [Hermes] a calf and to the king of heaven [Zeus] a bull.”vii These three seem neatly to correspond to Urshanabi, Utnapishtim, and Siduri.

Athena is, like Siduri, an artist, patroness of the arts. Ovid in particular makes this plain, in describing a weaving contest between her and Arachne. The piece she weaves goes far beyond mere craft:

…. There, shades of purple, dyed in Tyrian bronze vessels, are woven into the cloth, and also lighter colours, shading off gradually. The threads that touch seem the same, but the extremes are distant, as when, often, after a rainstorm, the expanse of the sky, struck by the sunlight, is stained by a rainbow in one vast arch, in which a thousand separate colours shine, but the eye itself still cannot see the transitions. There, are inserted lasting threads of gold, and an ancient tale is spun in the web. 

Pallas Athene depicts the hill of Mars, and the court of the Aeropagus, in Cecrops’s Athens, and the old dispute between Neptune and herself, as to who had the right to the city and its name. There the twelve gods sit in great majesty, on their high thrones, with Jupiter in the middle. She weaves the gods with their familiar attributes. The image of Jupiter is a royal one. There she portrays the Ocean god, standing and striking the rough stone, with his long trident, and seawater flowing from the centre of the shattered rock, a token of his claim to the city. She gives herself a shield, a sharp pointed spear, and a helmet for her head, while the aegis protects her breast. She shows an olive-tree with pale trunk, thick with fruit, born from the earth at a blow from her spear, the gods marvelling: and Victory crowns the work. 

Then she adds four scenes of contest in the four corners, each with miniature figures, in their own clear colours, so that her rival might learn, from the examples quoted, what prize she might expect, for her outrageous daring. One corner shows Thracian Mount Rhodope and Mount Haemus, now icy peaks, once mortal beings who ascribed the names of the highest gods to themselves. A second corner shows the miserable fate of the queen of the Pygmies: how Juno, having overcome her in a contest, ordered her to become a crane and make war on her own people. Also she pictures Antigone, whom Queen Juno turned into a bird for having dared to compete with Jupiter’s great consort: neither her father Laomedon, nor her city Ilium were of any use to her, but taking wing as a white stork she applauds herself with clattering beak. The only corner left shows Cinyras, bereaved: and he is seen weeping as he clasps the stone steps of the temple that were once his daughters’ limbs. Minerva surrounded the outer edges with the olive wreaths of peace (this was the last part) and so ended her work with emblems of her own tree.viii

It is, in short, a masterpiece.

The weaving contest: Velasquez.

Hermes, in turn, is the Greek cognate to Urshanabi: Hermes Psychopompos, the figure who guides souls to the spirit world.

Both Hermes and Athena guide and help Herakles as well. In his quest for Cerberus, Hermes leads Herakles to the underworld. Athena guides him back. The Temple of Zeus at Olympia featured twelve metopes showing the twelve labours of Herakles. Athena is shown in four of them. She gave Herakles the noisemakers with which he startled the Stymphalian birds. She helped him support the sky when he sought the apples of the Hesperides. She intervened to end his killing spree during his madness.ix Both perform similar services for Odysseus.

Athena is divine patron of the arts, of military valour, and of wisdom. These fields do not obviously intersect. But interestingly, they are three fields Aristotle cited as typically populated by the melancholy: artists, heroes, and philosophers.x This may reveal Athena’s true interests and her true character.

In the Völsunga Saga, Siegfried/Sigurd again has two helpers and guides in overcoming the dragon Fafnir. The first is Regin, a smith, who “had all wisdom and deftness of hand. … he has the ability to work iron as well as silver and gold and he makes many beautiful and useful things”xi—an artist. Regin crafts Siegfried’s invincible sword, then gives him vital advice on how to proceed. The second helper is the god Odin, who appears as an old man to amend and complete Fafnir’s advice. Odin is cognate to the Greek Hermes. 

Then said Regin, “Make thee a hole, and sit down therein, and whenas the worm comes to the water, smite him into the heart, and so do him to death, and win thee great fame thereby.”
But Sigurd said, “What will betide me if I be before the blood of the worm?” 

Says Regin, “Of what avail to counsel thee if thou art still afeard of everything? Little art thou like thy kin in stoutness of heart.”
Then Sigurd rides right over the heath; but Regin gets him gone, sore afeard. 

But Sigurd fell to digging him a pit, and whiles he was at that work, there came to him an old man with a long beard [Odin], and asked what he wrought there, and he told him. 

Then answered the old man and said, “Thou doest after sorry counsel: rather dig thee many pits, and let the blood run therein; but sit thee down in one thereof, and so thrust the worm’s heart through.”xii

Siegfried is able to kill Fafnir, following this advice.

Siegfried kills Fafnir.

The artist figure gives his advice first, then retreats. The psychopomp figure next appears, with more complete knowledge. Just as with Siduri and Urshanabi.

This may be another reason why the Fool mysteriously disappears before the end of King Lear. His artistic vision only goes so far: it is Kent, the religious figure, who treads the complete path.

In Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, Sir Launcelot’s grail quest begin when he is unjustly accused of infidelity by his wife Guinevere. The trauma drives him instantly insane. Again here, we see the common pre-modern understanding that madness comes from trauma, and specifically from an experience of emotional betrayal.

She [Guinevere] said: False traitor knight that thou art, look thou never abide in my court, and avoid my chamber, and not so hardy, thou false traitor knight that thou art, that ever thou come in my sight. Alas, said Sir Launcelot; and therewith he took such an heartly sorrow at her words that he fell down to the floor in a swoon. And therewithal Queen Guenever departed. And when Sir Launcelot awoke of his swoon, he leapt out at a bay window into a garden, and there with thorns he was all to-scratched in his visage and his body; and so he ran forth he wist not whither, and was wild wood as ever was man; and so her an two year, and never man might have grace to know him.xiii

Now turn we unto Queen Guenever and to the fair Lady Elaine, that when Dame Elaine heard the queen so to rebuke Sir Launcelot, and also she saw how he swooned, and how he leaped out at a bay window, then she said unto Queen Guenever: Madam, ye are greatly to blame for Sir Launcelot, for now have ye lost him, for I saw and heard by his countenance that he is mad for ever. … Alas, madam, ye do great sin, and to yourself great dishonour, for yehave a lord of your own, and therefore it is your part to love him.xiv

After two years of wandering, Sir Launcelot, still mad, happens upon a tree in which are hanging two swords and two shields. “Upon a tree, there hung a white shield, and two swords hung thereby, and two spears leaned there by a tree.”

What can it mean?

Launcelot takes one of the swords, and with it strikes one of the shields, making a loud noise. A dwarf appears and wrestles him for the sword. Then a knight all in red appears, and fights him for it.

Once Launcelot falls, however, they prove themselves helpers, not enemies. The dwarf says to the knight, 

Sir, …, it is not worship to hurt him, for he is a man out of his wit; and doubt ye not he hath been a man of great worship, and for some heartly sorrow that he hath taken, he is fallen mad; and me beseemeth, said the dwarf, he resembleth much unto Sir Launcelot.

The knight responds:

…Whatsomever he be, said that knight, harm will I none do him.xv

So they put him on a litter, take him to the knight’s castle, and nurse him back to health. He slowly recovers, and eventually rises to do battle with a great boar. The boar can no doubt be taken as a guardian figure; the hero quest has begun. Here as elsewhere, the hero quest is presented as the proper and healthful response to the experience of mental illness generally. Launcelot goes on from this to eventually find the grail.

So, have we met our two helper figures? Two swords, two shields, two helper figures, the dwarf and the red knight?

Not so fast. Launcelot, after all, struck only one of the shields with only one of the swords; he was, then, summoning only one of the helpers. There is an implication here of more to come. And more comes. In vanquishing the boar, he receives terrible wounds, and again passes out. He is found by a holy hermit, who again nurses him back to health.

And here, surely, we have our Gerberinus, our religious figure.

This suggests that the red knight and the dwarf, who respond to the first shield, are collectively the artist figure, aka the court jester. Not an obvious connection to make, perhaps; but dwarves were often employed as court jesters. Once healed by the hermit, Launcelot stumbles into a city and is adopted, being still somewhat mad, as a court jester by the local king. As the sign of his office, he is invested with a red cloak.
And then Sir Castor sent for the fool–that was Sir Launcelot. And when he was come afore Sir Castor, he gave Sir Launcelot a robe of scarlet and all that longed unto him.

This seems to retroactively identify the red knight—as a court jester.

Athena helps Herakles

Here too, as elsewhere, the artist appears first, the dwarf and red knight, then the psychopomp, the hermit, takes over.

For Jason and the Argonauts, there is an obvious helper figure in Phineus; a prophet, someone with spiritual second sight: “Phineus who above all men endured most bitter woes because of the gift of prophecy which Letoʼs son had granted him aforetime.”xvi Phineas gives the Argonauts detailed directions to Colchis and the Golden Fleece, outlining the dangers they will face on the way, and how to overcome them. He is their guide, then, for the entire trip.

There is nothing here to clearly identify Phineas as an artistic type; except that he is not on good terms with the gods, having revealed too many of their secrets to mankind. That sounds more like the rebellious artist than the priest. Like Siduri, the primordial artist in the Gilgamesh tale, he lives on the shore of the sea; he does not cross over. He does not go with the Argonauts on their journey, but describes their destination from afar. He paints the picture, as it were.

And there is here a second guide and helper: Medea. She is, explicitly, a priestess, a priestess of Hecate. Her advice and help is vital once Jason has reached the far side of that great sea, the other side.

Tiresias: Fuseli

If we then consider Oedipus Rex, we find a figure very similar to Phineas there, an old man with second sight, who guides Oedipus on his quest—in this case, unhappily. It is Tiresias, the all-purpose prophet of Greek legend. Also like Phineus, he is blind—blind, that is, to the physical world, the better to see without distraction the invisible spiritual world.

And in the Oedipus cycle, again, there is a second helper figure: Antigone. She is not formally a priestess, but, like Kent, she is conspicuous for her religious sentiments. When her brother Polynices dies, she violates the law to mourn for him, arguing that the divine law supercedes human law. “I owe a longer allegiance to the dead than to the living,” she explains to her sister. “In that world I shall abide for ever.”xvii To her, it seems, the spirit world is the real world. She ministers to her brother, and then also to her father, Oedipus.

So why are these helper figures here? Because, surely, they indicate the two reliable aids and supports for the abused and the depressed: the two great spiritual disciplines, the two great guides for the perplexed: religion and art. Modern psychiatry and psychology are not included, of course. They did not yet exist. Should they be? Have they offered anything better?

The Gilgamesh epic calls Siduri, the archetypal artist, “The girl who gives men lifesaving drinks”; “whose drinks refresh the soul.”xviii That, surely, aptly describes the proper effect of art. She warns Gilgamesh that, in undertaking the hero quest, he is “staring at the sun.” An interesting image; particularly since the epic has at this point just described Siduri, the artist, as one who has “peeked at the sun” in order to fashion her golden bowls. Artists, then, are those who have seen the transcendent, and reflect or reveal it in their work. They live on the shore of the eternal sea; and so are authorities for those of us who undertake hero quests. Every work of art is a glimpse of eternity.

Ushanabi, the religious figure, on the other hand, has actually himself crossed over to the other side of that sea. In principle, he is the greater and the later guide.

Here we plainly have suggestions for the treatment of depression.


iCampbell, op. cit., p. 69.

ii Ibid., p. 72.

iiiIbid.

ivone account that includes the court jester is given at http://people.wku.edu/sally.kuhlenschmidt/whimsy/dymphna.htm

vEpic of Gilgamesh, Tablet 10, Kenneth Sublett, trans.

viApollodorus, Library, 2. 37 & 46, Aldrich, trans.

viiOvid, Metamorphoses Book 4, ll. 740 ff Melville, trans.

viiiIbid., Book 4, ll. 70-102 Kline trans.

ixhttps://www.thoughtco.com/the-goddess-athena-helps-hercules-117193

x“Through what is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts turn out to be melancholics (μελαγχολικοι)?” “Many other heroes seem to have been similarly afflicted, and among men of recent times Empedocles, Plato, and Socrates, and numerous other well-known men, and also most of the poets.” Problem XXX.

xiVölsunga Saga, Chapter 14, William Morris trans.

xiiVölsunga Saga, Chapter 18.

xiiiMalory, Morte d’Arthur, Book 11, Ch. 8.

xivIbid., Ch. 9.

xvIbid.

xviApollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica 2. 179 - 434 RC Seaton trans.

xviiSophocles, Antigone.

xviiiEpic of Gilgamesh, Tablet 10.