The Nature of Stings

World distribution of haplogroup X. Results for the Americas are Indians only.

CBC, The Nature of Things, and David Suzuki are suddenly in trouble for making a documentary about the “Solutrean hypothesis.” Briefly, the “Solutrean hypothesis” suggests that the Americas might have been first settled by people coming from Europe, across the ice sheet during the last ice age.

The problem, apparently, is that this theory has recently been embraced by “white supremacists.”

It is fun to see David Suzuki and the CBC being raked over the greenhouse-gas-rich coals: it is nice to see the left devouring itself. Which seems to be happening increasingly often. But something also smells funny. The National Post piece on the controversy explains the hypothesis is “so toxic, and so discredited among mainstream researchers that documentary director Robin Bicknell said she could barely find anyone willing to go on camera even just to say it was wrong.”

That does not sound right, does it? There is no problem in finding scientists who will explain why we know that the earth is not flat, that the sun does not orbit the earth, or that Nazi race theories were bunk. No problem at all. The only reason scientists might be reluctant to go on camera saying the theory is wrong is that it is very likely to be true. Only then do they face a problem—and otherwise academics love publicity. If they admit it is quite likely to be true, they will be accused of white supremacy, and their career is over. But if they say it is false, and in a couple of years it is generally accepted as correct, their career is over. Nobody wants to be the first to stick their bearded turtleneck out.

This is what you get when you politicize science.

But who is most guilty of that? A few hundred “white supremacists,” whatever that apparently infinitely malleable term currently means? Or the huge number on the left, apparently a majority of us all, and including the Canadian establishment, who maintain that there is some great political, legal, and moral significance to whose ancestors arrived in North America first?

Now it seems they risk being hoist on their own flint-knapped arrowheads, and they of course do not like it.

I am not qualified to evaluate the theory myself, but this fear factor alone makes me think it must be true.

Let’s look, though, at the arguments the article gives that it is not true:

“There is, for example, no evidence of Solutrean seafaring, and no evidence of their cave art in North America, which would be unusual for a people known for the elaborately painted Cave of Altamira in Spain.”

Absence of evidence is of course not evidence of absence. Given the vast area and low pre-Columbian populations, finding anything in particular from the period is a needle in a haystack proposition. People were searching for a century or more before they turned up the first Viking site at L’Anse-aux-Meadows. Vessels, needing to be light, would presumably be made of light wood and hides. It is unlikely any wood and hides would survive for 20 millennia. Nevertheless, this new theory comes amid a generally growing realization among archaeologists that remote human ancestors were far more able and eager seafarers than we previously believed. They made it over sea to Australia 50,000 years ago. Polynesians made it island by island all across the Pacific. Someone populated islands in the Mediterranean 80,000 years ago.

Cave art? Presumably, if the Solutreans came across on the edges of the ice sheet, they were getting their living from the sea. In Suzuki’s words, they were “lured by the neverending bounty of the sea.” Accordingly, they would probably have stayed at least at first, perhaps at last near the sea coast when they arrived. Sea levels are substantially higher now than they were 20,000 years ago; any cave art the left is likely to be underwater- perhaps 50 miles out from shore.

Accordingly, needles may well yet be found in this almost entirely unexamined haystack.

The documentary notes significant European genetic markers in Canadian Indians. Indeed, whether or not the Solutrean hypothesis is true, this large element of European genetic material in the Indians of eastern Canada must still somehow be accounted for. It is important new data—we did not know about this until we sequenced the human genome, and it seems to defy the traditional theory of arrival from Asia, and no contact before Leif Erickson.

However, the article counters,

“According to Moreno-Mayar, …, there is another more plausible way to account for the presence of the relevant genetic marker, which was found in three of forty teeth analyzed. This marker, known as haplogroup X, was picked up by the ancestors of Native Americans as they encountered Ancient North Eurasians on their migration northeast towards Siberia, and eventually North America.”

Unfortunately, this explanation is not nearly as plausible. The problem is that haplogroup X is found concentrated in the northeast section of North America. This theory makes it go all the way around the world to get there, leaving no traces anywhere else long the way. No traces of the haplogroup in modern Siberia, anywhere in East Asia, in Central Asia, in Central or South America, or in Western North America. All areas these people would have to transit, presumably mating on the way. That’s like going from Toronto to Oshawa via Edmonton. Without ever stopping for gas.

World distribution of haplogroup R, even more common in Canadian Indians than haplogroup X. (Results for the Americas are Indians only)

The National Post article does not mention it, but according to Wikipedia, the ultimate disproof of the Solutrean hypothesis is a recently discovered skeleton:

“In 2014, the autosomal DNA of a male infant from a 12,500-year-old deposit in Montana was sequenced. The DNA was taken from a skeleton referred to as Anzick-1. The skeleton was found in close association with several Clovis artifacts. Comparisons showed strong affinities with DNA from Siberian sites, and virtually ruled out any close affinity of Anzick-1 with European sources (see the "Solutrean hypothesis"). The DNA of the Anzick-1 sample showed strong affinities with sampled Native American populations, which indicated that the samples derive from an ancient population that lived in or near Siberia, the Upper Palaeolithic Mal'ta population.”

It is hard for this layman to see why this is relevant; it looks a lot like a red herring. If they are saying that this corpse matches genetically with Siberia and with modern Indians, they are also saying that it cannot account for the European haplogroup found in modern Indians. The discovery apparently shows that this particular skeleton, far away from the East Coast, far away from where the Solutrians are supposed to have lived, and far away from the modern Indian groups with the haplogroup X chromosome, and dating to a time after the Beringia land bridge, knew how to craft Clovis points. But this is nothing we did not already know, without seeing the skeleton, and does not affect the Solutrean hypothesis, formed with this background knowledge. It seems significant only if you accept what seems to be the current weird orthodoxy on the left, that culture is a genetic trait, and nobody can “appropriate” anything from another culture. So if one non-Solutrian could make such points, however much later, it cannot have come from the Solutrians.

So: if you find someone who eats pizza and is not Italian, that proves pizzas are not originally Italian and there were never Italians in contact with them? Really?

If there were a betting market in this, I would put down money that, in another ten or twenty years, the Solutrian hypothesis will be in all the school texts.

Those on the left may not really want to argue that this invalidates any special aboriginal claims to North American land. But by all means.

Sir John's Public House

http://www.stratfordbeaconherald.com/…/kingston-pub-droppin…


Oddly, I have not found mention of this on the Kingston Whig Standard website, but apparently Sir John's Public House, in Kingston, actually located in what was once Macdonald's law office, has changed its name to The Public House under pressure from nearby First Nations Indians.

Sad, because in his day, Macdonald was a pretty loyal friend to the Indians.

But he is now scapegoated for having supported residential schools. And for saying in Parliament, when his government was being accused of extravagance towards the Indians, that he was only sending them the minimum of support.

It is all similar to the Cultural Revolution in China, or the various waves of iconoclasm in Europe. In each of them, irrecoverable and invaluable cultural elements were lost. Not to mention the vast economic potential from tourism. Now it has come to Canada. Our grandchildren will not thank us.

Oprah 2020

I may be wrong. I would never have believed Trump would have become president. But my gut says, if Oprah Winfrey chose to run, ther is no way he could beat her.

Trump has wonderful instincts as a showman, but compared to Winfrey, just about everyone else is an amateur.

TIME magazine once did a poll on who Americans thought would be most likely to be in heaven. Oprah came second only to themselves, and above Mother Teresa, who is, of course, now officially there.

Never Hire a Professional

Researchers at Cornell have discovered that, aside from raising the cost of education, the existence of teachers' unions and collective bargaining for teachers in any state reduces overall economic output and incomes, specifically the incomes of men.

Eh? How does that work? Aren't unions supposed to raise incomes?

First off, logically enough, unionization restricts hiring, and makes each hire more expensive. It stands to reason, then, that in this one sector, at least, there are fewer jobs available. And yes, the data do show lower employment rates, and lower labour force participation.

A valuable warning for those who want, like Ontario currently, to raise the minimum wage. Raise the cost of labour across the board, and, logically enough, you will have fewer jobs across the board. This study suggests that the losses for the poor will be grater thn the gains.

Don't believe a minimum wage would work that way? Then what again is the point of hiking taxes on cigarettes, alcohol, or calling for a carbon tax? Isn't it our automatic assumption that making something more expensive reduces the demand? Why would the basic laws of human nature be suspended in this one instance?

But this cannot by itself explain the economic harm detected. The teaching profession is by itself just not large enough to make this much difference. In any case, teachers' unions have also usually made demands for smaller class sizes and fewer teaching hours, which should offset this effect by forcing the hiring of more teachers. Here's another factor, and certainly a far larger factor: teachers' unions and collective bargaining, it turns out, leads to "reductions in measured cognitive and non-cognitive skills among young adults."

In other words, unionizing teachers means they do not teach as well. The quality of the work declines, and students suffer directly.

Unions, and self-regulating professions, mean things are done for the benefit of the employee or professional, no longer for the benefit of the customer.

Pas le Dieu des philosophes

Sure I had met God before:
Unseen presence in dark theatre alleyways,
Leprous, begging nickels in the street;
Doing hard time for meditation;
In a fashion, climbing Anselm’s ladder
To the spiraling galaxies;
In the dawn;
Or fishing with a moonlit thread
In the secret valleys of the night.

But it was the thunderbolt this time.
This time it was the catalytic flame.
God blew off the top of my cranium,
And left me all naked to the sky.

And I a stammering idiot with my trembling hand
Knew in awe I never could be alone again.

Ever since that night
At intervals a great eagle comes;
Pecks at my synapses like worms
Scattering vital fluids;
And craps poetry into my hollow skull.

-- Stephen K. Roney

Depression and the Dragon Quest

Fafnir: Rackham

Neither the terror at the threshold, nor the riddle that must be unravelled, nor the struggle of the one against the multitude, we all know, are the main event in the hero quest. The true and perfect hero must also soon or late confront a dragon. Marduk, St. George, Launcelot, Tristan, Beowulf, Ragnar Lodbrok, Siegfried, Rustam, Susa-no-o and Yorimasa in Japan, all defeat great serpents. In India, Krishna conquers the dragon Kaliya; Indra slays the dragon Vritra. In Greece, Zeus kills Typhon. In Scandinavia, Thor overcomes the Midgard Serpent. All self-respecting heroes sooner or later do the dragon cage match.

An odd thing, surely, since there is no such thing as a dragon in nature. Yet the dragon appears as the hero’s nemesis almost everywhere.

When Hercules, for example, wrestles with the river Achelous, said river turns into a great serpent. Achelous recalls:

I turned to my magic arts, and slipped from his grasp in the shape of a long snake. But when I had wound my body in sinuous coils, and, hissing fiercely, darted my forked tongue at him, Tiryns’s hero laughed, and mocking my magic arts, said: “My task in the cradle was to defeat snakes, and, though you are greater than other reptiles, Acheloüs, how big a slice of the Lernean Hydra would your one serpent be? It was made fecund by its wounds, and not one of its hundred heads was safely cut off without its neck generating two more. I overcame it, and having overcome it, disembowelled that monster, with branching snake-heads, that grew from their own destruction, thriving on evil. What do you think will happen to you, who are only a false snake, using unfamiliar weapons, whom a shifting form hides?”i

Herakles here defines himself as the ultimate serpent-slayer.

Krishna conquers the dragon Kaliya

And he indeed fights many dragons: the snakes sent to kill him in his cradle; then the Lernean Hydra; the sea serpent that threatens Hesione; a giant serpent he kills beside the Lydian river Sagaris for Omphale; and Ladon, the dragon who guards the Apples of the Hesperides at world᾿s end.

The ultimate enemy of Gilgamesh, prototypical hero of the Western world, is also a serpent. His first great foe, Humbaba, is indefinite in form. One recovered tablet describes him as dragon-like: “he had the paws of a lion and a body covered in thorny scales; his feet had the claws of a vulture, and on his head were the horns of a wild bull; his tail and phallus each ended in a snake’s head.”ii But as he returns to Uruk with the plant of immortality, the object of his hero quest, with which he hopes to heal his colleague and co-hero Enkidu, it is a snake that proves his final and greatest enemy:

After 15 miles they set up camp
where Gilgamesh slipped into a pool;
but in the pool, a cruel snake slithered by
and stole the plant from Gilgamesh
who saw the snake grow young again,
as off it raced with the special, special plant.iii

Jason must get past a dragon as well, to gain the Golden Fleece:

The final task was to put the dragon to sleep with the magic drugs. Known for its crest, its triple tongues and curved fangs, it was the dread guardian of the tree’s gold. But when Jason had sprinkled it with the Lethean juice of a certain herb, and three times repeated the words that bring tranquil sleep, that calm the rough seas and turbulent rivers, sleep came to those sleepless eyes, and the heroic son of Aeson gained the Golden Fleece.iv

So what exactly, then, is a dragon?

 

Welsh dragon. The celebrated breath comes from leeks.

A medieval bestiary says this:

The dragon’s strength is found in its tail, not in its teeth. Its lashing tail does great harm, and the dragon kills anything it catches in its coils. ... The Devil is likened to a dragon because he is the worst of all serpents. ... The crest of the dragon represents the Devil crowned with pride. As the dragon’s strength is not in its teeth but in its tail, the Devil, deprived of his strength, deceives with lies.v

Isidore of Seville, the great Medieval encyclopedist, advises “The dragon is the largest serpent, and in fact the largest animal on earth. Its strength is in its tail rather than its teeth; it does harm by beating, not by biting. It has no poison and needs none to kill, because it kills by entangling.”vi

It is plain, then, that the dragon is in the first place a huge serpent; other features are variable. But this is a metaphoric serpent. It apparently conveys as an objective correlative the various vices of pride, deceit—Jason’s opponent is “triple tongued,” and all serpents “speak with forked tongue”—and possessiveness, “entanglement.” Dragons also, although neither Isidore nor the Bestiary mention it, commonly guard some kind of hoard or treasure: the golden apples, the “tree’s gold,” Fafnir’s gold hoard. Chinese dragons circle the golden pill of immortality. They are acquisitive, then.

Chinese dragon chasing pill of immortality.

These sound rather like the traits of the narcissist, and of the narcissistic parent: pride, desire for grandeur, greed, deceit, failure to keep promises, possessiveness.

Joseph Campbell quotes a case study from Jung which seems by chance to confirm the association with an abusive parent:

Dr. Jung has reported a dream that resembles very closely the image of the myth of Daphne [sic]. The dreamer is the same young man who found himself ... in the land of the sheep—the land, that is to say, of unindependence. A voice within him says, “I must first get away from the father”; then a few nights later: “a snake draws a circle about the dreamer, and he stands like a tree, grown fast to the earth.” This is an image of the magic circle drawn about the personality by the dragon power of the fixating parent. Brynhild, in the same way, was protected in her virginity, arrested in her daughter state for years, by the circle of the fire of all-father Wotan She slept in timelessness until the coming of Siegfried.vii

The dragon, then, if Jung and Campbell are right, represents “the fixating parent.” Its power is that of paralysis: it fixes the child to a point, representing “unindependence,” unable, in contrast to the peripatetic hero, to travel.

But it is surely more than this: the dragon is not just representative of some person, because that person could just as well represent themselves as a dream image; the parent or anyone else.

The dragon is, the bestiary advises us, ultimately the Devil himself. We are now in the spirit realm, and dealing with things at the cosmic level. This is the primordial serpent, evil itself, of which the human narcissist is merely a devotee or individual incarnation.

Thor faces off against the Midgard serpent.

One might object here that not all dragons are themselves portrayed as evil. The Oriental dragon, as known in China, Vietnam, or Korea, is a productive, fertile character. So how can the fundamental meaning of the dragon be the Devil?

But note that Oriental religion has no Devil, and no equivalent figure. It simply does not accept the ultimate reality of evil. Ethics are not a part of the cosmic equation. Taoism, like Gnosticism in the West, sees the ideal as a balance of all opposites, and this, ultimately, also includes the opposites of good and evil. The dragon is not a negative image because moral evil is not a negative. The hero and the dragon, then, are of equal moral authority, and properly should reconcile. Fine; but outside our purview for now.

In most cultures, it is understood that mental illness is produced by spirit possession: by “an evil spirit.” This, then, the dragon of the hero quest, is the chief evil spirit, for which a great serpent is the fitting objective correlative; as a serpent represents original evil in the Garden of Eden, and a great dragon in the Book of Revelations: “an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads.” (Revelations 12:3). It is defeated by St. Michael.

Rustam and the dragon

Before you scoff at this as hopeless hocus pocus, note that it is simply the most reasonable way to speak of something within your own consciousness that seems to possess a will of its own: that wants what you do not want. Reject the idea of evil spirits, and you are forced into logical contradictions like positing a second “unconscious self.” A self other than yourself, that is, of which you are “unconscious” yet of which you are conscious.

And so here there be dragons. The hero-depressive must face up to and overcome the reality of evil as an abstract absolute, but also as a living conscious thing within, instilling fears and negative opinions about him or herself, in order to overcome the effects of his or her upbringing. This was the seed laid by abusive parenting.

Medusa having a bad hair day.

Perseus’s first serious adversary is a little different from the usual monster serpent: Madame Medusa, who is anthropomorphic, more or less, but who has snakes for hair. She seems, as a segue from the Graeae, almost a threshold figure; but she cannot be considered only a threshold figure, because her head is the grail and goal of Perseus’s original hero quest.

Ovid describes Medusa as being or having been attractive: “She was once most beautiful, and the jealous aspiration of many suitors. Of all her beauties none was more admired than her hair.”viii To emphasize her serpentine nature, according to Ovid, on Perseus’s return flight with her grisly visage, “bloody drops fell from the Gorgon’s head. The earth caught them and gave them life, as species of snakes, and so that country is infested with deadly serpents.”ix So Medusa’s essence is beautiful woman plus snake. All mortal adders are her parthenogenetic children.

Freud offers his own, divergent intepretation of the Medusa image. He writes

To decapitate = to castrate. The terror of Medusa is thus a terror of castration that is linked to the sight of something. Numerous analyses have made us familiar with the occasion for this: it occurs when a boy, who has hitherto been unwilling to believe the threat of castration, catches sight of the female genitals, probably those of an adult, surrounded by hair, and essentially those of his mother.x

This is a classic Freudian exegesis, in which anything can stand for anything else: the head is the genitals, the male cutting off something from the female is the female cutting off something from the male, and so forth. Don’t Medusa’s many snakey locks—another image of multitude!—suggest a surfeit rather than a deficit of penises? Of course not! “This is a confirmation of the technical rule according to which a multiplication of penis symbols signifies castration.”xi The fact that she frightens onlookers to stone obviously refers to an erection, right?—by the penis her head supposedly represents. This penis, then, causes an erection in the onlooker, rather than having an erection itself.

Black is white.

Sir Launcelot does the dragon thing.

It almost sounds superficially plausible, simply because it evokes vivid images in the mind. But surely Freud is being inconsistent. If the rule is really that everything can mean its opposite, Medusa’s head must not refer to the genitals, but to the feet. That is the obvious opposite to the head. In cutting off her head, Perseus must really be putting something on; perhaps he is giving her a new pair of sandals? The many snakes in her hair imply that these sandals are not made of snakeskin; and so forth. Freud’s real rule of interpretation seems to be that things mean what he wishes them to mean, neither more nor less. But if we are simply going to assign meanings arbitrarily, without some definite rule, a raven may as well be a writing desk.

Let us stick, then, with the simple-minded notion that the dragon image means something reasonably suggested by the nature of a serpent; and moreover, that this can also be conveyed, more or less as well, by the image of an attractive woman who is deadly to look at.

Emily Dickinson perhaps best captures the essence of snake for the human imagination, and why snakes often frighten us so, with the simple phrase “His notice sudden is.” Snakes, invisible in the grass and moving in uncanny ways, can come upon us abruptly. They startle. Like Medusa’s hair, they can, as Ovid says, “numb ... with fear.”xii

St. George

We evoke something like this when we call someone a “snake in the grass.” The snake represents an attack we do not expect; especially malice masked as friendship. This is aptly then associated with an attractive woman who is fatal to look at: a virile young swain like Perseus naturally expects at least some initial affection from any woman; and is, moreover, drawn by natural affection to look at one. Yet here, one glance means death. Assumed affection masks malice.

The same serpentine sting is well conveyed by the image of Andromeda or Hesione chained to the rocks, expecting to be swallowed at any instant by their invisible adversary, unseen and unheard beneath the waves. Its notice sudden is.

It all fitly conveys, in turn, the thrill of fear of chronic anxiety, a standard feature of melancholy, a standard feature of PTSD, and a standard feature of childhood abuse, if not, according to the DSM, a standard feature of depression by the official diagnosis. One has experienced in one’s past a deadly, unanticipated attack, and ever again is wary of the risk. That is the trauma.

Despite all we read in the popular press about the dragon’s fiery or poisonous breath, the Bestiary and St. Isidore surprisingly insist that the dragon kills not with venom, but with his tail and coils; not by direct assault, then, not in the direction you expect danger to come, but in a backhanded manner, from behind. Like a snake in the grass. Like a knife in the back.

Russian dragon.

And this actually fits with many legends. The dragon often does not try to fricasee the hero with its baleful breath; that seems more often used to poison the landscape. Its plan of attack with the hero or heroine is to entangle or swallow. Cetus intends to devour Andromeda; the dragon in the legend of St. George intends to ingest the Libyan princess. The sea monster that intends to eat Hesione also swallows Herakles, who must fight him from the inside out. Vritra swallows Indra.

This is perhaps cognate to the image of the devouring parent: the intent is total possession.

Achelous as serpent wrestles with Herakles—entwines him. The battle between Beowulf and Grendel is also a grappling match. The dragon seeks to “fixate,” to use Campbell’s term.

We see the sign of the serpent again in King Lear’s description of his trauma in Shakespeare, the trauma that drives him mad: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is.” “Struck me with her tongue, Most serpent-like, upon the very heart.” The serpent reference is almost automatic. It is the image of emotional betrayal. Hamlet’s ghost uses the same image for Claudius’s act of killing his brother: “The serpent that did sting thy father’s life/ Now wears his crown.” (Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5).

To produce depression or other expressions of “mental illness,” Shakespeare’s play suggests, this betrayal need not actually involve prolonged abuse. That is not quite the issue. The issue is the betrayal of affection. One expects and assumes affection from a family member, especially a parent. To receive instead the opposite is perhaps the ultimate human trauma.

Sigurd and Fafnir: Norse dragon.

We similarly have no definite warrant that Cordelia was abused before her sudden rejection at her marriage. Nor do we know that Dymphna was abused before adolescence. It is fairly apparent that Oedipus was not. But this does not matter. Each may only have been betrayed once, but the betrayal was total: their parents wanted them dead. It is this foundational betrayal that matters, not how often it is felt. It is this that breeds such monsters in the mind.

Aside from the great serpent, there is another striking image that runs through at least Greek mythology, in particular through the tales of heroes, that also seems to convey betrayal: Achilles’s heel.

Achilles's heel.

Proverbially, every hero has an “Achilles’s heel,” some secret weakness. Superman has his kryptonite. Baldur was vulnerable only to innocent mistletoe. Esfandiyār, in Persian legend, can be killed only by a shaft to the eyes. Siegfried is vulnerable only at a small spot on his back.

All these examples suggest, in various ways, an unexpected attack, something coming by surprise, perhaps from behind. But among Greek heroes, it is often quite literally their heel. About where a poisonous snake would strike. And an image, like the coils or the belly of the dragon, of immobility, “fixation.” Immobility may imply the disability of depression; it may imply as well perhaps submitting to total ownership by a narcissistic parent. Note that Medusa’s gaze, too, produces paralysis.

Achilles is not even the only hero of the Trojan War who proves vulnerable in his heel. There is also Philoctetes, who embarks with the Achaean armada, but, in Hygenus’s account, “on the island of Lemnos, a snake struck his foot. ... When the Achaeans could not endure the offensive odour of the wound, by Agamemnon’s order he was left on Lemnos together with the marvellous arrows. ...”

Later an oracle was given to them that Troy could not be taken without the arrows of Hercules. Then Agamemnon sent Ulysses and Diomede as scouts to visit him. They persuaded him to be reconciled and to help in attacking Troy, and took him off with them.xiii

He turns out, in the end, to be the indispensable man, the hero.

Jason and the dragon of the Golden Fleece.

Philoctetes on his desert island seems another landscape, like Dorothy’s Kansas and the like, of depression. Sophocles writes:

This man,—noble, perchance, as any scion of the noblest house,—reft of all life’s gifts, lies lonely, apart from his fellows, with the dappled or shaggy beasts of the field, piteous alike in his torments and his hunger, bearing anguish that finds no cure.xiv

He is also lame, paralysed, trapped within the circuit of his small island world. And this is so until he accepts his hero quest, and casts off for Troy.

Herakles too is attacked in the heel during his epic battle with the Lernean Hydra:

By pelting it with fiery shafts he forced it to come out, and in the act of doing so he seized and held it fast. But the hydra wound itself about one of his feet and clung to him. .... A huge crab also came to the help of the hydra by biting his foot.xv

The two monsters seemed to have something specific in mind.

Telephus’s heel is tripped up by a vine:

Telephus, being deeply upset by the death of his brother and seeking for vengeance, attacked the enemy line. Having put to flight those who opposed him, he was doggedly pursuing Ulysses in a vineyard nearby when a vine tripped him up. Thereupon Achilles who, from some distance, had seen what had happened, hurled his spear and pierced the king’s left thigh.xvi

—laming him.

Also famously lame in Greek mythology: Hephaestos, the inventor God, rejected by his mother and tossed off Olympus at birth. But his lameness comes because his legs were broken in a second fall: thrown off Olympus by his father Zeus for, like Tristan, defending his mother.xvii

Medeia and Talos.

In the Argonautica, Hephaestos’s creation, in turn, the bronze robot giant Talos, betrays a similar vulnerability. He has only one vein, that ends in a critical bolt on his ankle. Otherwise invulnerable, if you remove this bolt, his immortal ichor bleeds away. Talos is not a hero, but may be an image of a melancholic: living a purely mechanical life, confined to his island. He runs around the island three times daily, guarding against all comers; a reasonable image of both the melancholic craving solitude and of what we might call obsessive-compulsive behaviour. And in the Argonautica, he goes explicitly mad—psychotic. In this state, he kills himself by pulling out the fatal bolt.xviii

Oedipus, too, is wounded in the heel; his name, “Swell-foot,” makes this definitive of his nature. And the wounded heel represents, explicitly, as with Hephaestos, rejection by his parents. Just as his mother, if inadvertently, is responsible for Achilles’s vulnerable heel.

Chaining these similar images together, a wounded heel = an unexpected attack from behind, as from a snake = having been betrayed by your parents = being paralysed, immobilized. It is from this complex that the hero emerges, and this is a continuing vulnerability.

Cronus/Saturn spending quality time with the kid.

There is similar imagery found in the traditional figure of Cronus. Why does old Cronus/Saturn carry a sickle or scythe? Is it only because he is a harvest god? Granted, he castrated his father Uranus with a sickle; but why a sickle?

Cronus/Saturn

Klibansky et al cite a Medieval source observing that “the attribution to him of a sickle meant that he, like a sickle, could cause harm only by a backward movement.”xix His “quality of harmfulness,” a second source adds, was “especially prominent when he reversed his course, and this discovery again had found mythical expression in the image of his carrying a sickle.”xx His “sharp sickle destroys all that is lovely and bears blossom: he lets no roses or lilies flower, and cannot bear fructification.”xxi

A rather early harvest.

Dine in?

The sickle, in sum, seems one more image of the sneak attack; of malice coming from an unexpected quarter. Cronus attacks backwards, and from below, at the heel. And he attacks his children.

Death of Krishna

In India, Krishna too, in true Hellenic fashion, is slain by a poisoned arrow to the heel. Karna is stabbed from behind, while working on his carriage wheel. Siegfried too is stabbed in the back, while having a drink at a stream. Julius Caesar, by popular convention, was unexpectedly stabbed by his supposed friend Brutus. Yes, Brutus was one of many; and this may not have been a literal stab in the back; but this, we are reminded, was “the most unkindest cut of all”: the betrayal of expected affection. The Judas moment.

Herakles’s death by the shirt of Nessus is also an image of betrayal of expected affection. The shirt is a gift from his wife, supposedly inspired by love, and meant to inspire love.... but soaked in the hydra’s poison, the poison of the serpent, it torments him to death.

In sum, all these images of the dragon and the hero’s vulnerability point to a critical experience of emotional betrayal as the foundation to the hero’s character.


iMetamorphoses, Book 9, ll. 62-89, Kline trans.


iiGeorg Burckhardt, Das Gilgamesch-Epos - Eine Dichtung aus dem alten Orient. Potsdam: Rütten & Loening, 1991.


iii Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet 11, column 4.


ivOvid, Metamorphoses, Book 7, l. 130 or so.


vhttp://bestiary.ca/beasts/beast262.htm


viEtymologies, Book 12, 4:4-5.


viiCampbell, op. cit., p. 62; Jung, The Integration of the Personality, pp. 104-6.


viiiOvid, Metamorphoses, Book 4, ll. 794-800, A.S. Kline trans.


ixMetamorphoses, Book 4, ll. 620-625, Kline trans.


xFreud, "Medusa's Head," Writings on Art and Literature, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997, p.


xiIbid.


xiiMetamorphoses, ll. 801f.


xiiiHyginus, Fabulae, 102.


xiv Sophocles, Philoctetes.


xv Apollodorus, Library, 2.5.2.


xvi Dictys Cretensis, Journal of the Trojan War, 2:3.


xvii Graves, Greek Mythology, 1, p. 54.


xviiiApollonius, Argonautica, Book 4, l. 1638.


xixKlibansky, et al. Saturn and Melancholy, Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1964, p. 177.


xx Ibid., p. 181.




xxi Ibid., p. 185.

On the Twelfth Day of Christmas

Beyak Ejected from Conservative Caucus

Senator Lynn Beyak, the Ontario Senator who was thrown off the Senate aboriginal affairs committee last year for saying residential schools were not all bad, has now been tossed out of the Conservative caucus. Her offense this time was posting comments in her support that were, according to CPC leader Andrew Scheer, and a lot of other people, racist.

Scheer quotes one such comment, presumably the critical one leading to his decision:

"I'm no anthropologist but it seems every opportunistic culture, subsistence hunter/gatherers seeks to get what they can for no effort. There is always a clash between industrial/organized farming culture that values effort as opposed to a culture that will sit and wait until the government gives them stuff.”

Scheer says:

"Promoting this comment is offensive and unacceptable for a Conservative Parliamentarian. To suggest that indigenous Canadians are lazy compared to other Canadians, is simply racist. I demanded Senator Beyak remove this content from her website. She refused. As a result of her actions, the Conservative Senate Leader Larry Smith and I have removed Senator Lynn Beyak from the Conservative National Caucus.

Racism will not be tolerated in the Conservative Caucus or Conservative Party of Canada."

I can understand why Scheer might have felt he had to remove Beyak from caucus. Indians vote, and are entirely likely to feel insulted. Not to mention the widespread popular support they command. True or not, saying this was not good politics.

Moreover, it is not true. The commentator is wrong on the facts. Obviously, sitting back and relying on government cannot be an aspect of traditional hunter-gatherer culture—there is no government, in traditional hunter-gatherer culture. It is more or less every man, or every family, for himself; the very opposite of this.

But the more troubling thing is that Scheer calls this “racist.” That is profoundly irresponsible of him. This is a dangerous mischaracterization, and it shows why we have every reason to worry about the effects of the recent M-103 and proliferating similar measures. Too many any longer seem unable to understand the difference between race and culture. The author of the comment was criticizing Indian culture, not Indians as a race or as individuals. He even makes this clearer by adding, in the same comment,

“I'm not saying all of them are like that but right now the Canadian society guilt trip route to more money and power is golden and being opportunist they're grabbing all the hotel room towels and silver ware they can.”

Not all Indians, then, and it is due to the circumstance they are in—the culture.

If we cannot criticize culture, in the end, we cannot even object to racism. Some cultures are racist. We also cannot object to female genital mutilation, slavery, the beheading of unbelievers, wife beating, the immolation of widows, child sacrifice, or genocide. All are or have been established cultural practices somewhere. Some of them, indeed, among traditional Canadian “First Nations” groups.

Even more disturbing, Global TV editorializes, in its story on the matter,

“Global News reviewed the 103 ‘letters,’ some dated as recently as Oct. 4, 2017, and found that the majority — which do not include full names of the writers— contained what could be described as racist or anti-Indigenous sentiments.”

What you see quoted by Scheer above is in fact, as you would expect, the worst of the lot. I went to Beyak’s web page and read a large chunk of them myself. You can too. Almost all are simply expressing their agreement that the residential schools, while they certainly had failings, were not all bad. That is the real gist of the majority of the letters. To say this is now apparently “racist and anti-indigenous.”

Global quotes a few of the comments. We must presume they consider these the most racist of the lot:

“Do not back down, the Indians, First Nations or whatever they want to be called have milked this issue to their decided advantage,” 

“This mood will only grow with Justin Trudeau running around doing selfies with minority groups,” 

“The handouts have taken their people nowhere, and their constant backward-looking mentality serves no useful purpose. Aboriginals seem to be well schooled in getting media pity and they have become very good at getting media coverage.” 

“To expect the Canadian government to continue to subsidize a culture which is often damaging to new generations of Indigenous youth, is just bizarre.”

These are surely simply reasonable disagreements among taxpayers regarding the disposition of public funds. In a democracy, it is necessary to be able to have such discussions. To tar any such comments as “racism” is simply a way to avoid addressing the argument. After all, the last two clearly express sympathy for aboriginals.

Charlie Angus has demanded that, for hosting such thought, Beyak should be thrown out of the Senate. “These are not letters from constituents or an open dialogue on ideas," he writes. "These letters are promoting an insidious negation of the lives, culture, rights and place of Indigenous people living in Canada."

Typically of one who is about to tell a terrible howler, he begins by denying they are what they obviously are: letters from constituents, and an open dialogue on ideas. This is insidious Orwellian newspeak: war is peace, freedom is slavery, and race hate, discrimination, and apartheid is “reconciliation.”

Saskatchewan “independent” (i.e., formerly Liberal) Senator Lillian Dyck has called for Beyak to be prosecuted for a “hate crime.” "Maybe someone should consider laying a charge of hate speech against her because she is using her public website in a way against an identifiable group that might be considered inciting hatred."

This is fantastically dangerous: this is pretty much exactly why we need laws protecting free speech. Allow censorship of views relevant to the current public debate, and democratic government is no longer possible. The public can no longer make informed decisions. Such freedom of speech is especially necessary to parliamentarians; which is why not even libel laws apply in parliament.

We are sailing close to the rocks here.

Dyck complained to The Walrus that, if the same claims were made against, for example, the Jewish community, it “wouldn’t be tolerated.”

I’m not sure that is the issue. Isn’t the problem instead that if the same claims were made against the Jewish culture, it would sound absurd?

Let’s try:

"I'm no anthropologist but it seems Jewish culture seeks to get what they can for no effort. There is always a clash between culture that values effort as opposed to a culture that will sit and wait until the government gives them stuff.”

The thought is simply ludicrous. Jews sitting and waiting, doing nothing for themselves, expecting the government to give them things? Jews getting special favours from the government? Say it, and you do not sound racist: you sound unhinged.

I think Senator Dyck is demonstrating the opposite of what she thinks she is demonstrating.

It is hard to come up with an obvious parallel, since the original terms are so broad: industrial/settled farming culture, on the one side, and hunter-gatherer cultures, on the other. What is left outside the original parameters to compare them with?

But one rough recent parallel does occur: the crisis with the Greek economic insolvency and the Euro. Let’s try it, then:

"I'm no anthropologist but it seems Greek culture seeks to get what they can for no effort. There is a clash between German culture, which values effort, and a culture that will sit and wait until the government gives them stuff.”

Yep, that works. That was said, more or less, and there was no public uproar or charge of racism.

Similar things are said in Canada about the Maritimes. Stephen Harper once said something like this. It did not play well in the Maritimes, but nobody called him racist. And Pierre Trudeau once said it about the West, more or less: “Why should I sell your wheat?”

Sauce for the Canada goose is sauce for the Canada gander.

The Red Green Show

As is long overdue, we seem to be seeing a falling out between Canadian First Nations and the ecology corps.

The general public has long imagined that First Nations opposition to development near their lands had to do with a concern for the environment. Silly rabbits. It has nothing to do with the environment. It has to do with wanting a payout. Claiming concern for the environment is only a means to this end.

Accordingly, the First Nations and the environmentalists are ultimately working at cross purposes. If a project is actually cancelled, as the ecological advocates generally prefer, it is a disaster for the Indians. They get nothing: no payout, and no jobs.

But they are really acting at cross purposes well before that. The more money the developer needs to spend to meet environmental regulations, the less it has to hand over to the nearby band leadership, while still keeping the project viable and big enough to provide the maximum jobs.

And so we begin to hear the grumbling. Projects are being cancelled!

A Canadian Christmas Essential

The Huron Carol.

Christmas Is Not Complete

... without this one.

Fifty Million Frenchmen Can Be Wrong

Ravana: The Many.

A depressed friend recently explained that he is told by his family that he was always the problem child growing up. He concludes that this must be true: “if there are seven people in the family and they all, except for me, have this recollection of how things went down, then there must be something to it. Kind of like, you could discount the first, second, or third woman who accused Bill Cosby of sexual misconduct, but when the tally is 38, well then you have to figure what they have to say has some merit to it.”

There it is: the one against the many. The abused child must always deal with a hostile social consensus.

Yet today he is the gentlest, least aggressive person one could imagine. One can only assume he always was; such traits, if basic, are not likely to change.

His logic is wrong here; but it is a logic on which much abuse is founded and made possible. To begin with, it is the “ad populum” fallacy. Truth is not decided or found by majority vote. This is a bit hard to accept when you were raised in a democracy, in which the majority is extolled as having some kind of mystical wisdom: “The people are always right.” We grow up in a cult of the majority.

Yet the majority is no more likely to be right than a minority of one. If five hundred people believe something, or 75% of the people in a group believe something, that is no more compelling than if one random person believes it; because the difference is only in number. To put it in mathematical terms, 500 times an unknown quantity is still an unknown quantity. If there is no other reason to believe that a group has some special wisdom, then there is no reason to believe that 75% of them have some special wisdom.

Majorities are often demonstrably wrong: this is what has happened when you see an investment “bubble,” for example. They form and burst because a large majority has come to some false conclusion, which then collides with the facts. Really successful investors always invest against the majority view. You buy properties because the majority has undervalued them, and is selling too low; you sell because the majority has overvalued them, and is buying too high. Believe the majority is always right, and you get and stay relatively poor.

So too in any other field. Accept the majority view, the consensus, and you are at a dead stall. Nothing new can be created. There is no development.

Granted, if it is purely a question of fact rather than a belief or opinion that you need to consider, then the more eyewitnesses you have, the stronger the case that it is so. Five people seeing a crime committed are better evidence than one person. Such evidence is still not terribly strong, however, as psychologists will tell you. We use eyewitness testimony in court mostly because we have nothing better; this does not mean it is very reliable. A Roper Poll in 1991 estimated that about 4 million people in the US believe they have been abducted by aliens. A lot of people have spotted Elvis alive in recent decades. These would seem to be fairly factual claims. Yet I am not prepared to take their word for it. Are you?

And even for a question of fact, there is a second important consideration. My friend thinks of the Cosby accusers. As of this writing, their claims have not been properly evaluated in court. But how about the accusers of Jian Ghomeshi? Six women accused him of similar sexual offenses. Their stories, as reported in the press, seemed to tally. But he was acquitted. Largely because it turned out they had been in communication about the matter. Because of this, they could have constructed a joint fiction. As any group is naturally inclined to do.

A family is such a group. Families are in daily communication, in daily collusion, in just such a way. They can and always do construct their fictional little worlds, as spontaneously as a spider spins its web.

This is no doubt why Nietzsche said “Madness is rare in individuals--but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.” It is difficult for a solitary individual to convince himself that wrong is right, or that he is Napoleon. It is much easier for a group, who have one another to support the claim. If everyone around you tells you you are Napoleon every day, it becomes much easier to believe.

It is a prime characteristic of a dysfunctional family that it creates, within itself, a complex fictitious world. In the classic case, it is all built around denial of the harm done by the alcoholism of an alcoholic parent. As a matter of course, if there is parental abuse, there will be a general denial that parental abuse has occurred.

The same is easily seen in nations, if to a much lesser extent. Ask any Canadian, and they will probably tell you that Canada won the War of 1812, and burned down the White House in Washington in the bargain. Both of these claims would probably be considered plain nuts on the streets in the US. And they are not, objectively, true. In China, I was at first taken aback to learn that the Chinese all understand that they won the Korean War. It had never occurred to me that the UN and US had lost it. We won. Yet, really, either claim is about equally defensible. Korea is full of such popular delusions. If anything goes wrong in Korea, it must be the fault of foreigners, and most often the Japanese. In Canada, of course, everything is the fault of the Americans.

All groups do this, to a greater or lesser extent, to the extent that they are dysfunctional; less so if they are fundamentally healthy and moral. One of the classic delusions, almost the essential one, is the designation of a scapegoat. The scapegoat preserves group solidarity; the group is virtually defined in opposition to the scapegoat, and the more immoral and delusional the group, the fiercer will be the need for and treatment of, the scapegoat. Consider Emmanuel Goldstein, in Orwell’s 1984: group solidarity was built around the ritual of the “Two Minute Hate.”

Or consider the Jews in Nazi Germany.

The scapegoating becomes more intense the more dysfunctional the group is; for the more delusional and immoral it is, the more desperate its need for group solidarity to support the growing web of lies. And the more dysfunctional the group, the greater the fear and real danger involved in stepping out of line of the social consensus.

Renounce the scapegoating, and you lose your membership in the group. And set yourself up to become another scapegoat.

In the case of a family, membership in the group can be a huge proportion of their self-identity. The more dysfunctional the family, the more clannish it will become, in its desperate need for solidarity, and so the more each member's self-identity becomes wrapped up in group membership. It is a vicious circle of abuse.

Accordingly, the abused child, who has been scapegoated by his or her own family, requires true heroism. If he or she is to survive.

In the Bleak Midwinter

L'Esprit de Montreal

HOPPY NEW BEER!

Irish and Classic

"Celtic Woman."

Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring.

The One and the Many

Moreau: The Lernean Hydra

It is characteristic of the hero that, sooner or later in his career, he must stand alone against all comers.

As Ovid describes Perseusʼs moment, at his wedding feast, “Phineus and a thousand followers of Phineus, surround the one man. Spears to the right of him, spears to the left of him, fly thicker than winter hail, past his eyes and ears. He sets his back and shoulders against a massive stone column, and protected behind, turns towards the opposing crowd of men, and withstands their threat.”i

Telephus holds off the assembled forces of the Greeks, the same armada that later conquers Troy; he “turned the valiant Danaoi to flight, and drove them into the sterns of their sea-ships,” says Pindar.ii And he rejects the calls of his countrymen to join them in that campaign, continuing to stand apart. Oedipus, if he can be taken as a hero, defeats a force of five mounted men, alone, at the Phokis crossroads.

Jason must defeat an autochthonic army that appears after he sows the dragonʼs teeth: “earthborn men were springing up over all the field; .... And as when abundant snow has fallen on the earth and the storm blasts have dispersed the wintry clouds under the murky night, and all the hosts of the stars appear shining through the gloom; so did those warriors shine springing up above the earth.”iii

Herakles achieves many similar feats. He defeats the Minyans “almost single-handedly.”iv He storms Troy at the head of “only six small craft and scanty forces.”v He holds off the Amazon army, killing each of their leaders. He defeats “hosts of four-legged centaurs.”vi The Lernean Hydraʼs multiple heads seem another image of multitude: “the hydra, that monster with a ring of heads with power to grow again.”vii “Of its fearful heads some severed lay on earth, but many more were budding from its necks,” writes Quintus Smyrnaeus.viii Some say the Hydra had nine heads; some say a hundred.

Being multiple in form seems a standard feature of Herakles’s opponents: “Typhons triple-bodied,” Cerberus, “the three-headed hound, hell’s porter.”ix Geryon has three heads; his watchdog Orthus has two heads. Ladon, guardian of the apples of the Hesperides, is “an immortal dragon with a hundred heads,... which spoke with many and divers sorts of voices.”x

Ravana.

So too, it seems, with Rama’s great adversary, Ravana: he has ten heads and many arms. Karna conquers a more literal multitude, the entire world, in the name of his friend Duryodhana. Alexander, of course, by tradition, does something rather similar. Moses, less dramatically, must repeatedly struggle against the popular consensus of the Hebrews, who continually turn on him as they wander in the desert. In the end, he does literal battle, and with a small minority of Levites, cuts the majority down (Exodus 32:27-30).

In Hamlet, our hero finds himself alone on a pirate ship, facing the entire crew: “in the grapple I boarded them: on the instant they got clear of our ship; so I alone became their prisoner” (Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 6). But he somehow, miraculously, achieves his freedom. In the more heroic original legend upon which Shakespeare based his play, Amleth holds off the assembled might of England almost alone with a bogus army of the dead.xi Even in King Lear, the abused heroine, Cordelia, is a solitary figure, even her husband absent for the action of the play, while the abusers, Regan and Goneril, are multiple. Lear is stripped of all his retainers but Kent and the fool. Dymphna must face the assembled army of Damon’s kingdom Oriel, with only old Father Gerberus at her side.

Churchill, a modern hero, and a depressive, stood famously against the consensus of his day in resisting Hitler, “a lone voice in the wilderness.”

Even Don Quixote, in his quest to be a proper hero, must engage alone against an army of giants:

Just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain. And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, “Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless.”xii

Don Quixote does battle: Dore

Many folk heroes are outlaws, who operate in defiance of the government, the social order, of their day: Robin Hood, the 108 Heroes of the Water Margin of Chinese legend, Zorro, the Scarlet Pimpernel.

This motif of one against many seems to reflect a characteristic we have seen in the depressed. Solitude is definitive, Robert Burton suggests, of the spiritual zone the melancholic inhabits. “Above all things they love solitariness.”xiii Diderot too cites “a firm penchant for solitude” as one of the chief features of melancholy.xiv The melancholic is a loner.

The hero type, it would seem, intensifies this characteristic. The merely depressed removes himself from the social whirl. The hero attacks it, rapier drawn.

According to Adult Children of Alcoholics, the second sign that you have been raised in a dysfunctional family is “We became approval seekers and lost our identity in the process.” Number seven is “We get guilt feelings when we stand up for ourselves instead of giving in to others.” Number twelve is “We are dependent personalities who are terrified of abandonment and will do anything to hold on to a relationship in order not to experience painful abandonment feelings.”xv

At first glance, this seems to contradict both conventional wisdom about the melancholic, and the hero legends. It paints the abused child as a compulsive crowd-pleaser.

But it may, instead, point out the reason why the depressed crave solitude, and why the hero stands alone in defiance.

The family is our first society; it is the introduction for each of us to social life, and all social life in microcosm. In the words of the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

The family is the original cell of social life. ... Authority, stability, and a life of relationships within the family constitute the foundations for freedom, security, and fraternity within society. The family is the community in which, from childhood, one can learn moral values, begin to honor God, and make good use of freedom. Family life is an initiation into life in society. (para. 2207).

In the case of an abused child, however, this original society is corrupt: his or her family is “dysfunctional.” It teaches all the wrong lessons. What then?

He must, then, fight against it if he (or she) is ever to grow out of his abused state; just as he must solve the riddle of the double-bind of filial duty. This will require heroic courage: the courage of High Noon. For, as the ACA “Laundry List” suggests, the more spontaneous response is to keep trying harder to seek an approval that will never come. Trapping you in another double-bind.

This illustrates the depth of the challenge faced by the abused depressive; and the degree to which he or she manages to overcome this perhaps marks the division between the ordinary depressed and the heroic. This is indeed what ACA advises in their “recovery” program. Seeking solitude or exile is the first sign of health. Rebelling against the corrupt social consensus is the ultimate victory.

However, this developed ability, if it is ever developed, to think for himself or herself, working only from first principles, would then serve the melancholic well for any enterprise requiring creativity or coming up with novel thoughts; for being a culture hero, an artist, or a leader of any sort; for becoming an explorer, a discoverer. See Burton’s armillary sphere and cross staff, used as personal emblems.

To become a hero, the abused must fight this great battle against the many-headed monster of social consensus, which is poisoning the landscape all about them.

And it is the abused child, specifically, who is called to this by circumstance.

iOvid, Metamorphoses, Book 5, ll.149-199. Mary Innis, trans.


iiPindar, Olympian Odes, 9. Myers trans.


iiiApollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica, Book 2, ll. 1340-1407.


ivRobert Graves, The Greek Myths, vol. 2, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Pelican, 1955, “Erginus,” entry 121.


vGraves, op. cit., “Hesione,” entry 137.


viEuripides, Herakles.


viiEuripides, Herakles.


viiiFall of Troy 6. 212 ff. Way trans.


ixEuripides, Herakles, Coleridge trans.


xApollodorus, Library, 2.5.11 Frazer trans.


xiSaxo Grammaticus, “Amleth, Prince of Denmark,” Gesta Danorum, D.L. Ashliman, trans.


xii Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part 1, Chapter VIII.


xiiiAnatomy of Melancholy, Part 1, Section 3, Memb. 1, Subsect. 2.


xivDiderot, Melancholie, Vol. 10, 1765, pp. 308–311.




xv“The Laundry List: 14 Traits of an Adult Child of an Alcoholic,” ACA.