the fucked up and unhealthy nature of greek myths is a feature, not a bug. if you’re going to engage with greek myths you need to be prepared to engage with fucked up narratives at face value. send post
… to elaborate, since the myth of Atreus and Thyestes is fucked up even for the standards of Greek mythology:
The Greeks had watched their world collapse, and the trauma had changed them… by the ninth century, Greek religion was pessimistic and uncanny, its gods dangerous, cruel, and arbitrary… Their rituals and myths would always hint at the unspeakable and the forbidden, at horrible events happening offstage, just out of sight, and usually at night. They experienced the sacred in catastrophe, when life was turned inexplicably upside down, in the breaking of taboos, and when the boundaries that kept society and individuals sane were suddenly torn asunder.
– Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation, 2007, ch. 2 (source)
(CW: everything. No, really, though)
The First Generation: Tantalus
There once was a king – Tantalus, king of Lydia or Phrygia or some other exotic eastern region, where such stories tend to begin. Descendant of gods himself, he was in very good standing with the Olympians, who often came down to feast in his palace, and sometimes even invited him to feed on ambrosia in the halls of the Olympus.
Depending on the version, he either wanted to test the omniscience of the gods by doing something unpredictable (great idea! When has that ever gone wrong?) or, more charitably, loved them so much that he wanted to offer them the most precious thing he had. Either way, Tantalus finds that the most reasonable thing to do in his situation is to kill his firstborn son, the infant Pelops, chop his body apart, and boil it with the meat of lambs and bulls.
Whether he meant to fool or flatter the gods, he failed. All the Olympians stared in silent horror at their plate. Then, with a terrifying thunderclap, Zeus stood up, overturned the whole table (just like he did at another cannibal dinner, by the cruel king of Arcadia Lycaon, whom he turned into a wolf) and cast Tantalus down into the Tartarus, the bad part of the underworld. (Remember that Zeus had just barely escaped being eaten as a child by his father Cronus. Child-eating was… a touchy subject for him.)
For the rest of eternity, Tantalus would stand navel-deep into a freshwater pond surrounded by fruit-bearing branches, forever tormented by thirst and hunger, as the water would vanish if he tried to drink, and the branches would curl away if he tried to eat. (This is where we got the word “tantalizing” from.)
The gods channeled their power and brought little Pelops back to life. Of course, none of them had touched his flesh… except the grain goddess Demetra, who was a bit distracted by the fact that his daughter Persephone had just been kidnapped by Hades, and so she had chewn on Pelops’ shoulder without noticing, as you do. No worries; Demetra made a brand new magical ivory shoulder for him that worked just as well as the flesh one. In fact, they did such a good job at restoring the child’s body, that Poseidon immediately took him under the sea as a lover, because this is still ancient Greece.
(Another child of Tantalus was Niobe, who once boasted to Leto that her own children were more numerous and more beautiful than Leto’s. However, Leto’s children by Zeus happened to be Apollo and Artemis, who picked up bow and arrows and slaughtered all of Niobe’s offspring.)
Unfortunately, the way the Greeks saw it, evil unnatural actions such as, say, killing and cooking your own children, had a way to turn to miasma, a cursed state that spread like a disease, infecting and corrupting everyone it touched, even if they had no blame for the original crime. This will have consequences.
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