by Veronika | Filed Under Articles, Muse Lore
Part 2 of our essay on fantasical, mythological, and supernatural Muses
Sudden, Mythical Metamorphoses
In this first section I would like to consider the sudden transformations we see so many of in Greek and Roman mythology, captured so well in ancient classical texts like Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as well as in some more modern fairy tales. In these stories, abrupt transmutations sometimes serve as a pleasant surprise from a god or goddess – a prayer answered by those fickle deities. As we are discussing muses, it seems fitting to start with the story of Pygmalion and Galatea.
Pygmalion was the man whose muse was his sculpture, and whose sculpture came to life. Perhaps not everyone can relate. However, for this man, a master sculptor who, despite being the King of Cyprus with many women who would happily serve him as wife or lover, only sculpture could interest him. Toiling relentlessly on a sculpture of ivory of a woman he named Galatea, he finally finished his work, only to realize he had fallen in love with his statue. Day and night he caressed her cold, perfect body, and could think of nothing else.
Half-mad with his impossible desire, he visited Aphrodite’s temple and prayed to her to give him a wife who was just like his sculpture. In some versions of the story Aphrodite, curious at this bizarre request, visits Pygmalion and makes his real but unspoken wish (that the sculpture itself be his wife) come true because she is flattered, thinking the statue bears a resemblance to her. In others she is simply in a good mood when he makes his supplication to her, and when he arrives home and plants a kiss on the so-lifelike mouth of his ivory dreamgirl, he feels warmth, and lips kissing back. Pygmalion and his Galatea were soon married and lived, as we might as well say before moving on to some sadder tales, happily ever after.
However, often these precipitant transfigurations are not festive events, but the only means of escape. One of the most famous instances of this is the maiden Daphne’s transformation into a tree. Apollo had already seen her and was giving fierce chase, sped on by youth and lust. A follower of Diana, Daphne was chaste and feared for her maidenhood, so she cried out to the gods to save her. “O father, help me! If you rivers really have divine powers, work some transformation, and destroy this beauty which makes me please all too well!” In response to her entreaty, Ovid writes, “a deep languor took hold on her limbs, her soft breast was enclosed in thin bark, her hair grew into leaves, her arms into branches, and her feet that were lately so swift were held fast by sluggish roots, while her face became the treetop, Nothing of her was left, except her shining loveliness.” Even as a tree, Apollo swears to love and honor her, and she becomes a dryad in the form of a laurel tree; and even as a tree, her description – the “deep languor,” the “shining loveliness” – is captivating.
There is something particularly poignant about these once fleet-footed maidens, such as Daphne was, being trapped in unyielding bark. Like the dancer, who has freedom on the stage, she inspires a longing to possess her that is at odds with what supposedly makes her so seductive: her freedom of movement. The devotees of Diana roamed the forest with a liberation similar to that which the dancing girl and the courtesan had, except they theoretically didn’t have to pay the price of sleeping with men to achieve it. But in reality they had to be on their guard, for hormones do not sleep. And just as we populate our music boxes with miniature, domesticated ballerinas, so too these misguided men like Apollo do the very last thing they would ultimately want to do, were they thinking straight: they trap their majestic ladies in the bark of dignified but immobile trees, thereby losing them forever.
Another example of insta-tree-turning can be found in the fate of Phaeton’s daughters. After Phaeton, the son of the sun, had been punished for his hubris after trying to drive his father’s chariot, with that very chariot crashing into the river Eridanos, his wife, daughters, and son mourned him incessantly.
Four months had passed since his death-crash, during which the rest of Phaeton’s devoted family visited his tomb and threw their bodies against it in agony every single day. Finally, one day something changed, and “the sisters, as was their habit. . .were mourning, when Phaethusa, the eldest of them, as she tried to fling herself upon the ground, complained that she could not move her feet. Fair Lampetie would have gone to her assistance, but she was held fast by roots which had suddenly formed. A third made to tear her hair, and plucked out leaves. One cried out that her legs were caught in the grip of a tree trunk, another was indignant to find her arms had become branches.”
Even as his mother tried to save her children, her weeping daughters suddenly informed her she was in fact hurting them, as their unexpected transformations were already irreversible: ” ‘Oh mother, please don’t hurt me!’ was the cry of whichever girl she touched. ‘Do not hurt me, please! It is my body which you are injuring, though it has been transformed into a tree. . .farewell!’ The bark closed over the last words, and from that bark there flowed tears which, hardened into amber by the sun, dropped from the new-made branches and were received by the shining river. It bore them off in its waters, to be an ornament one day for Roman brides.” And thus, the daughters of Phaeton were turned to poplars, their tears to bejewel the rich, the powerful, and those mortals celebrating special occasions like love.
In both the case of Daphne and of Phaeton’s sisters, they were transformed for either love of chastity or a chaste, filial love. The case of Salmacis, however, is quite different. The only one of the naiads not among Diana’s party, Salmacis instead spent her days luxuriating in her own loveliness, brushing her tresses and bathing her incomparable limbs. That is, until she spied Hermaphroditus, and subsequently inverted the motif so often seen in The Metamorphoses: instead of a god or god-like male (for instance, Zeus) raping a nymph or mortal, here is the only instance where a nymph turns the tables and won’t take no for an answer. Picking flowers one day, she spots the delectable Hermaphroditis, offspring of Mercury and the goddess Venus, whose features betrayed a very comely connection to both. She tried to win him over with kisses and flattery, but he was shy, and blushing, tried to run away. Finally the wily Salmacis hid in some bushes, while the innocent boy, thinking he had gotten rid of his earnest suitor, stripped naked and dipped into a pool. Thinking she had him trapped there, Salmacis dove into the pool in triumph, coiling her arms and legs around him: “She was like the ivy encircling tall tree trunks.” Though the youthful boy struggled against her, she called out to the gods, “may not time to come ever separate him from me, or me from him!” And with this prayer their bodies became united “as when a gardener grafts a branch on to a tree” – that is, like vines.
Apart from entwining themselves with the object of their affection, lustful, determined females in the ancient stories also turned men into creatures whom they felt more befitting to their bestial natures. Most of us know the story of Circe from Homer’s Odyssey. The daughter of the sun/Helios, Circe used her charm to trap mortal men on her seemingly god-sent island of hospitality and comforts. There lost or shipwrecked travelers would gorge themselves on her food until they were changed into pigs. Odysseus escaped this fate, however, because he was warned of the consequences of eating her food by Eurylochus, his second-in-command. Because she was such a powerful witch, with a knowledge of magic potions that could turn any man into an animal, when Circe saw that Odysseus remained a man, she was so impressed by what she thought to be his powers that she fell in love with him. They became lovers, as the bewitcher became the bewitched, and he remained on her island for years, entreating her help when he finally left toward home, which she granted him.
A similar story of the woman-demon who turns men into animals is told in a famous Japanese tale, except without such a happy ending. Izumi Kyoka, known for writing eerie tales that harkened back to traditional ghost stories, penned in 1900 what was to become his most famous short story: “The Monk of Mount Koya.” In its depiction of a sensual, beautiful woman with the ability to seduce a man with her womanly charms, while her even deeper potency lay in her inimitable, unfailing knowledge of the black arts – namely, her ability to change a man into any form she wishes – the story’s “heroine” bears a striking resemblance to Circe. As with many Japanese ghost stories, the tale is told in flashback, and its events occurred to a traveler while he was in an unfamiliar environment. Stranded at an unknown, rural train station, and after a ghastly fight through a dark forest full of blood-sucking leeches, the monk of the story comes upon a luminous woman in an otherwise deserted countryside, who offers him shelter for the night.
Despite her warmth – or perhaps because of it – the monk is slightly wary of the woman; he is also nonplussed by the way she talks to the animals who are the only other residents, besides a small “idiot” boy, of her rustic hut in the middle of the woods: “Just then a small rodent-like creature appeared and leaped from the riverbank straight onto the woman’s back. It clung to her hips and twined itself around the lower part of her body. ‘Get away from me, you beast,’ she cried angrily, ‘Can’t you see I have a guest with me? Your behavior is outrageous.’” Later, while he is trying to sleep, he is further alarmed by the unusual behavior of the animals on her property: “and so it went on, as groups of animals continued to surround and assault the house. All told, I could hear perhaps twenty or thirty of them with their ragged, rasping breath and frantically beating wings. It was like a scene from one of those painted screens that depicts the sufferings of animals in Hell. In the light of the moon I could see the silhouettes of ghastly figures cavorting and dancing across the front door of the house. I wondered what sort of evil spirits they were, for in their frenzy they sounded like fallen leaves restlessly fluttering in the wind.”
In the morning he learns the truth from the so-called “idiot”: the mistress of the house was once a great healer, who some years ago began to use her power for evil. So strong were her supernatural arts that she only had to brush up against a man to change him into whichever animal she wished. Because the priest had been so careful, because of his vows of chastity, to avoid touching her, he escaped her dark magic and consequent transmogrification.
Such tales of a beautiful woman in lone surroundings who is part-demon (or sometimes half of a specific animal, most often part-snake or part-fox) are common in Japanese literature; but the fact that this tale is told both in ancient Greek mythology, with Circe, and modern Japanese literature, based on Japanese folk tales, is significant. It shows us that this figure of the solitary woman with the power to charm men – and specifically, to turn them into mindless beasts – was one that caught the imagination of writers from places and times as diverse as one could find written records for. For part of the reason for this, we need look no farther than the reason (or lack thereof) for the Salem witch trials: in that unfortunate historical event, many women suffered simply because they lived alone and knew “healing arts.” They lived on the peripheries of the community, they studied things like midwifery and other simple medicine, and basically, in their solitary lifestyles, posed a threat to patriarchy.
Furthermore, the fact that both Circe and the woman in Kyoka’s story turn their men into beasts speaks to a subliminal fear of sexuality, and the loss of control to women. Honore de Balzac, one of the sharpest observers of all members of 19th century French society, including the courtesan, wrote in his Splendors and Miseries of the Courtesans that Esther, the reigning courtesan of Paris, had achieved that status because of her exquisite handling of the male animal. He writes of her, “She holds a magic wand with which she unlooses the brutish appetites so violently curbed in men not without heart who are occupied in politics or science, literature or art. There is no woman in Paris who can so effectively say to the Animal: ‘Out!. . .’ And the Animal trots from its kennel, and it wallows in excesses.” Just as men needed a courtesan like Esther to help mediate their transformation from “respectable citizen” to “wild beast,” even in a society that allowed for courtesans, so there has always been and probably always will be conflict within men’s hearts toward repressing the animal locked within “its kennel” and “wallowing in excesses.” Thus, there will always be stories about Circe and the lady of “The Monk of Mount Koya” – muses and demon-women at once, but only because men need there to be.
From the other point of view, one of the most famous demon women to helplessly undergo a violent, operatic transformation into this state (like the men in the stories above), is well-known to us thousands of years later for her hair of snakes, but the classics disagree on Medusa’s punisher, the reason for her punishment, and her original appearance and morality (good or monstrous). One tale tells that she was a horrid beast to behold even before her metamorphosis; later revisions make her more sympathetic and tragic a figure by bestowing upon her a beauty of which to be robbed. In the former story, Medusa is the only mortal of a three-headed winged beast, so Perseus is dispatched to kill her, and from her decapitated head springs the winged horse Pegasus and the giant Khrysaor.
In the latter tales, a common theme is Athena’s jealousy for Medusa’s beauty. Poseidon, having raped Medusa in Athena’s temple, enraged the goddess to a storm-pitch, but the maelstrom fell on Medusa, naturally, not Athena’s fellow god. So out of revenge the goddess turned Medusa’s matchless tresses to serpents, and made her face such a horror that looking upon it would turn men to stone.
Women with powerful spells, charms, and punishments aside, many sudden metamorphoses, particularly in Ovid, occur when Zeus himself takes the form of another creature to try to trick his fiercely jealous wife Juno into thinking he’s not philandering again. Perhaps the most ingenious – and in visual representation, most unexpectedly sensuous – of his masquerades turns out to be when he visits Danae in a shower ofgold, to impregnate her with Perseus. Gustav Klimt’s painting of this visitation in particular (as seen above) shows a maiden in a very private moment which, even while basically depicting a rape, hints at some measure of secret pleasure, as if Danae is experiencing something, the surprise of her own sexuality, for the first time. It is as if she has discovered how to pleasure herself in a dream.
More violent but ultimately, somehow nurturing, is another popular transformation of Zeus, into the swan in whose guise he couples with Leda. This is a more complex intercourse, in which the maiden covers for the swan, as if he were already the baby they will produce. And then there is the veneer of vulnerability logistics add to this liaison: Zeus, as the swan, falls into Leda’s arms and asks for protection from a pursuing eagle. Swans are strong animals, with very powerful wings, but it is nevertheless hard not to see him as needing mothering in this set-up, even if it is only a ruse.
That night Leda lays with both her long-necked visitor and her husband, King Tyndareus, resulting in two eggs, from which hatched Helen (later Helen of Troy), Clytemnestra, and Castor and Pollux. This particular myth became extremely popular among the visual arts and later the poetic arts, perhaps because in many versions, Leda seems more complicit than many of Zeus’ other maiden-victims. That is, she first acts maternal toward the swan, and then she nurtures the egg, in one version of the myth keeping one egg hidden in a chest so her husband will not wonder about or harm it. In the paintings and poetry, it is almost as if the seducer has found peace, just for a moment; especially in the paintings, the feathered Zeus suckles at the breast of Leda more like a child than a scheming, would-be rapist. Even the first two stanzas of William Butler Yeats’ famous poem, “Leda and the Swan,” which sketch out a more brutal meeting between swan and unsuspecting wife than the paintings suggest, give something away in the second stanza:
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill.
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
How can those terrified
And how can we but read this as a testament to Leda’s fascination – part motherly, part loverly – with Zeus-as-swan, loosening her thighs for his “feathered glory”? It is her openness and curiosity, perhaps, that makes this myth so enduring. And above all, whose “strange heart [is] beating”? And why is it “strange”? There is something about this metamorphosis that holds a mystery, terror, and wonder above most if not all of the other unions between Zeus and mortals described in Ovid, as if Leda as well as Zeus-as-Swan were becoming a new creature, without the cumbersome party favors of new appendages; and feeling her way through the dark feather-softness of transformation.
Of course, ancient myths record metamorphoses that were catalyzed by lust, platonic love/mourning, unrequited love, this strange half-rape/half-nurturing love between Zeus-the-swan and Leda, and even by ravagers looking to cover up their crime. In a reverse of Arachne’s story, in which the master spinner was unwise enough to show off her superior weaving talent and show up a goddess (Minerva), who punished her impudence by turning her into a spider, so she could spin and weave all day, there is also a famous myth in which weaving was used to save someone – at least, to bring about well-deserved revenge.
Tereus of Thrace was wedded to Prokne, one of the two daughters of Pandion, but not satisfied with one lady, he decided to rape her sister Philomena, who was even richer in her beauty, as well, and then tear out her tongue so she could not reveal his terrible crime. Resourceful Philomena, however, embroidered the details of her assault and her mutilation on a piece of tapestry, and sent it to her sister, who had been told that Philomena was dead.
As soon as the two sisters understood each other, the two of them plotted and carried out a horrid but just revenge: they killed Tereus’ son, Itys, and placed his flesh before the unsuspecting king as a dish. Once he realized – too late – what he had eaten, Tereus drew his sword to pursue the two sisters, at which time they were saved by the gods, and instantly turned into creatures of flight: Philomena became a nightingale (her voice restored in the nightingale’s song), Prokne a swallow, and Tereus, for his part, was changed into a lapwing. (Many details from this myth later appear in Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus.”)
As the centuries passed, people relied on fairy tales as much as or more than ancient Greek myths, which receded into a more and more distant past, to entertain themselves and their children, but the theme of abrupt metamorphosis was not abandoned. Indeed, even in modern retellings of fairy tales from the Grimms’ brothers, Perrault, or Hans Christian Andersen, that motif is stronger than ever. But the King of fairy tales involving sudden transformations, judged on any scale, has got to be “Beauty and the Beast.” As much as any of the dues ex machina transformations found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, such as Daphne’s salvation, the climax of this tale rests on the beast’s restoration to his human, princely form, and Beauty’s abrupt, simultaneous realization that she has fallen in love with the beast despite his looks.
While it was first published in 1740, because of its themes of valuing inner beauty, loyalty to one’s father, and the blindness which often impairs our self-awareness, as well as the many magical renderings the tale has received, “Beauty and the Beast” never goes out of style. Not least among these renditions are two very different but equally delightful film treatments: Disney’s animated musical from 1991, and Jean Cocteau’s lo-tech version from 1946, which nevertheless offers “special effects” (or magic?) like candelabras that light themselves and tears that turn to diamonds. Such touches remind us of fairy tales’ power to enchant and are another reason why “Beauty and the Beast” remains one of the most beloved tales of sudden metamorphosis: it brings with it a welcome booster shot of childhood wonder, and with it a reminder of the love that can go with it, and how once vanity and ego have been vanquished, anything is possible. And oh yes – one thing an adult can teach the child vis a vis this tale: when two people want to love each other as adults, the true terrors of trusting one another – because not to go out on a limb here, but the beast just might be a symbol for sexuality – must be faced before the magic mirror reflects happiness back to us.
I think there is something that touches us, too, in the fearsome beast, whom we think, at the beginning of the tale, is an abhorrent monster, because he is going to kill Belle’s father, or Belle in his place, simply because in her lack of greed, she asked her much-loved father to bring her back a single rose from his trip. However, what we find out is that the beast is ready to act as her servant, as best as his temper and learning curve will allow. He names her queen of the castle and says all within its spellbound realm will do her bidding. He dresses her in jewels that outshine the sun, and gowns made of layers of tulle and silk so delicate it seems that butterflies must be holding the seams together. Asking nothing of her (except, once a day, to be his bride, a proposal to which he expects a refusal even before he asks), he entertains and feeds her as she desires; he even sends her home when she begs to see her sick father, although the beast knows this might result in his death, should she break her promise to return. Because Belle is not ready to sever the apron strings of home – even an unhappy home; except for her father, she must deal with the torment of her spiteful sisters – she risks the beast’s life. Tarrying too long over a necessary rite of passage to adulthood, she almost sacrifices her great love, and the castle, filled from grounds to turrets with magic, that comes with him.
In a modern retelling of the tale, Angela Carter’s short story, “The Tiger’s Bride,” she has no interest in a Belle who hesitates at the threshold of a magnificently sensual adulthood, and at the end of her tale, it is Belle, not the beast, who is transformed. As Belle falls deeper and deeper into ecstasy in the beast’s arms, “droplets fell like diamonds off my beautiful fur.” Carter’s Belle has found – and embraced – her inner animal. This, I think, is another level of fantasy the tale tucks within itself: the idea of the inner beast in us all.
Countless variations of the Beauty and the Beast myth exist, many of them famous stories in their own right, from fairy tales like “The Frog Prince” and “East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” to stories made famous in other contexts such as “The Phantom of the Opera.” The “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” fairy tale is particularly popular in many cultures around the world and has been retold recently in a beautifully illustrated version by Mercer Mayer. One can see this as a redemption version of the “Frog Prince” tale in which the maiden, having been helped by a frog when her father was ill, is unwilling to keep her promise to the unsavory creature once her father is well and her home prosperous again. When the frog demands that she be his wife, the maiden throws her wart-covered betrothed against the wall in disgust, as in the “Frog Prince” tale, but in “East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” this is just the beginning. Once she has discovered him to be a ravishingly handsome prince, she does not immediately get her prize. Instead, she must atone for her actions by following him to the land where the demons show up to take him, once she has inadvertently changed him back to his true form. This is the kingdom ruled by the witch who originally cast a spell on him: a land “east of the sun, west of the moon.”
Along the way, in the particularly clever Mayer version, the erstwhile maiden consults keepers of the four elements, who each help her in some way to get to her destination: the salamander who lives in a chamber of fire at the heart of the world (fire); he gives her a tinderbox and a unicorn. The unicorn she rides to see Father Forest (earth); Father Forest gives her a goat to carry her the many miles to the sea to meet the Great Fish. The Great Fish (water) lets the maiden hitch a ride on his back to the house of the North Wind (air) and gives him one of his shiny scales.
It is in the palace of the North Wind that she makes her final plea, for while the salamander, forest, and fish did not know how to direct her to the land “east of the sun and west of the moon,” but only knew with certainty that “she would not find a welcome within.” But here she finds luck, and the North Wind rewards her, perhaps because she has completed the full circuit of earth and air, fire and water, and after traveling so far, proven her commitment. He says to her: “I know what is in your mind and the mind of the youth. I know that your mind has one purpose and his the same. I know what is in the mind of the earth and of the moon and of the sun. Yes, I know of this kingdom. It is farther than I have ever gone, but I will take you there if you will be brave, for you will not find a welcome within.”
Indeed, in that far-off kingdom, inhabited by trolls, she finds her beloved, after agreeing to take on back-breaking work amidst the wicked and ugly natives, who throw dirt at each place she has just cleaned and pull her hair. In an invocation of the Snow White myth, her prince is encased in a block of ice, which the maiden melts with a tinder box given her by the salamander. While fleeing with her love, the troll queen, who wants to marry the handsome mortal, tries to stop them, but the maiden holds up a scale from the Great Fish, as shiny and reflective as a mirror, in which the queen and all her minions can see their repugnant images. Once they do, they are instantly turned to stone. Finally, having proved herself worthy of the prince after having once broken her promise to his frog-incarnation, the maiden and the prince marry, the spell which bound him to the troll queen now severed forever, thanks to his new wife’s courage.
In that it depicts a maiden who breaks a vow to an enchanted lover but regrets it with all her heart, there are echoes of both “East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” as well as, of course, “Beauty and the Beast,” in the myth of Psyche and Eros. Or rather, one should say it works the other way around: there are echoes of the ancient myth of Psyche and Echo in the two much more recent fairy tales. Psyche also works as a bridge to our next section, on nocturnal changelings, given the initial temporal terms of her meetings with her husband Eros, and the curiosity that ultimately destroys the happiness they brought her.
Psyche (meaning “the soul,” or “breath”) was so celebrated for her beauty that she incited the jealousy of Aphrodite, and to punish her, Aphrodite commanded Eros to make her fall in love with the ugliest of men. Eros, however, couldn’t help but fall in love with his target himself, so he spirited Psyche away to a lovely, secret palace. He warned her, however, that she could only visit him at night, and she must never inquire who he was. And although their nocturnal meetings were as full of love as any pair of newlyweds could ask for, Psyche, like Beauty in the “Beauty and the Beast” myth, had that fatal encumbrance of so many otherwise highly enviable young women in myths and fairy tales: a phalanx of jealous sisters. They convinced the blissful maid – who now had a rapturous, if puzzling, love union added on to her beauty to make others livid at her luck – that her husband must be a monster. So one night she crept in with a lamp, but the face she beheld was not that of a monster: it was that of a god in its fairness.
But Eros woke, saw what his beloved had done, and after scolding her for her mistrust, vanished, and with him, along went his palace as well. Psyche, who symbolizes the curiosities and flaws of the human soul, wandered the world looking for her beloved, until she came to Aphrodite’s palace. The goddess, still jealous of the maiden, put her through relentless, hellacious tests, which she only passed with the secret help (secret even to her) of Eros, who still loved her. Eventually, after all her hardships, Psyche became immortal too, and was united with Eros, having proved her true remorse, commitment, and worth; and in the process, having also sown the seeds for dozens of class fairy tales and their variations.
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