The ERINYES

Theoi.com has a wonderfully detailed set of pages on the Erinyes, aka. The Eumenides, the greek chthonic goddesses of vengence. Traditionally seen as three furies, the Erinyes personify the retribution visited upon those who have violated natural laws of kinship or have made false vows.



Currently, I'm reading Oedipus at Colonus, where an old blind and beleagured Oedipus, has wandered into the sacred grove of the Erinyes at Colonus, just outside Athens. I am trying to understand the symbolic logic of this transgressive act. Oedipus has a habit of going places where he shouldn't, but in this sacred place, he is destined to find peace after his many years of suffering. Theoi.com has a page devoted to Oedipus and the Erinyes, well worth reading. The Erinyes may have been responsible for the plague afflicting Thebes in the prologue of Oedipus the King, a vengence for the unsolved murder of Laius (at the hands of the unwitting Oedipus). I also wonder whether the Sphinx has affinities to the Erinyes, since they are frequently depicted as having wings, not to mention serpents in their hair.

SPHINX (Sphinx), a monstrous being of Greek mythology, is said to have been a daughter of Orthus and Chimaera, born in the country of the Arimi (Hes. Theog. 326), or of Typhon and Echidna (Apollod. iii. 5. § 8; Schol. ad Eurip. Phoen. 46), or lastly of Typhon and Chimaera (Schol. ad Hes. and Eurip. l. .c.). Some call her a natural daughter of Laius (Paus. ix. 26. § 2). Respecting her stay at Thebes and her connection with the fate of the house of Laius. The riddle which she there proposed, she is said to have learnt from the Muses (Apollod. iii. 5. § 8), or Laius himself taught her the mysterious oracles which Cadmus had received at Delphi (Paus. ix. 26. § 2). According to some she had been sent into Boeotia by Hera, who was angry with the Thebans for not having punished Laius, who had carried off Chrysippus from Pisa. She is said to have come from the most distant part of Ethiopia (Apollod. l. c. ; Schol. ad Eurip. Phoen. 1760); according to others she was sent by Ares, who wanted to take revenge because Cadmus had slain his son, the dragon (Argum. ad Eurip. Phoen.), or by Dionysus (Schol. ad Hes. Theog. 326), or by Hades (Eurip. Phoen. 810), and some lastly say that she was one on the women who, together with the daughters of Cadmus, were thrown into madness, and was metamorphosed into the monstrous figure. (Schol. ad Eurip. Phoen. 45.)

I have not been able to find any strong genealogical connection between the Sphinx and the Erinyes; however, the idea of the Sphinx being unleashed upon Thebes for not having punished Laius for his rape of Chrysippus has thematic similarities to the vengeful retributions for which the Erinyes were so well known. Oedipus, the man of strong intellectual acuity, the champion of thinking for oneself, of overcoming nature through the power of one's own wit, had tried to transform himself, to shed identities and thereby avoid fulfillment of dire prophecies. He has ignored or been blind to the hidden message of the Sphinix's enigma: that the man of multiple identities (four legged, two legged, three legged) is at the same time, inescapably, one man. You cannot escape or shed your self. When he arrives at Colonus at the end of his life, he must make peace with his nature.

After the revelation of his parricide and incest, Oedipus suffers the curse of exile and wandering homeless and blind. This could be seen as retribution at the hands of the Erinyes.

The most terrible of the family curses were those inflicted for the crimes of patricide or matricide. The ghost of the dead parent would return from the Underworld with avenging Erinyes (Furies) to haunt and drive mad the criminal child. Only through severe atonement could the wrath of the ghost and their Furies be abated.

The three most famous victims of the Erinys-curse were: Orestes for the slaying of his duplicitous mother, Oidipous for his unintentional patricide, and Alkmaion for the crime of matricide.

Ovid has a vividly horrible description of the Erinyes appearance:

The Sorores Genitae Nocte (Night-Born Sisters) [Erinyes], divinities implacable, doom-laden . . . sat, guarding the dungeon’s adamantine doors, and combed the black snakes hanging in their hair . . . Tisiphone, dishevelled as she was, shook her white hair and tossed aside the snakes that masked her face . . . malign Tisiphone seized a torch steeped in blood, put on a robe all red with dripping gore and wound a snake about her waist . . . The baleful Erinys stood . . . stretching her arms entwined with tangled snakes, and shaking out her hair. The snakes, dislodged, gave hissing sounds; some crawled upon her shoulders; some, gliding round her bosom, vomited a slime of venom, flickering their tongues and hissing horribly. Then from her hair she tore out two with a doom-charged aim darted them. Down the breasts of Athamas and Ino, winding, twisting, they exhaled their noisome breath; yet never any wound to see, the fateful fangs affect their minds. Tisiphone brought with her poisons too of magic power: lip-froth of Cerberus, the Echidna’s venom, wild deliriums, blindnesses of the brain, and crime and tears, and maddened lust for murder; all ground up, mixed with fresh blood, boiled in a pan of bronze, and stirred with a green hemlock stick. And while they shuddered there, she poured the poisoned brew, that broth of madness, over both their breasts right down into their hearts. Then round and round she waved her torch, fire following brandished fire . . . She went, and loosed the snake she’d fastened round her waist.

Not the kind of girls you'd want to take on a dinner date.

We must not forget that Oedipus himself invoked the Erinyes against his sons Eteiocles and Polynices, who had mistreated him in Thebes and were the agents of his eviction from the city. Oedipus laid the curse of the Erinyes upon them, and in the battle of the Seven against Thebes, both sons would die (thus setting the stage for Sophocles's Antigone).

So how does Oedipus, the gross violator of nature, make his peace with the Erinyes? Oedipus at Colonus is your key to understanding the mythic resolution.

To appease the wrath of the Erinyes, the murderer or killer had to undergo the rite of ritual purification, and perform some act of atonement.

The atonement of Oedipus at Colonus should be the subject of another post.