Tiresias
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- For other uses, see Tiresias (disambiguation).
In Greek mythology, Tiresias (also transliterated as Teiresias) was a blind prophet famous for changing his sex, the son of the shepherd Everes and the nymph Chariclo.
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[edit] Overview
Tiresias was a priest of Zeus. The myth begins in the country, near Mount Kyllene in the Peloponnese, as Tiresias came upon a pair of snakes lustfully intertwined. He hit the copulating couple a smart blow with his stick - presumably striking a blow for animal decency. But Hera was not pleased: as the sensuous seductress of Zeus, she heartily approved of sex - even for the lower creatures. Her punishment was cruel - the worst a man could imagine. He was then transformed into a woman. As a woman, Tiresias became a priestess of Hera, married and had children, including Manto, who also possessed the gift of prophecy. According to some versions of the tale, Lady Tiresias was a prostitute of great renown. After seven years as a woman, Tiresias again found mating snakes; he made sure to leave the snakes alone this time. As a result of his experiences and lesson learnt Tiresias was released from his sentence, and permitted to regain his masculinity. All could then have been well, but Tiresias was drawn into an argument between Hera and her husband Zeus. A common area for marital discussion - who has more pleasure in sex - the man or the woman? Hera was clever enough to let Zeus believe that men were superior in this as in everything else. However Zeus and Hera asked him to settle the question of which sex, male or female, experienced more pleasure during intercourse, as Tiresias had experienced both. Zeus claimed it was women; Hera claimed it was men. As a dastardly man, he revealed woman's greatest secret: on a scale of ten, she gets nine parts of the pleasure to his one. Hera was furious, and instantly struck him blind - Zeus couldn't do anything to stop her - but he did give Tiresias the gift of second sight.
An alternative story in Callimachus' poem "The Bathing of Pallas" has it that Tiresias was blinded by Athena after he stumbled onto her bathing naked. His mother, Chariclo, begged her to undo her curse, but Athena couldn't; she took the serpent from her aegis and commanded it to lick his ears, giving him prophecy instead.
Stripped of its narrative and anecdotal and causal connections, the mythic figure of Tiresias combines several archaic elements: the blind seer; the impious interruption of a natural rite (whether of a bathing goddess or coupling serpents); serpents and staff (Caduceus); a holy man's double gender (shaman); and competition between deities.
Tiresias's background was important, both for his prophecy and his experiences. Greek mythology contained many hermaphroditic figures (including Hermaphroditus), but Tiresias was fully male and then fully female. Also, prophecy was a gift given only to the priests and priestesses. Therefore, Tiresias offered Zeus and Hera evidence and gained the gift of male and female priestly prophecy.
As a seer, Tiresias was "a common title for soothsayers throughout Greek legendary history" (Graves 1960, 105.5). In Greek literature, Tiresias's pronouncements are always gnomic but never wrong. He is generally extremely reluctant to offer his visions like most oracles. Often when his name is attached to a mythic prophecy, it is introduced simply to supply a personality to the generic example of a seer, not by any inherent connection of Tiresias with the myth: thus it is Tiresias who tells Amphytrion of Zeus and Alcmena and warns the mother of Narcissus that the boy will thrive as long as he never knows himself. This is his emblematic role in tragedy (see below).
[edit] Tiresias and Thebes
Tiresias appears as the name of a recurring character in several stories and Greek tragedies concerning the legendary history of Thebes. In The Bacchae, by Euripides, Tiresias appears with Cadmus, the founder and first king of Thebes, to warn the current king Pentheus against denouncing Dionysus as a god. He dresses in women's clothing with Cadmus to go up the mountain to worship Dionysus with the Theban women.
In Sophocles' Oedipus the King, Oedipus, the king of Thebes, calls upon Tiresias to aid in the investigation of the killing of the previous king Laius. At first, Tiresias refuses to give a direct answer and instead hints that the killer is someone Oedipus really does not wish to find. However after being provoked to anger by Oedipus' accusation that Tiresias had a hand in the murder, he reveals that in fact it was Oedipus himself who had (unwittingly) committed the crime. Subsequently Oedipus blinds himself, and abandons the city.
Oedipus had handed over the rule of Thebes to his sons Eteocles and Polynices, but Eteocles refused to share the throne with his brother. Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes recounts the story of the war which followed. In it, Eteocles and Polynices kill each other, and Megareus kills himself because of Tiresias' prophesy that a voluntary death from a Theban would save the city.
Tiresias also appears in Sophocles' Antigone. Creon now king of Thebes refuses to allow Polynices to be buried. His sister, Antigone, defies the order and is caught; Creon decrees that she is to be buried alive. The gods express their disapproval of Creon's decision through Tiresias. However, Antigone has already hanged herself rather than be buried alive. When Creon arrives at the tomb where she is to be interred, his son, Haemon who was in love with Antigone, attacks Creon and then kills himself. When Creon's wife, Eurydice, is informed of her son and Antigone's deaths, she too takes her own life.
Tiresias and his prophesy are also involved in the story of the Epigoni.
[edit] Death
Tiresias died after drinking the water from the spring Tilphussa, where he was struck by an arrow of Apollo. After his death he was visited in the underworld by Odysseus, to whom he gave valuable advice concerning the rest of his voyage, specifically concerning the cattle of Helios, which Odysseus' men did not follow.
[edit] QE-RA-SI-JA
At Knossos, in a LMIIIA context (14th century BC), seven Linear B texts mention an elsewhere-unattested entity called qe-ra-si-ja and, once, qe-ra-si-jo. If this title had survived the fall of LMIII Crete, then it could have evolved into *Terasias in Doric and, possibly, *Te[i]resias in Ionic.Lesson 26: Mycenaean and Late Cycladic Religion and Religious Architecture
[edit] In post-classical literature
The figure of Tiresias has been much-invoked by fiction writers and poets. Since Tiresias is both the greatest seer of the Classical mythos, a figure cursed by the gods, and both man and woman, he has been very useful to authors.
In The Divine Comedy (Inferno, Canto XX), Dante sees Tiresias in the fourth pit of the eighth circle of Hell (the circle is for perpetrators of fraud and the fourth pit being the location for soothsayers or diviners.) He was condemned to walk for eternity with his head twisted toward his back; while in life he strove to look forward to the future, in Hell he must only look backward. Tiresias' daughter Manto is also assigned her punishment here.
More recently, "Tiresias" was the title of a poem by Lord Alfred Tennyson. T. S. Eliot used Tiresias as the primary speaker in his landmark modernist poem, "The Waste Land".
The French composer Francis Poulenc also wrote an opera called Les Mamelles de Tirésias ("The Breasts of Tiresias") based on Guillaume Apollinaire's surrealist text.
Frank Herbert also uses the mythic characteristics of Tiresias in his second Dune novel, Dune Messiah, where the protagonist Paul Atreides loses his sight but has prophetic powers to counter this stemming from insights into both the male and female part of the psyche.
Amy Seham, drama professor at Gustavus Adolphus College, wrote a musical entitled "Tiresias" in 1999, with music by Chanda Walker and Kira Theimer.
Tiresias as a motif of doubleness (male/female) also occurs in the writing of Rohinton Mistry. There it serves as a comparison to the protagonist of the short story "Lend me your Light", who is torn between his childhood home in Bombay and his new existence in Toronto: "I, Tiresias,/ Blind and throbbing between two lives..." (Tales from Firozha Baag: 180).
Tiresias also shows up in Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex (novel). Cal, the protagonist, references and compares himself to the seer, and even played him in a production of Antigone.
Haruki Murakami's novel, Kafka on the Shore, has a character called Oshima, who is an androgynous seer, like Tiresias.
Carol Ann Duffy wrote a poem entitled 'from Mrs Tiresias' in her collection The World's Wife.
[edit] Sources
Tiresias appears in the following literary classics:
- Oedipus the King, Sophocles
- Antigone, Sophocles
- The Bacchae, Euripides
- Iphigenia at Aulis, Euripides
- Phoenician Women, Euripides
- The Odyssey, Homer
- Oedipus, Seneca the Younger
- Metamorphoses, Ovid
- Seven Against Thebes, Aeschylus
- Fifth Hymn ("The Bath of Pallas"), Callimachus
- Paradise Lost, John Milton
- Tiresias, Alfred Tennyson
Tiresias appears in the following song lyrics:
- "The Cinema Show" from the 1973 album Selling England by the Pound by progressive rock group Genesis.
Take a little trip back with Father Tiresias, Listen to the old one speak of all he has lived through. I have crossed between the poles, for me there's no mystery. Once a man, like the sea I raged, Once a woman, like the earth I gave. But there is in fact more earth than sea.
- "Castle Walls" from the album The Grand Illusion by Styx
The film Tiresia is inspired by this myth.
[edit] References
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- Robert Graves 1960 (revised edition). The Greek Mythsbg:Тирезий
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