Post #92: The Sphinx

14 Feb. 2024

“I am human; nothing human is alien to me.”

—Terence, Heauton Timorumenos, 77

     The Sphinx, according to ancient Greek accounts, was not a creature to be trifled with: sent by Hera, the queen of the gods, the Sphinx had the face of a woman, the breast and feet and tail of a lion, and the wings of a bird. From the Muses she had learnt a deadly riddle with which she challenged anyone seeking passage to Thebes: “What has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed and three-footed?” Fail to answer correctly and the luckless traveler would be snatched up and devoured. At last the Thebans grew so desperate that anyone who could solve the riddle was promised both the kingdom and the late king’s wife. It was Oedipus who found the solution: man himself, for as a baby he crawls on all fours, as an adult he goes about on two feet, and in old age he requires a walking stick. Thus was the Sphinx overcome and Oedipus embroiled, despite all his valiant efforts to the contrary, in his tragic fate.*

     In other accounts, a little less venerable but equally suggestive, there was a second riddle: “There are two sisters: one gives birth to the other and she, in turn, gives birth to the first. Who are the two sisters?” (Day and night, both feminine words—and deities—in ancient Greek.) Thus the identification of the Sphinx with the female in its most formidable forms: Hera, the Muses, Day and Night. For Sigmund Freud, too, the myth of the Sphinx not only fit admirably with the Oedipal complex, her riddles also represented the sexual problem itself: first, in childhood, as the great mystery of where babies come from, then, in later years, the even greater puzzle of what to do about it, and how.**

     Freud himself famously confessed that he too had not been able to answer the great question of what women want, despite his learned and profound explorations of the female, and the human, soul.*** Thus the Sphinx will appear menacing or even monstrous to those unable to rise to her challenges; yet she should not, despite her forbidding appearance, be considered a merely destructive power and nothing more. Unlike the Furies or the Harpies, the Sphinx is no mere agent of doom, but a guardian of life’s deepest secrets, the creative and procreative no less than the deadly. She represents not the terrors of the night as against the blessings of the day, nor the sexes set in irreconcilable opposition, but the fruitful if complex conjunction of the two. Fierce she may be, with all the primal force of life-giving and life-taking Nature; but she proves hostile only to those who refuse to respond adequately to her, that is to say life’s, most urgent questions (recall the epigraph to #86).

     The ability to answer the Sphinx, both theoretically and practically, to her full satisfaction, may still leave a traveler through life well-short of enlightenment or liberation; but it is no small attainment, for it means that one has discovered how to delineate Day and Night, to establish the right balance and boundaries between them with a firm and judicious hand, including all that is implied in the distinction. To do so well is to have understood, and live by one’s insight into, the complex union of the yin and the yang; it is to command, as it were, the entrance into existence by the great gateway of the feminine, and perhaps, by extension, thereby also to comprehend the relation of birth and life to its great counterpart, aging and death.

     All this, once considered  a repository of time-honored wisdom, has been subjected since at least Freud’s time to a vigorous and unrelenting campaign of demystification (to say nothing of more recent attempts at delegitimizing our categories of male and female altogether: a battle that would need to be fought out, steeply uphill and to the finish, not just with the most pliable segments of one or two feeble generations, but with the very aeons of our biological inheritance.) From the Great Enigma to Betty Friedan and the Vagina Monologues. Disenchantment indeed, foisted on the dismayed old reverencers of the feminine in the uncompromising conviction that women shall be the gainers wherever the blessings of remorseless rationalism are brought to bear upon to the refractory relations of the sexes.

     How widely this modernizing zeal is really shared—beyond the narrow confines of the polymorphously unisexed postmodern intelligentsia—remains an open and much-contested question. It cannot be resolved here. We can only say that the old gods have not lost all their votaries; there are still pilgrims aplenty roaming the planet in pursuit of the elusive mysteries of the eternal feminine, and these seekers after the holy grail would not presume to trammel or tame the Sphinx (Vive la différence!), but rather to discover her secrets and answer her boldly, facing without fear her lion’s roar and risking exposure to her sharp teeth and claws, but retaining throughout all due respect for her formidable charms and powers.

*Apollodorus, Library 3.5.8

**Autobiographical Study, Standard Edition, vol. XX (London: Hogarth Press, 1959), part III, p. 37.

***See Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, vol. 2 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), part 3, ch. 16, p. 421.