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Ruth K. Westheimer - Myths of Love: Echoes of Greek and Roman Mythology in the Modern Romantic Imagination

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Book:
Myths of Love: Echoes of Greek and Roman Mythology in the Modern Romantic Imagination
Author:
Ruth K Westheimer / Jerome E Singerman
Publisher:
Quill Driver Books
Genre:
Books / Romance novel
Year:
2014
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3 / 5
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Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Americas favorite sex therapist, analyzes ancient myth and its relevance to 21st century relationships in her new book Myths of Love: Echoes of Greek and Roman Mythology in the Modern Romantic Imagination. From humanitys earliest beginnings, people have puzzled over the dual nature of love. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, love was sweet, but it was also irrational, cruel, and often deadly. Faced with the terrible paradox of love, classical civilization produced some of the most psychologically insightful myths of all time--stories of classic archetypes such as Narcissus, Helen of Troy, and Venus and Adonis.
Dr. Ruth and classical scholar Jerome E. Singerman insightfully examine the underlying psychology of the ancient myths and explain why their universal appeal has shaped the imagination of Western civilization for millennia. Myths of Love traces how these myths of endured in literature and art across the centuries and how they still influence how we think about sex and relationships today.
Surveying a vast range of Greek and Roman literature from Homer to Ovid, Myths of Love retells and reconsiders the full gamut of human sexual experience, from the tenderest expressions of married love to the savage, self-destructive passions of narcissism on jealousy. Bridging high culture and pop culture, Myths of Love reveals the secret connections between classic literature and todays popular novels and films.
A stimulating blend of art, science, ancient religion, and the passions and contradictions of the human heart, Myths of Love is a smart and sexy revisit to the roots of Western cultures eternal fascination with love.

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M YTHS OF L OVE

Echoes of Ancient Mythology in the

Modern Romantic Imagination

Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer

Jerome E. Singerman

Fresno, California

Myths of Love

Front cover image courtesy Alfredo Dagli Orti /
The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY

Published by Quill Driver Books

An imprint of Linden Publishing

2006 South Mary Street, Fresno, California 93721
(559) 233-6633 / (800) 345-4447

QuillDriverBooks.com

Quill Driver Books and Colophon are trademarks of
Linden Publishing, Inc.

ISBN 978-1-61035-211-6

eISBN 978-1-61035-246-8

135798642

Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file.

Contents

Introduction

Only the lesson which is enjoyed can be learned well.

The Talmud

T his book is a collaboration between two good friends who first started talking to one another about classical mythology a few years ago, while in front of a painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. What we saw was this: In the foreground of an obviously Northern European landscape of conifers and rocky outcroppings, with a spired town visible in the distance and a fortress or monastery perched at the edge of a cliff, a young man is sitting beneath a tree. He is rather preposterously dressed in a full suit of armor accessorized with an elaborately tailored red velvet cloak. On his head he wears a gloriously wide-brimmed hat trimmed in feathers or fur. Standing in front of him are three women, naked but for the heavy gold jewelry around their necks and, atop the head of the figure in the middle, a hat to rival that of the young man. Interjecting himself between the young man and the ladies is a gray-bearded figure in extraordinary gold armor, wearing yet another piece of wonderful headgearthis a helmet seemingly made from two fully intact birds. Hovering in the air, in the upper left-hand corner, is Cupid, poised to shoot an arrow.

The painting is a famous one, but even had we been looking at it for the first time, the scene being represented would have been immediately recognizable. True, the period and the place are wrong and several key details are off. The man with the winged helmet is surely Hermes, but why is he so old? And why is he offering a clear glass orb when he is supposed to be holding a golden apple? Still, this is obviously a depiction of Paris judging the relative beauty of Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena in the prelude to the Trojan War.

One of us started wondering aloud about the tenacity and malleability of the Judgment of Paris story, and of classical myths more generally, as they changed and persisted over the millennia, about how these stories of gods and men from pagan Greece and Rome could remain such a part of the cultural landscapes of Reformation Germany and twenty-first-century New York alike. The other one of us zeroed in on the erotics of the scene before us, on the possible dynamic between Paris and the goddesses, and on how she herself was continually surprised by the ways in which the myths of classical antiquity so often help her to articulate her way of seeing the world.

And so we were launched. Wouldnt it make for an interesting project, we thought, to explore a group of myths from our individual and shared perspectives, perhaps even to write a book drawn from the conversations we anticipated having? We decided for obvious reasons to focus specifically on myths dealing somehow with the varieties of lovehuman and divine, licit and illicit, ennobling and debasing, gloriously fulfilled and tragically thwarted. Jerome Singerman could take the lead in selecting the stories and in bringing some knowledge of their literary, religious, and visual traditions to the table; but Ruth Westheimer would choose the way of retelling these stories and of coaxing from them their contemporary meanings. We are both very much the authors of this book, but it is Dr. Ruths voice that you will hear whenever someone speaks here in the first-person singular.

It was, of course, no easy thing to make the selection of twenty-five stories you have before you, nor even to decide what was properly a myth and what not. We have been fairly generous in our criteria. These are stories overwhelmingly concerned with the loves of the gods or with the influence of the gods on the affairs of humans, although we admit that the connection is tenuous in one or two instances that are more exclusively tales of human love. And while some of the stories retain clear religious or cultic meanings, in others the gods are more appropriately taken as symbolic projections or perhaps even as narrative fancies. All of the stories we tell exist in ancient Greek or Roman sources, although some seem to be what we would consider individual authorial creations traceable to a single literary work. Others, of course, have deep and widespread roots in the ancient Mediterranean world, and in these cases, there tend to be significant variants between the versions. Even in antiquity, the overall shape and particular details of any given myth might be fluid, and we have often found ourselves offering bits of competing narratives within our retellings.

We have strived here to offer a selection that mixes the familiar and iconicthe usual suspects, you might saywith myths that may well be unfamiliar to many of our readers. There are inevitably omissions, and none seems more glaring, perhaps, than the story of Odysseus, the man who gave up the opportunity of eternal life to return to Penelope, the wife who remained faithful to him for the twenty years of his absence. It is, quite simply, a story we could imagine neither compressing into just a few pages nor extracting from the rich tapestry that is the Odyssey, a poem that is one of the greatest adventure stories of all times but also a veritable encyclopedia of many varieties of love beyond the conjugal. We have drawn from numerous other sources for what follows, though, and it will be clear that we have drunk longest and with the greatest satisfaction from Ovid. Surely it is no coincidence that he included so very many love stories in his Metamorphoses, for whether for good or ill, whether in antiquity or the present, there are few things in life quite so transformative as love.

A NOTE ON NAMES

Although the ancient Greek and Roman religions were not at all identical, from at least the third century BCE on the native Italian gods came to be identified with the deities of Greek Olympus. When the later Roman writers on whom we will drawOvid, Virgil, Seneca, the mythographer Hyginusretold myths with roots in Greece, they routinely substituted their own gods for the originals. Thus Zeus becomes Jupiter or Jove, Hera becomes Juno, Artemis Diana, Aphrodite Venus, Hermes Mercury, Poseidon Neptune, Hades Pluto, and so forth. Of the major gods, only the name of Apollo remains the same in the two traditions.

In what follows, we tend to give the Greek form of the name when drawing primarily on a Greek original and the Roman form when using a Latin source. When important sources exist in both languages, we will often cite both names together.

Tiresias: The Riddle of Pleasure and the Burden of Shame

I f youve ever seen or read the tragedy of Oedipus, you may remember Tiresias, the blind seer who tries to tell Oedipus that he has killed his own father and married his own mother. Now, in a book about myths of love, you may expect me to stop right here to talk about Oedipus himself, a mythological figure who had really serious love problems. Certainly, Freud thought this was one of the most interesting mythological love stories imaginable, and he based much of his theory of human psychology and sexuality on it. But Oedipus didnt know that the old man he had killed years before at a crossroads was actually his father, nor that the attractive older woman he later married was both the widow of the dead man and his own mother, so lets pass over him, at least for now. The fact is that its Tiresias who really interests me, and Id like to tell you why. It has to do with the way he lost his sight and gained his clairvoyance.

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