Insights from the Greek Myth of Oedipus
Click here to listen to Fate, Free Will, and Being Human in the season 1 archives on buzzsprout
In the Greek myth of Oedipus a king tries to avoid fulfilling a horrifying prophecy and fails. He doesn’t escape his fate. Does this mean that he is doomed?
Did Oedipus make a critical mistake? Did he have other options? Do we?
Reflections on the message and meaning of the tragic fate of King Oedipus and how it can illuminate the dance with fate and destiny today.
The painting is Oedipus at Colonus by Jean Harriet Fulchran (1776-1805).
Here is a transcript of this program:
Myth Matters 062719 Fate, Free Will, and Being Human: insights from the Greek myth of Oedipus
hello everyone and welcome to Myth Matters, a biweekly podcast of storytelling and conversation about mythology and why it’s important to our lives today. I’m your host and personal mythologist. Catherine Svehla. Thank you so much for joining me wherever you may be in this wide, beautiful, crazy world of ours. You are part of this story circle. In the last podcast I told you the Greek myth of Oedipus. This was a very important story for the ancient Greeks and one that holds a lot of meaning for us today.
The myth was immortalized in a famous play written by Sophocles andf that was my source for the story. And as I mentioned, it was considered to be the definitive Greek tragedy. The Greeks had a very prescient and complex understanding of tragedy and although that is a dark word and one that references the hardships that we may encounter in life, it also speaks to the complexity and the paradox and the mystery that surrounds human experience.
Now, I had some very interesting responses to that podcast. So first of all, thank you very much for your questions and your comments. It was a very thought provoking experience to sit with you and I want to talk a little more about the myth today. It’s a difficult one to take in. Everything that I heard from you revolved around the nature of the oracle and the prophecy and the box that Oedipus appeared to be in.
The big question in the background then was this: is there anything that Oedipus could have done to avoid this awful fate? Very important question if you are reflecting on the story and considering how you might be like Oedipus. Let me begin by saying that myths like this myth of Oedipus are not predictive. They are not predicting an outcome that absolutely must happen. Myths are descriptive. They describe a scenario.
A myth is the territory, not the map. So the myth of Oedipus describes one scenario, one direction or shape that a life may have, and we respond and make meaning from it, draw insights for our own. Let me say also that a myth is not inherently prescriptive. There’s not one remedy. You may take a valuable lesson from one, you may find multiple options in one. You might find insight at another time in a given story.
Reflection then is the objective. We’re not looking for predictions. We’re not looking for specific one size fits all instructions or morals. We are looking to stimulate our capacity for reflection and to enter into the complexity that a good enduring myth describes. So no my friends, there is nothing that Oedipus could have done to avoid his fate. His story is the story of actively avoiding a message, of fervently believing that one can avoid a prophesized fate and we’re going to talk a little bit more about what that might mean for us today.
For the ancient Greeks, the oracle was a way to get information about the role that the gods, that is the immortal, nonhuman forces, played in your life, and a way to get information about what the Fates –who were immortal nonhuman forces– had in store for you. Most of us today have different images and concepts to describe these forces. You might talk about the will of God or some other divinity. You might talk about fate or destiny or chance. You might use the term “the unconscious” or psyche. You might use all of these terms. All of them are useful, but however you conceive of it, the relationship between fate and free will, between what we consciously decide and try to do and everything else that goes on in life, continues to trouble and mystify us. That’s why this story is still so useful. The ancient Greek tragedies like the myth of Oedipus are stories about hubris, about what happens if you live without the proper awareness of your limits as a human being.
This is one of the meanings of those famous words above the doorway to the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi. “Know yourself,” i.e. know that you are not a god. The hubris of Oedipus stemmed from the fact that he believed that he could escape his prophesized fate. He overestimated himself, his awareness, his knowledge, and his ability to act and control the outcome. This hubris is something that we can and do fall prey to today, although we might call it pride or arrogance or vanity. We routinely overestimate ourselves in one way or another.
The message in the tragic myth of Oedipus though is not one of punishment and error. It’s not a matter of looking at these terrible consequences and going, oh my gosh, Oedipus really screwed up. Yes, we see his error. That’s the beauty of the play. We are outside so we know things that he doesn’t know, because we are properly meant to reflect on the significance of his hubris. But this myth takes a compassionate view. There is no divine judge shaking a finger at him. His blindness is self inflicted and his exile is part of the process of realizing the prophecy.
He has to find the murderer, that is, he has to discover the truth about himself because of the plague on the people and exile is the solution. And let’s look a little more closely and also generally at the prophecy that shapes his life so definitively. The specifics involve crimes that he will commit with and against both his father and his mother, but in the broader sense, the message of the Oracle was “Oedipus your life and sense of self will ultimately spring from what you don’t know about yourself and others.” And this is true for us too.
It is a commentary on one of the mysteries of human existence. The story says that it is the nature of our existence, this blend of freewill and fate, of self awareness and unconsciousness, of control and a lack of control, and that however much we develop our individuality and our sense of mission in life, that individuality and sense of purpose, our ego, our personality, ourself, all of it will exist in relation to others— other people, other creatures, beings, the gods, other aspects of self and psyche, the world.
Maybe you’ve heard that phrase, “no man is an island.” I’ve often heard that as a statement about our profound interdependence, about how much human beings need each other, about the social nature of our nature. That need for others is so deep. It extends even to the creation of our own self. A human being is a creation and it involves many, many creators. As I reflected on this, I saw a connection between the acceptance of our limits as human beings, limits on our consciousness, awareness, knowledge, power to act, free will, and the full embrace of the metaphysical and spiritual knowledge of “oneness.” That image of the great net of being, for example, to be part of the net or the web described by sages and spiritual teachers. You must act in concert with others and be acted upon by all others. Do you see this? To put it another way,
You’re called to accept the fact that you are not only the protagonist in your own drama, in your own life play, but you are also a character in the dramas of others. To return to Oedipus. He played an important role in many lives. His wife and mother Jocasta for example, who tried to kill him as an infant and later married him. What was her view of this? Her story is intimately interwoven with his and yet we would not say that her life was determined by his, would we?
We really resist the truth of these limitations and the degree to which we are woven into the fabric of existence. There’s a vulnerability that comes with that recognition and perhaps a fear of consequences, and yet fate and free will coexist. This isn’t an either or situation. You don’t choose to live one or the other. Even in completely collapsing into fate, you are making a decision to stop acting, right?
These concepts or lived realities are meaningful because they coexist. They elicit one another and life is both. We overlook this in our habitual oppositional thinking and the habit of saying that something must be either black or white, true or false, man or woman, fate or free will. That’s something that working with myth can help you change. I was thinking about this the other day because the solstice recently took place and it’s so interesting and ironic and paradoxical, isn’t it, that the solstice seems to take place at the beginning of the summer. It’s the longest day of the year and yet it is also the herald of the shortest day of the year. It is the beginning of the unwinding process that ends in winter. There are signs of summer all around and yet we began that journey back to winter and in a sense next winter is already here with us. As the sages say, as soon as you are born you begin to die.
Now in the last podcast I talked a little bit about the multiplicity of selves and I said that one of the forms of blindness that afflicted Oedipus was this sense that he was only who he thought he was. And I want to talk about that a little more, about the way that our habitual ego consciousness operates in that illusion that it is the only self, the only point and source of self awareness. The only me that is living and spinning out the one true story of your life.
One of the things that ego does is create a persona. And I talked about that in the last podcast also. The persona, the public face that we cultivate, is the self image that we show other people. We try to look good. We create the persona from the bits and pieces of our personality that we find most acceptable and useful and it’s not a bad thing to have a social self, one with fewer rougher edges perhaps than the private you at home, one with better matters maybe!
But if the gap between your persona and the private “you” is too large problems arise, because we spend a lot of time in that persona, in that public self. And when you yourself, that ego, that private self, become part of your own “public,” that is, when you identify with the persona and you forget that you have other aspects, well that is an invitation to trouble. That is when the shadow, what you’ve left out of the construction of that smooth persona, expresses itself unconsciously. This is a form of fate as your attitudes and actions constellate situations in your life and you wonder why, because you are unconscious about the way that you are drawing them to you.
Okay, that might sound a little confusing and I’m using the language of depth psychology here. So let me put it another way. Perhaps you’ve had this experience, you keep making the same mistake or the same choices over and over again.
Maybe you repeatedly find yourself in relationships with a certain type of person or accepting a certain type of work and subsequently having the same experiences, encountering the same problems or challenges over and over again. There is something in you below your consciousness, something in your shadow that is constellating this situation and drawing it to you. The question is, will this be a source of healing, growth, or expansion, or will it be an affliction? Well, as you become aware of the repetition and decide to become conscious of yourself and your role in the situation, change is possible. Not inevitable. I think it was Michael Ventura who said that confusing self-awareness with control is one of the problems that Westerners have had for centuries. So change is possible when we become more aware, when we become more conscious. Learning is possible. Healing is possible through a greater measure of consciousness about yourself.
This is one of the problems with perpetually playing the victim, with looking outside for the problems and misfortune in your life. And as a little aside, back to Oedipus, there’s a way in which he does that, plays the victim in his reacting to the oracle rather than investigating it. Well, when you blame other people, when you blame outer circumstances, you don’t reflect upon the contents of your own personality and consciousness in a helpful and necessary manner. So as soon as you decide to become more aware, certain possibilities open up to you that did not exist when you were in a state of relative blindness.
Now back to Oedipus. I’m not saying that he could change his storyline. He couldn’t change his storyline. Then it would be a different myth, a description of a different aspect of our situation. What’s unconscious is unconscious.
We don’t even know that it’s there. This is our situation and not a failing. If you find yourself asking this question, “what am I not aware of?” and pondering options for Oedipus, “what could he have changed?” well, that’s a good indication that you could ask yourself, “where are these questions appearing in my life now? What am I resisting?”
Valuable question to ask, but we can’t torture ourselves for being unconscious or for being part of that great web of being. That is a waste of life. We can live with awareness of these facts and stay alert. Our freewill is exerted when we know that we are running from something and stop without indulging the fantasy hat we will be completely conscious one day.
How does your behavior change? How does your relationship to yourself and others change when you live with the knowledge that most of your life is unconscious and beyond your control? Most of your life is unconscious and beyond your control. Do you freak out or open up maybe both at sometime!
One final thought to share. In the last podcast, I told you a little bit about how Oedipus ends up. It’s the plot of the next play. Oedipus in Colonus. He wanders for 20 years with his daughter Antigone and he lives with love. He has feeling, love is given and received between the two of them. He’s literally blind and yet he gained deeper insight into his life. He accepts that the prophesized events did occur, that he killed his father and slept with his mother, and he sees that that is not the only aspect of his life or being that matters.
And most importantly, he develops compassion for himself and for the other people in his life and for the human condition. As I said at the beginning, myth is not predictive. It’s not a story of cause and effect. And yet there is truth. And the truth that I’m finding in this myth right now is that a person is a process. We are always in the process of becoming who and what we are…. to go with the flow is to go with our own flow, the dynamics of our own being in time and over time.
It involves awareness of both our fixedness and our changeability, of our multiplicity and complexity. Compassion, compassion and acceptance is our goal. Living into this myth doesn’t entail giving up or despairing. Rather, it’s a source of learning and feeling, of living as a humane human in that web of being woven by Grandmother Spider or as one of the points of light in Indra’s Net.
I’d like to close with a poem by Billy Collins titled “Serpentine.”
This morning I saw suddenly
on the road ahead of me
the moving question mark of a snake,
black thumb of a head lifted,
some ancient node within the dark hood
urging the long thin body forward,
sensing its way
through its slippery existence
as it had been doing since birth,
slithering toward our moment of intersection,
the swishing passage no longer hidden by grass
or the wet cover of leaves,
but its entire length visible now
in the pure daylight of this dilated second,
just as I had been moving toward it, too,
all my life,
in my own upright, warm-blooded way,
walking the long sidewalks, riding trains,
leaning on the railing of a ferry,
or as today, driving a country road,
which from the air would look like a snake itself
curling through the dense green woods.
No moment was given there
spacious enough
to brake or swerve within,
only time enough to keep my line,
hoping without hope,
knowing, as I needled through the instant,
that the two of us had always been meant to meet here,
my curved line crossing his
as on some unknowable graph
spread out on a vast table
under the glare of a hanging lamp—
a relentless diagram,
millions of faint red lines
forming millions of tiny squares.
–Billy Collins from Picnic, Lightning
And that’s it for me. Catherine Svehla and Myth Matters for this week. Feel free to contact me if you have questions or comments about today’s program. If you are new to Myth Matters, I invite you to head over to the Mythic Mojo website where you will find the podcast and a variety of ways to subscribe. You can listen to it from one of your favorite platforms like iTunes or Stitcher ,or you can join my email list and receive announcements with links to new episodes in your email.
I’m very grateful to all of you who support this program by sharing it with others and spreading the word about what we’re doing here at Myth Matters. I am deeply, doubly grateful to those of you who are able to provide some financial support to this podcast, and I want to give special thanks this week to Greg Gilbert for his recent generous contribution to Myth Matters. Every bit helps.
It all helps, and I’m talking about a much bigger “it” than contributions to the podcast right now, my friends, it all helps. Whatever each of us does counts.
Thank you so much for listening. Please tune in next time and until then, happy myth-making and keep the mystery in your life.
