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FRAGMENTATION OF BEING and the Path Beyond the Void by Kent D. Palmer
copyright 2004 All Rights Reserved. Not for Distribution.
We have seen how men would order the household, bringing light from the city indoors, along with order to make women like men. But we only have to look at the Oresteia to gain some insight into the darkness the house holds. Here, Aeschylus makes it clear what a dysfunctional household is in which the negative fourfold holds sway. Through three tragic plays (Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides) we see unfolding the curse of evil actions begetting further evil. And in it we learn what darkness is. We need to taste that darkness in order to counterbalance the idealization of oeconomicus. But it is clear that these two views are themselves extremes and nihilistic opposites. However, there is a difference in that the view of Aeschylus strikes deep into our humanity, whereas the view of Xenophon skims the surface without telling us any more about who we really are.
What we really need to do is to trace the interplay between the positive and negative fourfold through the plays. Remember, the positive fourfold is identified by Heidegger as Heaven/Earth//Mortals/Immortals, while the negative fourfold was put forth by Aristophanes as Night/Covering//Chaos/Abyss. We have previously shown how these two opposite ontological configurations are at work in other settings. Man and the cities he defends stands between heaven and earth as a mortal oriented toward the immortal, whereas women within the household are the creatures of night who must remain covered and who embody chaos and the abyss. This is not our judgement but the cultural judgement of the Greeks. Women, unlike men, are more at home in darkness where they reveal their charms to their possessors. They live under cover, wearing veils when outside, but mostly remaining inside the house in order to deserve the epitath "white armed." They are uncontrollable, disorderly, irrational, and emotional. Finally, they cause men to become oblivious to their duties to the city and other men. These characteristics are embodied by women when they are at their best. When they are at their worst, these characteristics combine to produce a monster like the Gorgon Medusa. The opposite of transgression between the aspects of the negative fourfold are their embedding and intensification until they represent evil itself. Women are the enemy within. In the Oresteia, all these characteristics are embodied by Clytaemnestra. She is the wife of Agamemnon who kills him on his return from his triumphs in the Trojan war. She is the opposite of Odysseus' wife who is true to him and welcomes him home with open arms. Pennelope represents the best a woman can be: indecisive. She leads on the suitors and generally oscillates between waiting and not waiting. Her weaving and unweaving at night signifies this lack of self control. Women are seen and see themselves, it seems, as needing a man to guide them. When that man is not present, they are ill prepared to enter into a man's world. The presence of the suitors shows that Pennelope was unable to stand up for herself and take charge of her own household. Clytaemnestra, on the other hand, is very much in control. So much so that she devises an early warning system to signal her husband's return. Beacons from the mountain top to mountain top bring the message of victory all the way from Troy to Argos. When a woman becomes like a man in the house, except in the superficial sense that Xenophon would instill, she becomes dangerous. Her self-control makes her have an interior which is an intensification of darkness. All the aspects of the fourfold meld together to make her an embodiment of the essence of manifestation. Darkness on darkness. The watchman says in the first lines of the play about Clytaemnestra "That woman -- she maneuvers like a man." This is just one of the many ominous notes that lead up to the dastardly deed she perpetrates of killing her husband.
It is interesting that the Agamemnon play starts much like the Assembly Women. Like Praxagora, Clytaemnestra is up in the night with torches lit, making preparations. In the latter case, it is because she has been warned by her sentinels that Troy has been taken, and she is making sacrifices. Thus, instead of private preparations, she is making very public ones. But it is significant that the action in both plays starts at night, because for the Greeks the night was more appropriate to the work of women. Throughout the plays are myriad references to night time, sleep and dreams. So many, in fact, we cannot catalogue them all. Similarly, the references to stealth, which is the form in which covering appears, are myriad. Since her deed is one of entrapment of her husband, the references to the net she has cast or the web she has woven in secret are many. Chaos appears as fury, frenzy and torment which ravages all the characters in the tragedy. Finally, the abyss appears as Fate which is continuously being appealed to as the source of all this misery, haunting the family throughout the generations. The tragedy is that this family, through the deeds of the ancestors, has fallen into a terrible fate visited on each generation as it attempts to revenge the injustices of the last generation. This fate is an abyss because it consumes everything, and through it everything is lost in oblivion. The positive fourfold appears in the last of the plays in which the relation between man and the gods (in this case Apollo, Hermes, and Athena) restores order on earth and finally undoes the curse. In fact, we can see that in the tragedy man loses his balance between heaven and earth and falls under the influence of the Cathonic gods becoming like the Titans, or in the grip of the Furies. In doing so, they become embroiled in a situation where men challenge fate and reap the rewards. Even the gods cannot influence fate. So once men lose their balance and fall into the vortex of fate in which successive generations pay for the wrong actions of their ancestors, there is not much the gods can do for them but watch and perhaps mediate with the old gods when the time is ripe. Thus, we see that falling into the overwhelming power of the negative fourfold involves a loss of balance between heaven and earth and a loss of contact with the immortals and their sphere of influence.
Perhaps the best way to read the Orestiea for our purposes is backward. In this essay we will concentrate upon the last of the three plays. We should start with the court scene in which Athena sets the Athenians to judge between the Furies and Orestes. For Athena, it is a wicked problem. If she judges against the Furies, then they may attack men, especially the people of Athens. But on the other hand her sympathies are toward Orestes and his protector, Apollo. So Athena sets up the court so men will make the decision instead of herself. Once the men have voted, she says she casts her vote as a tie breaker, and sure enough it is a tie. Half the jury of men vote for Orestes, and half for the Furies. Mankind is perfectly divided on this issue, whether it is that the man should be able to kill his mother if she kills his father. Or whether such a man should be hounded and driven crazy by the older gods who inhabit the dark earth and who revenge the killing of flesh and blood. They maintain that the killing by Clytaemnestra of her husband was not a blood murder, i.e. they were not of the same blood being from different families. But when Orestes killed his mother, it was a blood murder, and no matter what the reason, he should be punished and hounded by the Furies. The Furies came into existence when Uranus was dethroned. Their law destroying the blood murders is more ancient than the law of Zeus. They dance around the condemned, driving them crazy and forcing them to roam the land mad. But when they lose the court case and Orestes is set free from their influence, then Athena persuades them to let go of their anger and find a home in Athens, becoming the guardians of marriage and the source of good rather than evil.
This transformation of the Furies from the source of madness and death into the source of good and the defender of marriage is the crucial point which the plays have to make. It makes us realize that the Furies are an image of the autopoietic ring. Their dance is the dance of the ring. Heidegger speaks of the "round dance of the fourfold." And through the Furies we realize that this dance can function for good or evil. Either it destroys those who break blood ties, or it supports those who make marriage ties and it is marriage ties that lead to blood ties. These two kinds of ties form a cycle where marriage begets children which create blood ties, and those children then eventually marry and so on. When we first see the Furies, it is at Delphi. The Pythoness gives a prayer to the gods and then enters the doors of the oracle. When she reappears a moment later, she looks shaken and says:
the halls of others -- He must purge his own.1
Here we get a picture of the RING of women around Orestes who is seeking purification from the god. They are seen as Gorgons or Harpies. The Pythoness does not know which. But the main thing she does know is that they are repulsive and BLACK. Their eyes discharge puss, and they are not dressed properly for the house of the gods, not even for the houses of men. The Furies have been put to sleep by Apollo in order to give Orestes a head start toward Athens. But here they are around the Navelstone of the earth. That stone may be seen to represent the windegg or amphora. It is the autopoietic ring as a closed system. The Furies, on the other hand, represent that same system opened up in some unnatural way. Normally, we see only one aspect of the autopoietic system at a time. But when the autopoietic system is forced open, it reveals a terrible inner reality of self-embedded darkness on darkness. The Furies are neither Gorgon or Harpie, but something indeterminate without wings. Something apparently human but not dressed properly, lurid as well as repulsive. They are asleep. They have driven Orestes here from Argos at the behest of his dead mother who cursed him before he killed her. Apollo addresses them in their sleep:
on, on over seas and cities swept by tides.2
Here we see the Furies as virgin women who were only born for destruction; they are likened to a dark pit or abyss explicitly, and are shown to roam only within the bowls of the earth which is the world of death. When they manifest above the earth, it is only to plague those who have broken the blood tie. They were born when Kronos dethroned Uranus and was the first to break the blood tie, killing his father. They are loathed by the gods of Olympus and men. They are specifically female, and they will drive their quarry deep in the endless heartland or across the seas. They follow those who break the ancient laws of family ties forever.
So we see that the Furies represent ties that occur within the household, ties between parent and child. When these bonds are broken, the unspoken contract of those giving life with those receiving life, then the Furies are unleashed. They are unleashed when the autopoietic ring is broken. They are the fury that is the obverse of Aphrodite. They were born at the same time in the same act of Kronos. They embody the rage of the wronged parent and their curse on their own children. As such, they are the glue that holds the autopoietic ring together and keeps it viable. They are the manic, desperate need for closure. When the windegg breaks, it reveals a face of Aphrodite. But when it is crushed so there is no place to hide any longer, then the Furies are revealed. They are the action of the Essence of Manifestation when exposed completely. When the immanent is made manifest, it appears as total madness seeking reprisals, the self-embedded aspects of the negative fourfold. Tragedy exists to bring these negative aspects of existence suppressed by the positive fourfold to light. Tragedy always harkens back to fate and to the Cathonic powers, and shows the terrible destruction that occurs when they are forced into the light. Tragedy is itself the bringing to light of terrible deeds which are then able to be resolved. Unless they are resolved, then the split between the Conscious and Unconscious breeds destruction and madness.
Clytaemnestra attempts to rouse the sleeping Furies.
A dream is calling -- Clytaemnestra calls you now.3
We see that Clytaemnestra has made special sacrifices at midnight to the Furies in order to rouse them to action before she was killed by her son. These sacrifices were made at midnight because it was a time not shared with gods. Thus, the Furies govern the nadir, the furthest point from noon. Clytaemnestra has made a contract with these creatures of the darkness which smacks of witchcraft. The negative fourfold, when it becomes self-embedded, turned back in on itself through torment and anger, turned in upon itself, produces the opposite of the contracts of men and gods. These are spoken in the temples to seal all kinds of transactions. But the sacrifices at the hearth fires to cathonic deities at midnight represent the production of evil. Clytaemnestra is reviled by all the dead for her deeds. She feels the guilt with which they sentence her. But she says she has suffered too, and hopes the Furies will avenge her after her death. Once avenged, she can stand on her own against the other dead. The judgement against one after death appears to depend on the outcome on earth.
Apollo drives the Furies from his shrine:
No god will ever shepherd you with love.4
No picture could be so horrible. The Furies preside over what is worst in human nature. But the point which is most important is the fact that where they preside there is no difference between Justice and bloody slaughter. Justice is when Right or Rta prevails. We have accepted Cosmic Harmony as the definition of Rta. So when actions that lead to death and destruction are out of harmony with the cosmos, then they come under jurisdiction of the Furies. Sometimes death and destruction are for just causes. For example, the sacking of Troy was Just because the ruler of the city had violated the laws of Zeus concerning guests by kidnapping Helen. The Trojans had disregarded the marriage vow between Menelaus and Helen, a king and queen among the Greeks. They had upset the cosmic harmony which was dependent upon the harmony of the sacred marriage between king and queen. For this outrage against the laws of guests and the laws of marriage, they deserved to be destroyed. It was just to do so. It was right. Rightness is an ideal. Agamemnon ruptured this illusion of rightness when he took away Achilles' war prize and plunged them into nihilism. It causes the Indo-Europeans to pursue extreme actions in order to set things right. Setting things right means to make things approximate the ideal state of affairs. For the Angels, knowing what is right comes naturally. They have no free will to cause them to become derailed from the pursuit of Rta. For jinn and men, there is knowledge of what is right and what is wrong, but many forces from the inside and outside that derail men and jinn from carrying out their vision of right action. What is right is the holoidal. Cosmic harmony is approximated in steps: logical consistency, interaction, mutual support, and interpenetration. With each step, the distinctions become finer and finer. The RTA is what promotes or drives the cosmos toward these refinements in harmony. It is what points to or signifies the Good, either the whole of virtue or in part. In this part of the first play we have Apollo, the one who is wise because he follows the dictum "know thyself" and the one who is moderate because he does "nothing to excess," speaking about the necessity to distinguish the just from bloody destruction. Justice is one part of virtue. When the cosmos approximates harmony, is when it serves as a mirror to the Good. That harmony should always point, ever renewed, toward the Good. When this pointing occurs, RTA is realized, the Cosmos is in harmony, and Goodness is embodied. Men and jinn are making non-nihilistic distinctions continuously.
What Apollo says is that where the Furies are concerned, there is no distinction between justice and bloody slaughter. One cannot distinguish the difference between killing that is right and what is wrong. So the Furies, are in some sense, the embodiment of the ultimate nadir of the ephemeron against the holoidal ideal of Justice and the rest of virtue which brings the world of men into harmony with the rest of the cosmos. The cosmos covers the entire pluriverse without any bias toward men. The world is how the cosmos is seen by men. The universe is the extreme reduction of the world so that only the concerns or measure of man are taken into account. Rta is an attempt to have a world that is in tune with the entire pluriverse. It takes the principle fostered by the angles as the measure of all things. For the angels, the destruction of those who are sowing corruption in the earth is correct and may be a means of restoring the RTA. When men or jinn stand up against the corrupters of the earth, they are doing what is right. But when men or jinn kill for the sake of killing, then the Furies are invoked, especially if that killing destroys blood relations. If the participants cannot tell what is Just, then they are lost in a sea of nihilism. Killing for its own sake as in Little Murders, the play by Jules Feiffer which portrays random murder as the norm in society, is an excellent example. The drive-by shootings so prevalent in American society today are another example. It indicates a society taken over by the Furies where just destruction cannot be distinguished from murder for its own sake, which pulls up the roots of life for no reason.
atrocious crimes, lull your will to act.5
Here, Apollo places his finger on the problem with the Furies. They are arbitrary as to what crimes they punish. They do not punish crimes that bear on marriage which Apollo holds up as just as terrible as those of blood murder -- murder of one's own blood relations. Because of this imbalance, Apollo says that their pursuit of Orestes is unjust.
A major point is the identification of marriage with FATE. Apollo says marriage is Fate itself. That justice guards its life. We have seen in the earlier plays the destruction of the family from within. Husband kills daughter. Wife kills husband. The ring of marriage is broken. But this does not unleash the Furies. Only when son avenges father's death, are the Furies unleashed on him. This is the ultimate dysfunctional household. In this play, the Furies come to embrace marriage as well as a key tie deserving their rage. Surely, all this refers to the matriarchal lineages that the Indo-Europeans submerged under the dominance of patriarchal lineages. The Furies are associated with the old matriarchal lineages, and do not recognize the newer lineages based on marriage. Apollo calls them imbalanced or unjust because they only are aroused for crimes against one and not the other. Through the action of the play, the Furies become balanced and accept marriage. In doing so, they lose their anger. It is the anger of a culture subdued by the Indo-European invasion, with its lines of transmission through the mother fouled by patriarchy. But as Apollo hints, there are two ways of descent, and they each deserve to be preserved. Preservation of both is just. Of course, the Indo-Europeans thought their own lineage system was the one in harmony with the cosmos. Matriarchal systems many times leave the husband as an outsider. Many times the wife does not go to the husband's fathers house, but stays with her own family. The husband visits the wife's father's house and remains a guest. Marriage, in the Indo-European model, is the means of extracting the wife from her fathers house and moving her to the husband's house. The difference is that the woman, instead of leading a life of continuity in which the husband is peripheral and the father is the dominant force, moves to a situation in which she has to put up with a major discontinuity in her life. The move from the father's house to the new house is traumatic. The husband must become a surrogate father instead of being free of responsibility. In Indo-European society the whole focus of life has changed from that supported by the Old Europeans. This change makes marriage a much more important institution. It emphasizes the interface between the sexes. In the old system, the interface between the sexes was not as important. The uncle, not the father, was the important figure to the children. The father becomes important only in the patriarchal system. So Orestes revenging his father's death is important from the point of view that it supports patriarchy and is a revolt against matriarchy. This becomes clearer when later in the play Apollo denies that the child has any part of the mother and that the origin belongs wholly to the father. This extreme doctrine, so obviously contrary to natural fact, alludes directly to the enforcement of patriarchy over matriarchy. Patriarchy to some extent enhances the relations between man and woman. The woman in matriarchy is visited only occasionally and usually for the sole purpose of procreation. This visiting for the sole purpose of procreation continues in the Greek household which maintains strict separation between wives and husbands by an inner split in the household that is mirrored by a split in the female psyche6. Sometimes in a matriarchal society the women who are wives must be visited by stealth. The father does not figure in the raising of the children. The whole allegiance of the children is toward the mother and her brothers and sisters. (Parenthetically, I have suggested that we return to the matriarchal social pattern to my wife and told her it would mean that she had to go back to live with her parents. I promised to come and visit between big game hunts but this idea did not appeal to her for some reason.) In patriarchy, the man and the woman begin to live together, the marriage becomes a tie of greater importance than those to the wife's relatives, and the father becomes the center of the children's upbringing instead of the uncle. Patriarchy stresses sexual differences not accentuated in matriarchy. Patriarchy is a revolt against matriarchy. (As an aside the male answer to feminists who deplore patriarchy is that it is a way of life that is only a few thousand years old, whereas matriarchy has been tried for many thousands of years. Therefore, it seems only fair that women give men a chance to work the bugs out of such a new social program. Men need to demand equal time. We deserve a chance to make our social program work. Women had their chance. Now when we just get started after only a few thousands years of this great social experiment they are calling for a return to matriarchy. And if matriarchy was so great why was it given up? Over twenty five thousand years of matriarchy and not one light bulb.) It must be brought about by force. It is dependent on the kidnapping of the wife. Thus, there is an essential confusion in Indo-European society between kidnapping and marriage. From this perspective, we see that the kidnapping of Helen was perfectly justified from the point of view of Paris. However, because she was kidnapped from other Indo-Europeans, he did not count on the importance of marriage to the Greeks. So important was the marriage tie that a major war was fought for possession of the queen in order to prove the significance of that tie. Once kidnapped, the wife was not allowed to be kidnapped again. In the father-in-law's house and husband's house the wife becomes a servant normally ruled over by the mother of the husband until that lady dies. Life could be miserable for women in these circumstances. A far cry from the situation of the woman who remains in the place of her birth and becomes the bearer of continuity as in the matriarchal scheme. Woman was torn from continuity and given to discontinuity and life in an alien place. The recompense was love. Love is a concept of the bond between man and wife. In later Western culture, it is perverted into romantic love, the obsession with the unobtainable. But love itself is a distortion. It refers to the bonding between man and woman where sexual differences have been overemphasized; where the interface between man and woman have become the center stage of the household rather than a peripheral event. Love, Apollo says, is the source of "mankind's nearest and dearest ties." These ties are created when woman has only her husband to support her against the rest of his household within which she is a stranger. So for woman there is a radical dependence. To survive the woman must turn all her attention to pleasing the husband so she will have at least that one defender in the alien environment forced on her. So love is born out of extreme dependence, not out of independence. In the matriarchal system, the woman has a "room of one's own" in her own house supported by her father. She is on an equal footing with her husband and can afford to give as good as she gets. In the patriarchal system, the wife is totally dependent on the husband's good graces. Her life can be hell if the husband sides with his family against her. So she must do everything she can to make sure this does not happen, and that psychologically puts the man in a dominant position and the woman in a weak and subservient position. Love is this relationship between the sexes within this overall social context which embodies dualism, or asymmetrical power relations. Love is from the wife toward the husband who, by necessity, does everything she can to please him. Love from the husband to the wife and her children is a gift when it occurs. The husband is under no constraint to return the affection. The husband in tis patriarchal situation is naturally the beloved not the wife. Romantic love reverses this patriarchal love and makes the unobtainable wife of another the beloved. Still the wife loses out in relation to her own husband. Only in modern times has love become a bidirectional non-power centered relationship between husband and wife. Unfortunately this relation has been contaminated by the concept of equality of the sexes which is a devaluation of both the male and the female. It covers over difference and is a tyranny as great as dualistic patriarchal love or its opposite forbidden love. Love is the sign of the weakness of women within the patriarchal system. In the matriarchal system, love does not occur. Instead, there is barter and exchange between equals on an even playing field. Love becomes the sign of cosmic harmony within human relations. Love is an illusion of persuasion within a field of constraint. The wife is forced to move from one household to the other. Within that context, if she plays her cards right and fosters a sense of communion with her husband based on her bearing of children to extend the lineage, then there can be the illusion of harmony, or love. Love has always been problematic in Western culture. For many people it is the be all and end all of their lives. But it is a distortion of basic human relations, and is based on dualism and dominance. It is the tactic of the person who has no power with those who have complete domination over them attempting to cajole them into treating them fairly and amicably. But in terms actual power relations, it is a conjured illusion. It attempts to invoke the holoid in human relations in order to stave off the stark realities of the economic trade of women. It is like the holoid, the elusive wholeness, which is the opposite of the ever present hollowness produced by unrelenting dualistic power relations. The importance of marriage is primarily in the support of the male lineage. The intimate relations are on the whole secondary, and dispensable to that ultimate goal. (It might be said in passing that much of Islamic law is concerned with the protection of women in the patriarchal regime.) Apollo says that marriage is stronger than oaths. This is because it involves the establishment of a non-nihilistic distinction between the married and unmarried woman. The married woman is bonded to a lineage. This bond needs to be strong because patriarchy is in some sense unnatural. You know who your mother is because you are born from her and are nurtured by her. But you can only know who your father is by the isolation of the mother from all other men. In a matriarchal society, this identification is not important. But in a patriarchal society, it is crucial. The isolation of women is the basic foundation of patriarchy; isolation before marriage in their father's home so they will be virgins; isolation after marriage from all other men to assure that the children born are a continuation of the lineage. But you cannot tell a married woman from an unmarried woman by just looking at her, unless there is some external culturally approved sign. The hymen has always served as the external sign even though it is, in fact, a poor indicator of virginity. So this is a non-nihilistic distinction. No such distinction is necessary in matriarchy. Patriarchy forces Indo-European society to make non-nihilistic distinctions in human relations. This is the one important difference between the two systems. Going "against nature," the patriarchal system introduces artificial relations between human beings. The marriage relations are twisted into dualistic power relations. But the important side effect is that Indo-European society is forced to make non-nihilistic distinctions between women that are not necessary in other kinds of kinship systems. The over emphasis on this relation makes the marriage bond more important. The tragedy of the Oresteia underlines this shift by transforming the Furies from guardians of blood ties to guardians of marriage ties.
and graves them on tablets of his mind.7
Some say that it is at this time that the introduction of retribution after death is introduced into Greek thinking. We have already seen it in Anaximander's fragment, and here it is again clearly expressed. The Furies want "blood for blood," and they say "each revives the pain his pains exact." This reckoning, if it does not happen on earth, then occurs at the last reckoning beneath the earth. The Furies want to exact their punishment now in this world. Clytaemnestra wants them to do so in order to save her honor among the dead. But the gods act toward this retribution to delay it. The retribution in this world appears as a cancellation. Blood wipes away the stain of blood. Pain answers pain. The Furies are the agents of cancellation, the desire for revenge left even when there are no other agents to enact revenge. Cancellation is, of course, the means of remaining invisible of the unconscious. What is symmetrical causes difference to disappear, and without difference there is no consciousness or manifestation. This is because symmetry is exactly the inability to tell whether a transposition or transformation has been made after the fact. Likewise cancellation erases differences. Thus, after a cancellation it is impossible to tell that the things that cancelled were there before. They each cancel each other exactly like a wave and its opposite. Where there was motion and difference, now there is no difference and an artificial calm that suppresses the differences that existed before the cancellation. So the essence of the Furies' action is cancellation, which is anti-manifestation. Their work is to hide. It is the opposite of the work of Aphrodite who represents the strong attraction between men and women that overpowers and destroys the marriage vow. Here the Furies support the maternal relations and ignore the marriage linkages through overpowering cancellation which de-manifests all those who break the ancient law forbidding murder of blood relations. The closed autopoietic system remains closed by mustering the strong powers of anti-manifestation. Using these powers, it closes in on itself and keeps itself closed, cancelling anything that seeks to break it open.
and the dead find little freedom in the end.8
The Furies are a manifestation of Clytaemnestra when she is killed. She called them up as a spell by her unholy sacrifices to Cathonic spirits at midnight. Now they work their magic on Orestes by their dance and singing. As we go deeper into the realms of the negative fourfold, we see more and more that it is linked with the dark magic of women, with witchcraft. Women who are powerless within a patriarchal society call back to their own gods for help. Those are the gods of the earth which hold the dead and are the source of living things which spring up seemingly parthenogenetic. These are the gods of the Old Europeans, female gods of the earth who dance together and sing, forming a ring which resonates. The autopoietic ring. The Furies must act together to call up their magic spell. They have no identity alone, but only as a group, and that identity stems from the exercise of their potent magic. Magic which is deep like that of Varuna, but naturally feminine magic that flows from the life springs they represent. The Furies are like the mad women who follow Dionysus. In fact, we can see that Dionysus arrives late to the ceremony and puts a male face on it. It is the song of the Sirens that draw men on to destruction. It is the old song that rings and protects the woman as she gives birth. But as we see it here, the power comes from the Fates, and it is the power to bind. This is Varuna's power. Apollo claims that marriage is Fate. That it comes directly from the Fates, this man gets this woman, that is Fate, and by that he claims precedents of the bonds of marriage over the bond of kin. But clearly we see that either way, the power of binding which comes from the angel can either be expressed in a feminine way or a masculine way. The Furies express it in a feminine way, and it is the binding of the autopoietic ring together into a closed and sacred circle. It is a magic learned at the hearth at midnight, at a time not belonging to any of the gods of light. We shall later see how the son of the king also learns this magic of Varuna in order to bind the Indo-European society together.
groping through the mist and sun-starved night.9
The center holds -- this is a key phrase. Through their dance they establish the center. This makes them self-organizing; alone they are nothing. But acting together they can produce a center and revolve around that center making Fate manifest in those who have transgressed the ancient law. They themselves do not destroy their victim. They merely hound him, driving him on and on without respite until he destroys himself. It is restlessness, a madness that they visit on their victims. Thus, the Furies action is cognitive, not physical. In the autopoietic system, there are these two aspects. The actual physical self-organization through reproduction, and the cognitive view of the observer. But with our own life we are our own observer, and it is this function that goes awry with the action of the Furies. The murderer becomes obsessed with his action, and turning in on himself, moves ever on toward self destruction (like McBeth's wife who says "out, out damn spot"). It is as if when the reproductive mechanism is destroyed, the associated cognitive function goes astray, turning in on itself to destroy those who broke the reproductive mechanism that came from that very mechanism. The Furies are the trace in the cognitive realm of the reproductive mechanism in the offspring.
Athena arrives to take charge of the situation when the Furies have found Orestes clutching the knees of Athena's idol pleading for mercy. Athena calls for a trial to judge the matter, and then realizes that it is a wicked problem which gives an unsatisfactory answer either way, so she decides to shift the blame to men and calls for a jury of mortals. The last speech of the Furies before the trial sums up the problem eloquently.
rams on the reef or law and drowns unwept, unseen.10
With this speech we realize that the gods themselves partake in this heritage. Kronos kills and dethrones Uranus, and Zeus does the same to him. Thus, the whole structure of the positive fourfold is founded on the kind of wrong against parents that the Furies guard against. Heaven and earth were separated by Kronos who is the equivalent to the Sumarian Enlil in this act. That cleavage is made by Kronos who is repaid by his own son Zeus for his own injustices. Now men are oriented toward the immortals who are the product of this history of injustice to parents based on the prior injustices to children. The Furies were born out of the injustice to Uranus by Kronos, the first example of such a wrong. It is at that moment that the Furies split from Aphrodite as she was produced. It is Aphrodite that gives drive to the reproductive mechanism, and it is the Furies that stand guard over the progenitors of every generation taking part in that reproductive mechanism. The Furies, as has been said, represent the cognitive dimension of the autopoietic system. But the positive fourfold, from the point of view of this older law, is totally unjust; thus, the children of Zeus from the Furies' point of view should have no power to prevent them from carrying out their mission. The positive fourfold is built on suspicious foundations, and the Furies point this out during the trial. Apollo can only reply with outrage when the dethronement of Kronos is mentioned. But this should lead us to suspect the positive fourfold. From the point of view of the negative fourfold, the cleavage between heaven and earth is a sacrilege. Then the immortals can only stand over that cleavage by the second injustice of Zeus. Each injustice creates the distinctions that make the positive fourfold possible. In this manner, we can impute that the light of the positive fourfold is perhaps not all sweetness and light. It is a harsh light, the harsh light of reality which is mentioned several times in the plays. It is a light tinted or contaminated with injustice. The negative fourfold is nothing other than the state of affairs where these injustices have not been perpetrated to create the artificial distinctions upon which the world is based. With no separation of Uranus from Gaia in the first place, then all would have been eternal night. The Furies allude to this in calling on Mother Night. When Uranus appeared parthenogenetic from the Earth, he covered it, introducing a double darkness. When Konos unmanned him in order to allow manifestation to unfurl, then chaos was created. The Furies are the manifestation of that Chaos. Again when Kronos was dethroned, he was thrown into the Abyss so that the oblivion of Tartarus appears. Each stage of injustice is related to a stage of the negative fourfold. Without the injustices of the gods, neither the negative or positive fourfold would appear. Before the unfolding of these dual faces of manifestation, the world had some other essential form not tainted by injustice.
This is a significant statement. It relates suffering to truth as they appear related many times in the plays. It says that it is good for those who commit crimes to learn the consequences of their acts. But it goes on to say that a man who knows no fear in himself is one with the city that knows no fear. This equation is exactly that which Plato makes a foundation of his philosophy -- the identity of the self and the city, especially in the case where the Good reigns. The Furies go on to say:
The Furies go on to say that we must strive for a middle road between anarchy and enslavement by tyrants. These are nihilistic opposites of complete freedom and lack of freedom related directly to binding. They say god will give you power if you strike a balance. But this god cannot be the jinn from Olympus mentioned in the next line. It must be Varuna who is the one who binds and from whom the Furies gather their power. The god behind the Olympians who is usually identified with Uranus. For the Hittites, this was not the first god in the series, but the second. The important point is that the gods of Olympus create laws that may change and vary, but the old law expressed by the Furies does not change. It sets free those who do no wrong, and binds those who transgress its boundaries. It is dispassionate and constant. It is unlike the laws of the jinn which seem to be completely arbitrary. The arbitrariness of the tyrant combined with the anarchy which flows from the feuds between the gods themselves. The measure of the Furies is a constant one, which says that blood relations should not destroy each other. It is the Furies that make retribution in this world for wrongs by children to parents. The Furies stand against the positive fourfold which embodies injustice completely. They stand for the old law which existed before the jinn took control, for the law of angels that kept the Balance of Cosmic Harmony. That law supported the matriarchy which, in the era of Kronos, worshiped Aphrodite, prior to the advent of Delphi, and the navel of the world. When the Furies stood at the shrine at Delphi there was a powerful image of the confrontation between these two "cultures." In the harsh light of day, these creatures appear to be monsters. But from the other perspective, it is the new gods, whose very power is based on fratricide, who are the monsters. As even Freud says Patriarchy is based ultimately on fratricide.
he can overturn and never strain for breadth.11
Here is Apollo's outrage to the crucial point the Furies have against the gods of Olympus. The Furies say mark it well, because in it is a clue to the sham of the positive fourfold and its foundations in injustice. The Furies are detested because they can bring this truth. And perhaps their detestable shape only appears in the harsh light of the positive fourfold where that light is tinged with injustice. Perhaps where injustice does not hold sway, their beauty is the same as that of Aphrodite. In fact, perhaps in the depths of the earth they are Aprhodite. All the hags and female monsters of Greek mythology are twisted by the harsh light of the positive fourfold that make all women monsters, when the negative characteristics imputed to them are merely the obverse of the characteristics of the positive fourfold. Every dualistic domination calls for something subservient to be devalued. For the Western worldview, it is women who take the brunt of this abuse. But when we see that Aphrodite and the Furies are the same, it throws the question back on the positive fourfold to answer what distortions it has introduced to make one lovely and alluring, and the other repulsive. Alluring and repulsive, like all the opposites in the enframing, are nihilistic, too extreme, sham, opposites which is written in to cover up genuine gender duality with the mask, now ugly, now with trumped up beauty which, when one looks close, is itself repulsive as well. Apollo gives everything away when he says that they have ways to unbind. Varuna is the binder, and Zeus' claim to sovereignty is the ability to unbind. Kronos broke free, then Zeus likewise. The jinn always claim that their magic allows them to violate the RTA and act freely without fear of binding. For the immortal ones, it is binding that is their greatest fear. It is interesting that when Zeus was bound by a revolt by Apollo himself, it was Thetis who had the power to unbind him. And she set one of the hundred-handed ones over him to protect him from being bound. So what Apollo says here is not exactly true. Theits is the one who has these ingenious powers, and later we will explore exactly what those powers are and why they are important. Apollo, in the same breath, indicates the major limitation to which the gods admit which is that they cannot reverse death. It is a secret that they themselves are vulnerable to death, a secret that Dionysus gives the clue to, and exactly when Zeus will be overthrown is known only to Prometheus, the friend of Mankind. Together, these three statements in the speech of Apollo give an incredible picture of the relation between the positive fourfold and the powers of binding from Varuna. In this harsh light, Aphrodite appears grotesque and in multiplicity as the Furies. The gods boast that they cannot be bound, which is not strictly true, because it is Theits who holds the power to unbind. But they admit to be foiled by death, the binding of fate. And we know from other sources that their immortality is a lie as well. So we wonder whether both their ability to unbind and to allude death are illusory and related.
but such a stock no goddess could conceive!12
This famous speech is clearly wrong to anyone who has seen how all children bear resemblance to mother as well as father. It is an extreme statement which Apollo throws down to win his case. Later unfortunately Aristotle argues for the same position. But like the two statements that aroused our suspicions before, this one is attempts to justify murder of the mother in the most blatant of ways. Pure rhetoric insults all women, in the tradition of the Greeks, but this is a particularly blatant example. This disenfranchisement of women is what creates the split between the negative and positive fourfold. Here the god of light uses Athena as an example of the ability of man to produce children without a woman. But he does not mention Hephaestus who it is rumored was generated by Hera alone. This is why Athena and Hephaestus are a pair. Both come from Zeus and Hera as creations without their mates. Athena is the nihilistic opposite of Dionysus. In them, we have woman as embodiment of the positive fourfold, and man as the embodiment of the negative fourfold. Here masculinity and femininity have traded roles with respect to the normal faces of manifestation associated with either sex. The darkness of the womb is used to represent the darkness of the negative fourfold which is found in the houses, in the caves, in the wilderness. The clearing-in-being, produced by the positive fourfold, is dependent on the surrounding darkness of the forrest. Without the contrast the light in the clearing cannot be experienced as intensified. Athena (and Dionysus) represent the rolling over of opposites into their opposites; the negative fourfold turning into the positive and vice versa. At that point of transition the masculine/feminine and light/dark polarities are exchanged to show ambiguousness. Athena is the extreme of the positive fourfold, extremity of light representing the intellect.
The lots of the judges are equal, and Athena, because she has no mother, breaks the tie with a vote for the patriarchy, betraying her sex who Apollo has disenfranchised. She is her father's favorite. After Orestes has left, getting off scott free, Athena attempts to convince the Furies to stay in Athens and make it their home. Slowly she persuades them, and they give up their hatred for the rewards she promises.
to hold forever, you will praise my words.13
She seems to bribe the Furies with gifts, but she keeps offering them part of marriage as theirs to guard and keep. Finally they accept.
Athena sends the Furies back to the core of the earth, persuaded that it is better to adopt marriage as an institution and accept the home and gifts of Athens. Fittingly, the women of Athens escort the Furies back to their home in the earth.
Cry, cry, in triumph, carry on the dancing on and on.14
The dance of the Furies is the representation of the autopoietic ring. It is the source of Good because it becomes a stable platform for pointing toward the Good. Between the Fate from the single source and the positive fourfold of Zeus' reign, the Furies, like Aphrodite, stand as intermediaries. Athena turns the Furies into sources of good for Athens, just like Plato attempts to appropriate it for his lower utopia. What the Furies have shown us is that manifestation has two sides. The positive and negative fourfolds are completely intertwined as a single system. The women are disenfranchised by the Patriarchal system and become the objects of dualistic power relations that render them victims. Agamemnon killed his daughter for the sake of pursuing war. Women are crushed under the weight of these dualistic relations, slaves both at home and when taken captive in war. They are projected as the embodiment of the negative fourfold which is really just the dark underside of the structure of ontological monism. The same characteristics are projected on slaves, barbarians, workers in other than agriculture, and all Others. It is the darkside of the Greek fear of diversity. But light and dark form a single nihilistic dualistic system which destroys humanity by disenfranchising all those who do not hold power, and equally destroying those who hold power through the awful pall of denied retribution hanging over their heads.
1The Eumenides; Aeschylus; page 232-3; lines 40-65
2The Eumenides; Aeschylus; page 233-4; lines 70-80
3The Eumenides; Aeschylus; page 235-6; lines 97-120
4The Eumenides; Aeschylus; page 238-9; lines 175-195
5The Eumenides; Aeschylus; page 240; lines 205 - 221
6See Eva Kuel The Reign of the Phallus
7The Eumenides; Aeschylus; page 243; lines 255-275
8The Eumenides; Aeschylus; page 246; lines 305-340
9The Eumenides; Aeschylus; page 248; 390-407
10The Eumenides; Aeschylus; pages 253-255; lines 505-570
11The Eumenides; Aeschylus; page 260; lines 650-660
12The Eumenides; Aeschylus; pages 260; lines 665-680
13The Eumenides; Aeschylus; page 268; lines 840-845
14The Eumenides; Aeschylus; page 276-77; lines 1043-1057
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