Okay. That’s New
I am a classics student. This means that I study classical myth, religion, literature, society, archaeology and history. I am also studying Latin for the second time in my life.
While some aspects of classics can be rather serious, Greek and Roman myth at times most certainly is anything but serious. To quote a friend, when asked how she could laugh at Greek myth, she replied with “how can you not?”
Seriously. With Achilles sitting on the sidelines like a whiny kid who didn’t get to do everything he wanted, “deviant sexuality” and random transformations abounding, how can one take some things seriously? There’s a reason we sit in the back of the lecture theatre giggling at some of the stories we hear.
But today’s lecture on Procris and the many variations of her story, from innocent virgin unfairly tested, to a more culpable adulteress, created a new level of WTF. Even for me, and I liked to consider myself reasonably well-versed in at least some weird and wacky myths.
In his Metamorphoses, Ancient Greek grammarian Antoninus Liberalis writes the following in his tale of Procris and her hound:
In shame Procris forsook Cephalus and went off as a fugitive to Minos the king of Crete. She found on arrival that he was afflicted by childlessness and promised a cure, showing him how to beget children. Now Minos would ejaculate snakes, scorpions and millipedes, killing the women with whom he had intercourse.
But his wife Pasiphaë, daughter of the Sun, was immortal. Procris accordingly devised the following to make Minos fertile. She inserted the bladder of a goat into a woman and Minos first emitted the snakes into the bladder; then he went over to Pasiphaë and entered her. And when children were born to them, Minos gave Procris his spear as his dog. No animal could escape these two and they always reached their target.
Just in case you missed it, here’s the point which made us go, “Ouch.” Not to mention WTF.
Now Minos would ejaculate snakes, scorpions and millipedes, killing the women with whom he had intercourse.
Now that sounds like a bad STD. Yowch.
And thus concludes my tale of the myth that made even me go “WTF?!”.