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The History, Psychology, and Philosophy of Magic

Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus, by John William Waterhouse (1891).
Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus, by John William Waterhouse (1891).

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Many years ago, I went through a phase at cocktail parties. Whenever someone asked me, ‘So, what do you do?’, I would reply, ‘I’m a magician.’ I kept a straight face, but was laughing inside.

The word ‘magic’ derives from the Latin, the Greek, the Old Persian, and, ultimately, the Proto-Indo-European magh, ‘to help, to be able, to be powerful’, from which also derive the words ‘almighty’, ‘maharaja’, ‘main’, ‘may’, and… ‘machine’. We come full circle with Clarke’s Third Law, which states: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’

Magic, like religion, is deeply embedded in the human psyche. Though it has, effectively, been banished from the land, still it surfaces in thought and language, in phrases such as ‘I must be cursed’ and ‘He’s under your spell’; in children’s stories and other fiction; and in psychological processes such as undoing, which involves thinking a thought or carrying out an act in an attempt to negate a previous uncomfortable thought or act.

Examples of undoing include the absent father who periodically returns to spoil and smother his children, and the angry wife who throws a plate at her husband and then tries to ‘make it up’ by smothering him in kisses. The absent father and angry wife are not merely trying to make amends for their behaviour, but also, as if by magic, to ‘erase it from the record’.

Another example of undoing is the man who damages a friend’s prospects and then, a few days later, turns up at his door bearing a small gift. Rituals such as confession and penitence are, at least on some level, socially condoned and codified forms of undoing.

Even if the world doesn’t work by magic, our mind often does—and projects its thinking back onto the world.

What Magic Is

‘Magic’ is difficult to define, and its definition remains a matter of debate and controversy. One way of understanding it is by comparing and contrasting it to religion on the one hand and to science on the other.

On the assumption that certain entities can exert a hidden influence on one another, magic is a method of acting in the world through sheer power of will. The notion that the universe is pregnant with subtle connexions is supported by, of all things, the study of mathematics, and it can sometimes seem, when a hidden number or relationship suddenly becomes apparent, that maths is at only one remove from magic.

Magic is often considered a gift, such that some people have it to a high degree and others, the muggles, barely at all, perhaps because their will is weak, unsettled, or untrained, or because magic does not run in their family—for like madness, or kingship, magic is often hereditary. Whatever the case, people without magic are usually portrayed as lacking in cognitive faculties such as insight, intuition, and imagination, and would not see possibility or irony or poetry even if it slapped them in the face.

Kinds of Magic: White and Black, High and Low

Magic is sometimes divided into white and black, and high and low. Black magic is selfish and does not consider other people, whereas white magic is altruistic or selfless, and seeks in general to maintain or restore the equilibrium of the universe. The magician’s psychological makeup determines what kind of magic, white or black, he or she is able or likely to wield.

Speaking of equilibrium, deflecting objects and especially people from their natural or pre-ordained course is likely to have significant repercussions, which is why, aside from the mental effort and exhaustion, the use of magic is often said to come at a price, either to the magician, his or her client (for want of a better term), or a third party. The equilibrium must, ultimately, be maintained. Drinking wine, I often say, is like using magic: there’s always a price to pay—if only the price of the bottle.

The magician is, in effect, a mediator of energies. Low magic involves drawing up energies from the earth, from plants and minerals and so on, and is more the province of common folk. High magic involves drawing down raw, unprocessed energies from the sun and sky, which requires complex ritual and is more the province of an educated or trained elite. Both high magic and low magic can be either white or black.

In the popular imagination, low magic has often been associated with women—the witch, wise woman, or herbalist—while high magic has more often been associated with men: the mage, wizard, sorcerer, or alchemist. This distinction may owe less to magic than to history: learned magic required literacy, education, and access to books and institutions, privileges that were overwhelmingly reserved for men. Notable exceptions include Circe and her niece Medea, two of the most powerful sorceresses in Greek mythology—but Circe was a goddess, and Medea a granddaughter of the sun god Helios.

The magician cultivates his or her will through concentration—acquiring charisma in the process—and focuses it through ritual such as ceremony, chant, or spell. Ritual also helps to create the right atmosphere and attitude for magic to take hold. Words, in particular, can exert a power all of their own. In the language of Ancient Egypt, the sound of a word had a magical power which complemented its meaning, a view of language which we still retain when we talk of ‘spelling’ a word, or visit a psychotherapist. And while words can change the world, getting them wrong, that is, misspelling, can have disastrous consequences. If they had told us at school that we were learning magic, we would have paid a lot more attention.

When Magicians Were Priests, Doctors, and Philosophers

Historically, the priest, the physician, the magician, and the scholar might have been one and the same person: the shaman, the sorcerer.

In the West, pre-Socratics such as Pythagoras and Empedocles moonlighted as mystics and miracle workers—or perhaps, since the term ‘philosophy’ is held to have been invented by Pythagoras, moonlighted as philosophers. Pythagoras claimed to have lived four lives and to remember them all in great detail, and once recognised the cry of his dead friend in the yelping of a puppy. After his death, the Pythagoreans deified him, and attributed him with a golden thigh and the gift of bilocation.

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates argues that there are, in fact, two kinds of madness: one resulting from human illness, but the other arising from a divinely inspired release from normally accepted behaviour. This divine form of madness, says Socrates, has four parts: love, poetry, inspiration, and mysticism, which is the particular gift of Dionysus.

While Socrates, in some sense the father of logic, seldom claimed to have any real knowledge, he did claim to have a daimonion or ‘divine something’, an inner voice or intuition that prevented him from making grave mistakes such as getting involved in politics, or fleeing Athens after being sentenced to death: ‘This is the voice which I seem to hear murmuring in my ears, like the sound of the flute in the ears of the mystic…’

Far from being a thing of the distant past, this trope of the philosopher-sorcerer outlived the sack of Athens and the fall of Rome, and perdured well into the Enlightenment. The economist John Maynard Keynes, upon buying a trove of Isaac Newton’s papers, observed that Newton and the physicists of his time were ‘not the first of the scientists, but the last of the sorcerers’. Other notable later occultists include Giordano Bruno, Nostradamus, Paracelsus, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and Arthur Conan Doyle, father of the hyper-rational Sherlock Holmes.

Magic vs Religion

Yet since antiquity, the West has had an uncomfortable relationship with magic, usually regarding it as something foreign and ‘Eastern’. In Plato’s Meno, Meno compares Socrates to the flat torpedo fish, which torpifies or numbs all those who come near it: ‘And I think that you are very wise in not [leaving Athens], for if you did in other places as you do in Athens, you would be cast into prison as a magician.’

For the Greeks as for the Romans, magic represented an improper and potentially subversive expression of religion. After centuries of contra-legislation, in 357 CE, the Christian Roman emperor Constantius II finally banned it outright:

No one shall consult a haruspex, a diviner, or a soothsayer, and wicked confessions made to augurs and prophets must cease. Chaldeans, magicians, and others who are commonly called malefactors on account of the enormity of their crimes shall no longer practice their infamous arts.

The Bible, too, inveighs against magic, in more than a hundred places, for example, picked almost at random:

  • Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. —Exodus 22:18 (KJV)
  • Regard not them that have familiar spirits, neither seek after wizards, to be defiled by them: I am the Lord your God. —Leviticus 19:31
  • But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death. —Revelation 21:8

Early Christians associated magic with mythopoeic thought, in which all of nature is full of gods and spirits, and therefore with paganism and, by extension, with demons. During the Reformation, Protestants accused the Church of Rome, with its superstitions, relics, and exorcisms, of being ‘more magic than religion’—a charge that transferred all the more to non-Christian peoples, and that, notoriously, served as a justification for large-scale persecution, colonisation, and Christianisation.

So, what exactly is the difference between magic and religion? It is often held that magic is older than religion, or that religion was born out of magic, but it may be that they co-existed, and were not distinguished.

Both magic and religion pertain to the sacred sphere, to things removed from everyday life. But, compared to religion, magic does not split so sharply between the natural and the supernatural, the earthly and the divine, the fallen and the blessed. And whereas magic involves harnessing the world to the will, religion involves subjugating the will to the world. In the words of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘religion consists in a humanisation of natural laws, and magic in a naturalisation of human actions’.

Hence, magic tends to be about specific problems, and to involve private rites and rituals. Religion, in contrast, tends towards the bigger picture, and to involve communal worship and belonging. ‘Magic’, said the sociologist Émile Durkheim, ‘does not result in binding together those who adhere to it, nor in uniting them into a group leading a common life. There is no Church of magic.’

So, one hypothesis is that, as man gained increasing control over nature, magic, as it came to be called, lost ground to religion, which, being communal and centralised, evolved a hierarchy that sought to suppress those practices that threatened its dogma and dominance.

Magic vs Science

But now religion is, in its turn, on the decline—in favour of science. What is science? Within academia, there are, in fact, no clear or reliable criteria for distinguishing a science from a non-science. For example, is ‘political science’ really a science? What might be said is that all sciences share certain assumptions which underpin the scientific method—in particular, that there is an objective reality governed by uniform laws, and that this reality can be discovered by systematic observation.

But, as I argue in my book, Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking, every scientific paradigm that has come and gone is now deemed to have been false, inaccurate, or incomplete, and it would be ignorant or arrogant to assume that our current ones might amount to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

The philosopher Paul Feyerabend went so far as to claim that there is no such thing as ‘a’ or ‘the’ scientific method: behind the façade, ‘anything goes’, and, as a form of knowledge, science is no more privileged than magic or religion.

More than that, science has come to occupy the same place in the human psyche as religion once did. Although science began as a liberating movement, it grew dogmatic and repressive, more of an ideology than a rational method that leads to ineluctable progress.

To quote Feyerabend:

Knowledge is not a series of self-consistent theories that converges toward an ideal view; it is rather an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible (and perhaps even incommensurable) alternatives, each single theory, each fairy tale, each myth that is part of the collection forcing the others into greater articulation and all of them contributing, via this process of competition, to the development of our consciousness.

Whatever one makes of Feyerabend’s provocation, science differs from magic in its method. Magic begins with hidden sympathies; science with verifiable hypotheses. Yet, once the human mind gets involved, the boundary between the two becomes less clear, and Newton spent more of himself on his secret alchemy than on his public science. 

So, Does Magic Work?

So far, I’ve been talking as if magic works. But does it work, and, if so, how?

Unless one broadens the definition of magic to include cognitive faculties such as insight, intuition, and imagination, or simply peak performance, magic does not work, or, at least, not in an immediate, instrumental sense. But magic might work indirectly, by focussing the mind and energies on a particular problem, or through a mechanism akin to the placebo effect or psychoneuroimmunology.

The term ‘placebo effect’ derives from the Latin placere (‘to please’) and refers to the tendency for a remedy to ‘work’ simply because it is expected to do so. In essence, people who associate taking a remedy with improvement may come to expect improvement if they take a remedy, even if the ‘remedy’ in question is no more than an inert substance, or a substance that has no therapeutic effect but only adverse effects that can be interpreted as indicative of a therapeutic effect. It may be that the expectation alone suffices to mimic the effect of the remedy, and brain imaging studies indicate that, in some cases, remedies and their placebos activate the very same mechanisms in the nervous system.

Remedies that are perceived to be more potent have a stronger placebo effect. Perceptions of potency are influenced by factors such as the remedy’s size, shape, colour, route of administration, and general availability. A brightly coloured injection administered by a silver-haired professor of medicine can be expected to have a much stronger placebo effect, and therefore a much stronger overall effect, than the unremarkable over-the-counter tablet recommended by the teenager next door. When doctors in England lost their white coat, they lost much more than a coat.

This highlights the importance of the psychological, social, and cultural context in which a treatment or intervention is administered, and, more particularly, the significance of the therapeutic act or ritual. If the practitioner, the patient, and their society believe in the magic, then the magic is real by the very force of that shared belief.

No wonder the magician, the priest, and the healer used to be one and the same person—and, in many societies, still is. Like religion, magic may represent a response to anxiety, distress, and a feeling of inadequacy or impotence, especially in the face of natural disaster. And like religion, it may represent a spiritual path, akin, perhaps, to a martial art, which also involves concentrating the mind, channelling instinctual drives, and leveraging forces.

So, does magic work? Yes and no.

Magic as a Mirror of the Mind

Whether it works or not, magic is an external projection of the human psyche, an external projection of our internal or psychological truth, which is why it features so prominently in fiction. Fairy tales often begin with a formulation such as, ‘Once upon a time in dreamland’, and magic is that dreamland. Like dreams, magic makes use of condensed symbols, and like dreams, it is a kind of wish fulfilment.

In the same vein, magic might be compared with mental states such as psychosis and neurosis, which, like dreams, can also involve condensed symbols and wish fulfilment. Sigmund Freud linked magical rituals and spells with neurotic and obsessional thought processes, and there are some parallels with compulsive acts, which are a response to obsessional thoughts or rules that must be rigidly applied.

Magic is, arguably, on a spectrum with madness, and magical thinking is especially prominent in schizotypy, or schizotypal personality disorder, which predisposes to schizophrenia—and, indeed, to shamanism. As I’ve said, Plato distinguished between madness resulting from human illness and madness arising from a divinely inspired release from normally accepted behaviour. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates says that this divinely inspired madness has four forms: mysticism, inspiration, poetry, and love. Love, according to Socrates, is not a god, as most people think, but a great spirit (daimon) that intermediates between gods and men.

Similarly, in The Sorcerer and His Magic (1963), the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss argues that magic is a mediator between normal thought processes (common sense, reason, science…), which suffer from a marked deficit of meaning, and pathological thought processes, which abound with meaning:

From any non-scientific perspective (and here we can exclude no society), pathological and normal thought processes are complementary rather than opposed. In a universe which it strives to understand but whose dynamics it cannot fully control, normal thought continually seeks the meaning of things which refuse to reveal their significance. So-called pathological thought, on the other hand, overflows with emotional interpretations and overtones, in order to supplement an otherwise deficient reality… We might borrow from linguistics and say that so-called normal thought always suffers from a deficit of meaning, whereas so-called pathological thought (in at least some of its manifestations) disposes of a plethora of meaning. Through collective participation in shamanistic curing, a balance is established between these two complementary situations.

The function of magic may not be to explain the world or act upon it so much as to imbue it with meaning. Science can tell us why an eclipse occurs; magic can tell us what the eclipse might mean. The first is a question of cause, the second of significance—and man, uniquely, is an animal in search of meaning. Which is why animals may have pointed ears, but never pointed hats.

Why We Miss Magic

Today, magic, like mythopoeic thought, is seen as ‘primitive’, and has largely been relegated to fiction and illusionism. But as a result, people have come to associate magic with delight and wonder; and with the retreat of Christianity, at least from Europe, a growing number are returning to some form of paganism as a path to personal and spiritual development.

A common trope in fantasy fiction is the ‘thinning’ of magic: magic is fading or has been banished from the land, which is caught in a perpetual winter or otherwise in deathly or depressive decline, and the hero is called upon to rescue and restore the life-giving forces of old.

It is easy to draw the parallel with our own world, in which magic has been progressively driven out, first by religion, which over the centuries became increasingly repressive of magic, and latterly by science with its zero-tolerance.

The sociologist Max Weber referred to it as the ‘disenchantment of the world’. The more completely the world can be calculated, predicted, and explained, the less room it leaves for mystery, correspondence, and intrinsic meaning. Although we have gained enormously in knowledge and control, something may have been lost in the exchange—and by gaining control, we have, ironically, lost control of the planet.

Some of my regular readers may have wondered why I turned my pen to so apparently frivolous a subject as magic. But we now know that magic is much more profound than it may at first seem. Aside from its links with madness and with healing, it is a mirror of the mind, and even, like love or beauty, and science and religion, a mode of belonging to the world.

Perhaps this is why magic has survived every attempt to banish it. Though we may no longer believe in sorcerers and spells, we continue to fall under charms, break curses, tempt fate, thank our lucky stars, and search for signs. We still speak the language of magic because that is the oldest and truest part of us.

That is why, when we read fantasy fiction, it is always for the side of the old magic that we root, for a time when everything shone brightly and we didn’t have to go around begging for meaning.

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What Homer’s Odyssey Teaches Us About Great Literature

Odysseus and Calypso
The longest journey is the one home to ourselves.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Why do some books remain alive for thousands of years while others, equally entertaining in their day, quietly disappear? The books that survive are those in which each generation discovers a different book. Even within a single lifetime, we never read the same book twice. Great books are mirrors. Every time we return to them, we see something different—not because the book has changed, but because we have grown. 

Homer’s Odyssey is perhaps the greatest example. No one simply receives Homer. Every translator, filmmaker, and reader enters into a conversation with him. Emily Wilson’s celebrated translation, the first complete English translation by a woman, has drawn renewed attention to aspects of the epic that many earlier translators scarcely noticed, particularly the experiences and voices of women. Wilson has argued that previous translators sometimes allowed their own assumptions to colour the text—for example, referring to enslaved palace women as ‘whores’ and ‘sluts’ where the Greek uses neutral terms or simple feminine pronouns. Christopher Nolan, meanwhile, has made a screen adaptation that many reviewers have read through the lens of contemporary concerns such as trauma, displacement, and identity. Every generation inherits the same three-thousand-year-old poem, yet somehow discovers a different Odyssey.

Part of the explanation lies in the hero himself. At first sight, Odysseus seems an unlikely everyman. He is a king, a war hero, the favourite of Athena, the architect of the Trojan Horse, and cleverer than almost everyone else. Yet Homer never reduces him to any one quality. Wilson famously translates his opening epithet, polytropos, as ‘complicated’: ‘Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost…’ Elsewhere Homer describes him as ‘much-enduring’ (polytlas) and ‘great-hearted’ (megalētōr). From the very beginning, Odysseus emerges not as a one-dimensional hero but as a many-sided human being, shaped as much by suffering as by triumph. In the twentieth century, Lord Raglan identified twenty-two recurring features of the mythical hero—miraculous birth, an attempt on the infant’s life, a royal destiny, and so on. Figures such as Theseus, Oedipus, and Moses satisfy twenty or more. Odysseus satisfies only eight. He stands halfway between mythical hero and ordinary man. Brave yet frightened, wise yet often foolish, loyal yet tempted, he struggles, learns, and changes. We do not admire Odysseus because he is perfect. We recognise ourselves in him because he isn’t.

Great books are psychologically spacious. Into them, we project not only ourselves, but our deepest concerns—and the concerns of our age. Looking into the Odyssey, Freud found a map of the unconscious. Simone Weil discovered a moral philosopher of attention. James Joyce found the voice of modern consciousness. Given my background as a psychiatrist and philosopher, I tend to read the Odyssey as a psychological and moral tale. On the surface, it is a geographical tale about a man trying to get home. But underneath, it is a psychological tale about finding our way home to ourselves and becoming the people we were meant to be. Every island offers Odysseus a different way of abandoning his journey—and abandoning himself. Each asks him the same question in a different form. The Lotus-Eaters ask, ‘Will you forget who you are?’ Circe asks, ‘Will you surrender your humanity to animality and pleasure?’ Calypso asks, ‘Will you give up your mortal life?’ The Cyclops Polyphemus asks, ‘Will you let your pride destroy you?’ The Cattle of Helios ask, ‘Can you resist immediate gratification?’ You, reading the same poem, may yet discover an entirely different Odyssey. That is not a weakness of the work. It is what enables it to endure.

Not all of us get to sail around the Mediterranean navigating Sirens and sea monsters. But all of us are on a journey home to ourselves. Like Odysseus, we too must grow and change before we can truly arrive. His wanderings are not simple delay but essential schooling. Every trial teaches him something—or, more importantly, strips something away. He must learn patience and perseverance, love and remembrance, humility and restraint… Only by losing and recovering himself does he become fit to return to Ithaca. Ithaca, or home, is not simply a place, but a life that feels genuinely our own.

The Odyssey does more than invite interpretation. It embraces it, making it part of the story itself. Many people imagine that the epic unfolds in straightforward chronological order, from Troy to Ithaca. In fact, most of the adventures for which it is famous—the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis—are narrated retrospectively, as Odysseus recounts them to the Phaeacians. But before he begins speaking, Homer has him weep. Hearing the bard Demodocus sing of Troy, Odysseus breaks down. Only then does he recover his own story. As he weaves his years of wandering into a coherent narrative, his voice blends with that of Homer. In telling his story, he transforms himself. His next journey will take him home.

For nearly three thousand years, we have become the Phaeacians, listening to a weary traveller trying to make sense of his life, as we try to make sense of our own. All along, we thought we were interpreting the Odyssey. All along, the Odyssey was interpreting us.

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Is Greek Myth Misogynistic?

The Gorgon Medusa
Medusa: monster or victim?

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Models, monsters, or victims? From Pandora and Medusa to Penelope, discover what Greek myth really says about women.

Greek mythology has captivated the Western imagination for almost three thousand years. Its stories of gods and heroes, monsters and marvels continue to inspire novels, films, paintings, and psychological and cultural theories. Yet, for all the reverence, modern readers are often struck by another recurring theme. Women seem repeatedly silenced or blamed, if not outright punished, pursued, or abducted.

The ancient Greeks undoubtedly lived in a patriarchal society. Political power, military glory, and public life belonged overwhelmingly to men, and many myths reflect the assumptions of the society that produced them. But Greek mythology is far too rich and varied to be reduced to a single attitude towards women. Some women serve as models of virtue, others as warnings against vice or excess; some are victims of gods and men, while others possess a power that rivals or even surpasses that of their male counterparts.

The women of Greek myth are queens and captives, wives and mothers, maidens and sorceresses, heroines and monsters. Together, they reflect the full spectrum of the Greek imagination. To understand what these stories are really saying about women—and about the civilisation that created them—we need to return to the myths themselves.

Pandora: The First Woman

Hesiod’s account of Pandora is among the earliest, and clearest, expressions of ancient Greek misogyny.

Prometheus had stolen fire from the gods and given it, in a fennel stalk, to mankind. Not content with punishing Prometheus, Zeus set about also to punish mankind. He ordered Hephaestus to mould the first woman out of earth and water, and each of the other gods to endow her with a ‘seductive gift’. He named this living snare Pandora [Greek, ‘All-gifted’] and sent her off to Epimetheus with a jar of evils in dowry.

Prometheus had forewarned his slow-witted brother not to accept any gift from Zeus, but Epimetheus took Pandora in and soon married her. After the wedding, Pandora remembered the jar. Although she had been told not to open it, her curiosity got the better of her. As she unsealed the lid, she released every evil into the world, bringing man’s golden age to its close. Aghast, she hastened to replace the lid, but all the contents of the jar had already escaped—all, that is, except for hope.

Like Eve in Genesis, Pandora carries the blame for the fallen world in which we live. Like Eve, she is overwhelmed by the urge to do the very thing that had been forbidden to her. But whereas Eve succumbs to temptation, Pandora is herself the temptation. She is created not as a helpmeet, but as a punishment. As Hesiod puts it, in the simplest, most direct Greek, she is kalon kakon, ‘a beautiful evil’.

Nor is Pandora alone. Helen’s beauty launches a thousand ships and destroys a city. Clytemnestra murders Agamemnon upon his return from Troy. Phaedra’s forbidden desire destroys Hippolytus. Again and again, women appear as the catalysts of male suffering.

If these were the only women in Greek mythology, the charge of misogyny would be difficult to deny. But, of course, they are not.

Penelope: The Faithful Wife

Penelope embodies the ancient ideal of womanhood. For twenty years, while Odysseus wanders the seas, she waits for him in Ithaca. Besieged by over a hundred suitors who assume her husband to be dead, she preserves both her marriage and the kingdom through patience, intelligence, and deception. By day she weaves a funeral shroud for her father-in-law Laertes; by night she unpicks her work, delaying the choice of a new husband until Odysseus finally returns to slay the suitors. 

Unlike Helen, Clytemnestra, and Phaedra, Penelope preserves rather than destroys her household.  Unlike Pandora, who unleashes chaos, Penelope restores order. She is not merely faithful but resourceful, matching Odysseus’ own cunning with a quieter, domestic intelligence.

Although an archetype, Penelope is not an exception. We might also think of Nausicaa, Alcestis, and Antigone. When King Alcinous offers Odysseus his daughter’s hand in marriage, Odysseus, thinking of Penelope, politely declines. Nausicaa graciously accepts his refusal, asking only that he remember her as the one who saved his life.

In Plato’s Symposium, Phaedrus contrasts the chicanery of Orpheus in seeking to cheat death to be reunited with Eurydice with the willingness of Alcestis to lay down her life for her husband Admetus when not even his elderly parents would do so. Alcestis was allowed to return alive from Hades, a rare reward indeed, whereas Orpheus returned empty-handed to be torn apart by women.

The goddesses, too, command profound respect. Athena, the goddess of wisdom and strategic intelligence, defies Zeus to champion Achilles; Artemis fiercely guards her independence; while Demeter’s grief at the loss of Persephone brings famine upon the earth. Male gods may rule Olympus, but they do not always have the final word.

Medusa: Monster or Victim?

No figure better illustrates the changing fortunes of women in Greek myth than Medusa. According to Ovid, when still a fair maiden, she was violated by Poseidon in a temple dedicated to Athena, who punished not Poseidon but Medusa, by turning her beautiful braids into snakes. Henceforth, anyone who met Medusa’s gaze would be turned into stone.

The treatment of Medusa by the Olympian gods is an epitome of rape culture: assaulted by Poseidon, who thought he had every right, and then blamed and punished for it by Athena in a case of one woman turning upon another to get in with the patriarchy. In fact, Athena and Medusa are not so different. Both represent a pole or extreme of how to deal with the threat of female autonomy, authority, and sexuality. A woman can be either a virgin or a mother, and if she is neither, she must be a whore or a monster.

Ovid’s origin story for Medusa is almost certainly a later elaboration of the original myth, which sits in the Perseus cycle—in which Medusa is presented as one of the three Gorgon sisters. Nonetheless, it captures the modern imagination: suddenly Medusa becomes another victim, and Perseus’ triumph acquires an unsettling moral ambiguity. Is this the defeat of an evil monster—or the final destruction of a blameless victim?

Medusa is both monster and victim. In this ambiguity or ambivalence, she is not alone. Helen oscillates between seductress and pawn, while Medea is at once a betrayed wife and an avenging murderess. Circe begins as a terrifying enchantress, before turning into Odysseus’s advisor and benefactor.

Philomela: The Silenced Voice

Ovid’s Metamorphoses reads almost as a catalogue of sexual assaults on women. Medusa, Daphne, Philomela, Io, Europa, Callisto…

Under the spell of Eros, Apollo fell head over heels for Daphne, and relentlessly pursued the sworn virgin. As he was about to catch up with her, she cried out, and her river god father Peneus turned her into a laurel tree. From then on, Apollo took to wearing laurel in his hair, whence the laurel wreath and our word ‘laureate’, as in, ‘Nobel Prize laureate’.

King Tereus raped his wife’s sister Philomela and then cut out her tongue. Unable to speak, she wove her ordeal into a tapestry and sent it to Procne, who in revenge killed her son by Tereus, cooked the boy, and served him up to his father. The sisters then presented Tereus with the boy’s severed head. As he pursued them with an axe, they prayed to be turned into birds: Philomela became the nightingale, and Procne the swallow.

Ovid’s pages are populated not only by dangerous women, but by women in danger. This growing sympathy may reflect Ovid’s own sensibilities, the influence of Greek tragedy, or changing attitudes over the centuries. Whatever the case, these women emerge not merely as symbols or warnings, but as fully human figures, capable of inspiring both horror and compassion.

The Greeks and Their Myths

Women in Ancient Egypt enjoyed many more rights than in classical Athens, for instance, the right to initiate divorce or dispose of property. In the art of the period, women are often depicted supporting or clasping their husband, and husband and wife referred to each other as ‘brother’ or ‘sister’, suggesting a relationship of near equality. In contrast, in classical Athens, women were regarded as chattel and were, in some respects, worse off than slaves. Aristotle, whose influence remains unsurpassed, regarded women as ‘deformed’ or ‘deficient’ males who lacked the deliberative capacity to rule. He even claimed that women had fewer teeth than men—when he could simply have looked into the mouth of Pythias, his wife (or perhaps his daughter; both bore the same name).

It would be surprising if the myths of the Greeks did not reflect their assumptions. Myth, however, is neither history nor ideology. It is less concerned with recording events or prescribing conduct than with exploring a culture’s deepest hopes, fears, and contradictions. Pandora expresses a fear of female autonomy and agency. Penelope embodies an ideal of fidelity and resourcefulness. Medusa explores the uneasy boundary between monster and victim. Philomela confronts the reality of violence and gives voice to the silenced victim. Athena, Artemis, and Demeter exercise an authority that surpasses even that of Agamemnon or Achilles. Rather than presenting a single image of womanhood, Greek mythology unfolds an entire panoply of female archetypes.

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Why the Greeks Thought Wine Deserved a God

Sick Bacchus, by Caravaggio
Caravaggio’s Young Sick Bacchus (in fact, a self-portrait) — To the Greeks, wine was not merely a drink but an affirmation of life in the face of death.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Would you turn the other cheek? Not that cheek. Discover the last and most unusual of the Olympian gods.

Dionysus was the god of wine, regeneration, fertility, ritual madness, ecstasy, theatre, and pleasure, among others. In certain times and places, or among certain people, he was the most important god—more important, even, than Zeus. Owing to his hold on the imagination, there is much mythical material surrounding him.

Dionysus was the son of Zeus and Semele, one of the four daughters of Cadmus. When Semele was pregnant with Dionysus, a jealous Hera persuaded her to ask Zeus to reveal himself to her ‘as he does to his wife’. Zeus reluctantly obliged, leading Semele to die from one of his thunderbolts. Zeus succeeded in saving his son from her womb, and stitched him into his thigh (probably a euphemism for his testicle)—whence the Dionysian epithet dimētōr, ‘of two mothers’, ‘twice-born’.

Following this second birth, Hermes placed Dionysus into the care of his aunt Ino and her husband Athamas, asking them to bring him up as a girl. Even in this guise, Hera recognised him and inflicted madness upon Ino and Athamas, who killed their children before killing themselves. To protect him, Zeus turned Dionysus into a kid, which Hermes spirited to the satyr Silenus and the mænads of Mount Nysa. Silenus became his tutor, and the centaur Chiron completed his education.

After the young Dionysus discovered the magical vine, Hera drove him mad. He roamed the world to escape from her while teaching mortals the secrets of winemaking. He travelled to Egypt and Syria, and even led a campaign into India. According to the historian Diodorus Siculus (d. 30 BCE), Dionysus taught all the known world how to make wine—except for Britain and Æthiopia. In Phrygia, he met the mother goddess Cybele, who taught him the mysteries and, by channelling it, cured him of his madness. He then established his cult and rites, inspired by those of Cybele.

While in Phrygia, Silenus wandered off drunk and was carried to King Midas. When Dionysus came to collect him, he offered Midas any wish. Midas asked for the power to turn whatever he touched into gold. Before dinner, he had turned every bush in his famed rose garden to gold. But he was horrified when his food and wine also turned to gold. His daughter tried to comfort him, but she too suffered the same fate. When Midas begged to be rescued, Dionysus told him to bathe in the River Pactolus, the golden sands of which later became the source of Croesus’ fabulous wealth.

Dionysus returned to Greece in a triumphal procession of satyrs and mænads. However, his wild and alien cult met with resistance. In Thrace, King Lycurgus captured his followers and drove Dionysus into the sea. Dionysus visited madness on Lycurgus—leading him to kill his wife and son and chop off his own legs in the belief that they were vines.

In his own city of Thebes, Dionysus was opposed by his cousin Pentheus, the son of Agave. The seer Tiresias urged Pentheus to embrace Dionysus, warning him, ‘Your blood [will be] poured out and defile the woods and your mother and sisters…’ But Pentheus forbade his worship, after which the women of Thebes lost their minds and left their homes to cavort in a frenzy on Mount Cithæron. Pentheus hid in a tree to spy on them, but the daughters of Cadmus found him and tore him apart from limb to limb. Agave tore off his head, put it on a pike, and took it to Cadmus—before realising what she had done.

Some time later, Dionysus chartered a ship manned by Tyrrhenian mercenaries. Believing him to be the son of a rich man, they sailed towards Asia with the intention of ransoming him. When they bound him to the mast, the bonds simply fell away. The helmsman Acoetes warned that this was no ordinary man, but the captain failed to change course. Dionysus filled the vessel with ivy and flute song, leading the mercenaries to lose their minds and leap into the sea. He then turned them into dolphins, sparing only Acoetes, who bore witness to his divinity.

On Naxos, Dionysus found Ariadne, who had been abandoned there by Theseus. Dionysus had countless lovers, both male and female, but married only Ariadne, giving her a crown and fixing it into the heavens as the constellation Corona. He then travelled to Hades to bring back his mother Semele, and all three ascended to Olympus.

The Meaning of Dionysus

Dionysus’ origins are shrouded in the mists of time, and it may be that he is a composite of a number of similar gods from far-flung times and places. His name is first attested on tablets recovered from Mycenæan Pylos, although its etymology is uncertain. The Greeks had many other names or epithets for him, including Androgynos, Bromios [Thunderer], Eleuthereus [Liberator], and Tauros [Bull].

Whatever his origins, Dionysus came to symbolise the impulsive, the chaotic, and everything that escapes human reason and control—and, by extension, nature and its vitality. Like nature, he is both creation and destruction, representing on the one hand growth and fertility and on the other wine and dissolution. He dissolves the boundaries between reason and instinct, civilisation and nature, life and death, the human and the divine. As twice-born and returned from Hades, he crosses and re-crosses the boundary between life and death. He reminds us, as does the hero, that life is at its fullest in the jaws of death.

Much of his mythology is about establishing himself as a god, suggesting that he may in part be rooted in a historical figure. Although the Greeks, especially Greek men, resisted his alien and anarchic cult, he rose to become one of the principal Olympian gods.

Dionysus was the last of the twelve Olympian gods to arrive, and the only one with a mortal parent—embodying, like wine itself, the duality between the human and the divine.

He rode in a chariot drawn by big cats and accompanied by an ecstatic retinue, or thíasos, of erect satyrs and frenzied mænads. Under the influence of the god and his wine, satyrs and mænads tore apart sacrificial animals and ate them raw. The Greeks honoured Dionysus in several annual festivals, including the City Dionysia, which became the premier competition for playwrights in Athens. The thíasos, especially the triumphal procession on Dionysus’ return to Greece, served as a model for later Dionysian processions and, according to Pliny the Elder, even the Roman Triumph.

Dionysus appears in early Greek art as a bearded man, but later evolves into an alluring and androgynous youth. His attributes include the thyrsus, a fennel staff tipped with a pinecone; the kantharos, a drinking cup with high handles; the vine and ivy; the snake; and the bull.

For Sigmund Freud, Dionysus and his thíasos symbolised the id, the deep, primitive, and instinctual part of the mind. Freud requested that his ashes be preserved in an Ancient Greek krater painted with Dionysian scenes—where they remain to this day.

To Dionysus, the most important individual in his train was Silenus, the wisest and, not coincidentally, the most drunken of his followers. The Midas myth has become famous the world over and is a powerful way of making the point that the true wealth of life resides in life itself. Assuming we have a modest amount, it is not generally a lack of funds but a lack of soul, or lack of love, that keeps us from living.

Silenus is also associated with the bleak teaching that the best thing for human beings is never to have been born, and the next best to die as soon as possible. Plato alludes to this ‘Wisdom of Silenus’ but thinks it dangerous and refrains from spelling it out too clearly. In Plato’s Symposium, Alcibiades compares Socrates to Silenus for being ugly outside but beautiful inside.

In his earliest work, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche popularised a dichotomy between Apollo and Dionysus. The Apollonian stands for light, reason, order, and individuation, whereas the Dionysian is all about darkness, irrationality, chaos, and dissociation. The Dionysian impulse, similar to Freud’s concept of the id or Jung’s concept of the shadow, is a primal force that demands to be acknowledged and integrated.

Dionysus himself lost his mind until he mastered the mysteries, after which he became a model of sanity or even hypersanity and established his cult. If too much of the Dionysian is destructive, too much of the Apollonian is stultifying, whereas a balance of the two unleashes the best of both.

Nietzsche argued that the Ancient Greeks achieved that rare balance of the Apollonian and Dionysian, notably in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, which, by providing a paradigm of existential suffering, enabled people to experience a profound sense of release and escape. But owing to the influence of rationalists such as Socrates and Plato, the Apollonian took over, and European culture came to lack passion and vitality.

The dichotomy between Apollo and Dionysus is, however, a modern one. The Greeks, if anything, tended to assimilate them: Like Apollo, Dionysus was said to have the gift of prophecy, and even to inhabit the Temple of Apollo at Delphi during Apollo’s winter absence.

The Dionysian Mysteries were related to the Orphic and Osirian Mysteries. Orphics held the ‘first Dionysus’, or Zagreus, to have been torn apart and eaten by the Titans before being reborn through Semele. They worshipped Dionysus as a chthonic aspect of Zeus and connected him with the reincarnation and immortality which they sought for themselves.

Dionysus also has much in common with Jesus Christ: a divine father, a mortal mother, and a rebirth or resurrection. Both carried a revolutionary message of salvation, sought to establish a following on earth before ascending to heaven, and roamed about performing miracles. Still today, followers of Jesus ritually eat his flesh and drink his blood in the bread and wine of the eucharist.

Of course, Dionysus was never likely to turn the other cheek—or, at least, not that cheek—but he was, unusually among the Olympian gods, a good friend to humankind.

If Prometheus gave us fire, Dionysus gave us wine, the inner fire which frees the mind and dissolves the ego along with all of its problems. Wine brings us together, helps us be together, and be inventive together, as in the Greek symposia and Roman convivia, in which measured drinking could lead to expansive elation and creative association and the voicing of disruptive ideas and perspectives.

It can be no coincidence that, on all four sides, in all four corners, the borders of the Roman Empire stopped where wine could no longer be made.

Life without wine would be a pale shadow of itself. I raise my glass to Dionysus.

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If this essay spoke you you, you might look into The Meaning of Myth, which contains the full chapter on Dionysus, and The Concise Guide to Wine and Blind Tasting, on the appreciation, psychology, and philosophy of wine.

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A Psychiatrist and Philosopher Interprets the Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice

Orpheus and Euydice, by Edward Poynter

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Everyone knows the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. And it means the exact opposite of what everyone thinks.

The earliest mentions of the supreme musician Orpheus date to the sixth century BCE. By the fourth century BCE, Plato was already commenting on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Today, the fullest accounts survive in Virgil’s Georgics and Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

The Story of Orpheus

Apollo gave his son Orpheus a lyre of gold and tortoise shell. Orpheus mastered the instrument so completely that no creature, and scarcely nature itself, could resist his playing and singing: the animals of the forest gathered around him, the trees bent toward him, and the streams and rivers came out of their beds to greet him.

Orpheus fell head over heels for Eurydice, and she readily returned his love. Hymen, the god of marriage ceremonies, presided over their wedding, but, in a terrible omen, his torch spluttered and spat and marred the feast with bitter fumes.

Eurydice ventured into the nearby woods, where the shepherd Aristaeus espied her dancing with the dryads. Enraptured by the scene, he began to chase her. As she beat back through the bushes, she tripped on a nest of vipers and died from a snakebite to the heel.

Orpheus sang of his grief from earth to heaven, moving the gods and all of creation. So empty did life seem without Eurydice that he resolved to go and see her in Hades—and, if possible, return her to the land of the living.

Orpheus entered Hades through a cave of poisonous vapours and, by his lyrical song, made it unhindered to the palace of King Hades and Queen Persephone. His lament entranced the ferryman Charon and the ordinarily fierce three-headed hound Cerberus, and even Hades himself, who, for the first and last time, shed a black and sooty tear.

With Persephone leaning heavily upon him, Hades declared that Orpheus could leave with Eurydice, as long as he did not look at her until they had both crossed into the land of the living—but should he break this one condition, Eurydice would forever remain in the underworld, where few of the living can enter, and none twice.

Orpheus led Eurydice back the way he came, resisting the urge to turn around and meet her doe eyes.

Then he realised that he could no longer hear her footsteps behind him, and began to fear that Hades had tricked him.

As soon as he saw the light of the sun, he glanced over his shoulder and glimpsed his beloved. But Eurydice had not yet crossed the threshold and was whipped back in a whirl into the bowels of the Earth.

Orpheus sat in a clearing and played mournfully on his lyre, spurning the many maidens who called upon him. According to Ovid, he was “the first of the Thracian people to transfer his love to young boys.” The scorned women threw sticks and stones at him, which fell back to the ground at the sound of his mesmerizing music. In the end, the Maenads, in a state of Dionysian frenzy, tore him apart from limb to limb.

Orpheus’ lyre and dismembered head, still dolefully singing, floated down the River Haebrus to the sea and washed up on the isle of Lesbos, which became famed for its poets. The Muses found his head and buried it in a cave, over which the nightingales sang more prettily than in any other part.

As for his lyre, it can still be seen in the constellation Lyra.

Orpheus and Eurydice before Hades and Persephone

Interpretation of the Myth

Orpheus is a personification of music, poetry, and art in general. In modern times, he has inspired countless paintings, poems, novels, ballets, operas, and films. More curiously, he became the patron of an ancient religious cult called Orphism.

In Plato’s Symposium, Phaedrus says that, rather than a great man, Orpheus was, in fact, a coward. In arguing that the mark of true love is the readiness to die for it, Phaedrus contrasts the chicanery of Orpheus in seeking to cheat death to be reunited with Eurydice with the willingness of Alcestis to lay down her life for her husband Admetus when not even his elderly parents would do so. Alcestis was permitted to return alive from Hades, a rare reward indeed, whereas Orpheus returned empty-handed to be torn apart by women.

Although Orpheus traveled through Hades like a hero, he missed the mark of a hero. His anxious doubting, his turning to boys, and his being torn apart by women all point, in the Ancient Greek mind, to a lack of virility.

The gaze objectifies the beloved: If Orpheus had truly loved Eurydice, he would not have needed to look back upon her. Indeed, he would readily have died to be reunited with her and would never have found himself in such a predicament.

The descent into the nether regions, or katabasis, is found in mythologies from all over the world. The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is strikingly similar to the Japanese myth of Izanagi and Izanami: Izanagi travels to the underworld to retrieve his wife Izanami, who warns him not to look at her. But so ardent is his desire that he lights a torch and casts his gaze upon her, only for it to be met by a rotting corpse.

By blurring the line between life and death, the katabasis explores themes of mortality and immortality. It is, by extension, a means of explaining natural cycles, especially the cycle of the seasons and the cycle of life, as symbolized also by the viper that undid Eurydice.

We might wonder whether Eurydice, beautiful but not much else, is something of a MacGuffin: an insignificant or irrelevant quest object that serves merely to motivate the adventure, like the Holy Grail in Arthurian legend or the ring in Lord of the Rings.

Far more fully realised than Eurydice is the power of art itself. No one and nothing remained unmoved by Orpheus’ song. For all his might, Hercules did not travel so easily through Hades. Even after his death, Orpheus’ severed head continued to sing, suggesting that art, besides being powerful, is immortal.

With such a gift, Orpheus had far more than most to be happy and, better than happy, useful. Yet he squandered it all for the mortal Eurydice, unable to understand that, for all her beauty, she was, like Izanami, never more than a decaying corpse.

How much better for him, and for all, if he had learnt to be happy on his own or with his one true love, music.

Instead of looking back on Eurydice, he ought to have been looking ahead, like a real hero, paying no heed to his own selfish, self-absorbed, self-indulgent happiness—the kind of happiness that, like Eurydice, dies in the moment that it is held.

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