Murder Most Foul – Part 1

Pic Courtesy - www.india.com

The latest murder of Sheena Bora has raised quite a furore in the minds of people, not because of the probable gruesome death of the victim, but more so because the murder was none other than her mother. Mothers in India and similar cultures have a much esteemed position and at times dramatically divine, as mothers are akin to creators, the beings that give birth to the child. This elevated the status of a mother, in a cultural sense, and thus the place of significance. It is this very elevation, which leads to shock and surprise, when we learn of such murders, which raise questions, as to how can a mother kill her child/children? How can the hands that rocked the cradle, end up throttling the life of her child? Melodrama apart, this definitely raises a very pertinent question on the current state of relationships and the complexities involved in some cases, like the present case of Sheena Bora.

Without going into the murky aspects, and the ever-growing web of complex-relationships of the dramatis personae of the case, I am personally quite intrigued by the motif of killing ones children. While this is a disturbing aspect from a social perspective, it is this that has caught my attention, leading me to see, if this is a modern phenomenon and if I could blame it on the modern degradation of familial structures, moral values and a growing lack of sensitivity, or did such crimes exist from time immemorial.

My hunting ground (pardon the ironical usage!) is mythology. Theorists and academicians will say that myths give messages of social or accepted behaviour or norms. Simplistically put, they lay down social and cultural norms. While at it, certain characteristics are reinforced metaphorically and extremes are highlighted to shock and thus bring out the enormity of the sin, which ends up being forbidden or unthinkable. Filicide or killing of one’s children is one of them.

Mythology abounds in examples of filicide, but it is important here to distinguish between sacrifices (often by the orders of gods) and murders (with or without a purpose).

In the case of the first one, parents, often fathers, are asked to offer their sons as an offering to gods leading to the ‘sacrifice’ of their sons. The case of Abraham and Isaac is the best example of this. This is primarily to test the devotion of the father to gods and in majority of the cases, the life of the son is awarded back or the pleased god appears just before the child is about to be sacrificed. Such cases are many and we will not call them acts of filicide here. We will also ignore cases of sacrificing ones children for a specific purpose without the gods asking for them, as they remain examples of sacrifices, like Jephthah sacrificing his daughter to Yahweh, from the Old Testament.

We will only focus on cases where children were killed by their parents, often for no fault of theirs and without the divine order.

A number of such myths exist in the Greek Mythology, chief among them being Medea, Procne and Tantalus. Procne and her husband Tereus lived happily with their five year old son Itys. Once Procne

Philomela and Procne

decided to invite her beautiful sister Philomela to live with them, and Tereus volunteered to bring her. On the way, Tereus falls in love with Philomela and ends up marrying her in an island under the pretext that her sister had died. When the truth was revealed to Philomela, she threatened to expose him. Fearing the inevitable, Tereus cuts her tongue and leaves her in an island and goes back to Procne, telling her that Philomela had died on the way. Soon with the turn of events, Procne learns the truth and in an act of retribution kills her son, saying that in him she could see his father. She then cuts pieces of her son and prepares supper from it and offers it to Tereus. Only after he consumes it, does she reveal the truth and escapes a raging father at her heels.

Tantalus is another similar example, except that he had no reason, whatsoever. Tantalus was a mortal son of Zeus but unlike other mortals, was a favourite with both the gods and Zeus. He was probably the only mortal, who was allowed to dine with the gods, especially the dinner-for-gods-only kind!

The feast of Tantalus. 1767. Hugues Taraval. French

Once to prove the gullibility and the foolishness of the gods, he invited them for dinner to his castle. He then cut his son Pelops to pieces and made a stew out of it and served to the gods. None of the gods had quite had the stew except for Demeter, who unmindfully chewed into what turned out to be the shoulder of Pelops. When she realised what had happened she alerted all the gods, who were now furious. Zeus punished him and sent him to the lowest region of the Underworld. (For more on this read The Crime and Punishment of Tantalus).

Finally, the murder considered to be most gruesome was by Medea. Medea had fallen in love with Jason (of the Argonauts fame) and helped him get the Golden Fleece much against the desire of her father. Later when they were escaping from a chasing father, she is supposed to have killed her brother, cut

Medea (about to murder her children)
by Eugène Ferdinand Victor Delacroix (1862)

him into pieces and scattered the parts all over, so that the distraught father got busy collecting the pieces for a respectable funeral for her son while Jason and Medea managed to escape. Yet further in the story, Jason falls in love with the princess of another city where they were seeking asylum and ends up marrying her. As an act of retribution for being ditched, Medea killed the princess and her own two sons, whom Jason loved deeply, leaving Jason all alone. (For more on this read Medea the Barbarian and Medea the Barbarian – Concluding Part ).

In all the three cases, the murder of the children, were not sacrifices; they were either an act of vanity or retribution, where the child was not at fault. All of them go down as gruesome acts of filicide and while literature has glorified Medea, the act of killing her children has always been condoned. There are many more such cases, like Cronos ‘eating’ all his sons, except Zeus, who later ends up killing his father. Besides these well known cases, there are other cases where fathers/mothers have killed their children by mistake, or in a fit of madness, often brought about by divine intervention, but we will not discuss them.

The Celtic myths too have some interesting references to filicide in the myth of Cath Maige Tuired, in which a man kills his son over the difference of opinion of medical method of curing the king who had lost his hand. The father was of the opinion that the king should have an artificial silver hand, while the son wanted to regenerate a hand magically from a tissue. The father was supposed to be so enraged with the superior medical skills of his son, that he struck him with a sword and killed him.

The Prose Edda of the Norse mythology also relates to many such cases of filicide and one of them is similar to that of Procne of the Greek mythology. In this Gudrun, avenges the death of her brothers by her husband by offering the hearts of their sons to the husband! The objective is to cause pain to her husband, leading to an heirless throne, an act which never went down well in the cultural milieu in which the story takes place. In yet another version of the same story, the murder is gruesome. Gudrun is 

supposed to have killed her sons, made goblets out of their skulls and fed their blood and hearts to her husband. Drinking from the skulls of enemy was a widely practised cultural act and thus went unnoticed by the husband, who is later killed by Gudrun and one of his nephews.

It is important to mention that the murder above and that by Procne earlier in Greek mythology, is seen more as an act of retribution, than filicide. The central theme is more to avenge an earlier act, than the murder of one’s own children. While this might seem an effort to overlook the crime, but the treatment of the acts is less important in the said narratives than what led to the crime. Besides the mothers who have avenged certain acts by killing their children, had to battle emotions before they committed the acts. Their love for their children was not less, though the need to seek revenge was greater, and in the case of Medea it was more out of being spurned or rejected by the one for whom, she had committed the crime of fratricide (killing ones brother) and more.

To be continued……………

Niobe

Last time we read about the crimes and punishment of Tantalus. Tantalus had three children, Pelops, Broteas and Niobe. Pelops was resurrected by the gods, but the other children had to face the wrath of the gods. Before we move on to Niobe, an important mythical figure, let us briefly refer to Broteas.

Broteas had once insulted the goddess Artemis (a folly repeated by her sister as we will see later) by refusing to honour her and so he was punished by turning him insane. In his insanity, he thought he was indestructible to the flames of fire and to prove it, he jumped into the fire. However, he was consumed by fire and that’s the end of it. His arrogance to the gods was his nemesis, a fate that was similar to that of his father.

Niobe was the daughter of Tantalus. She got married to Amphion, the ruler of Thebes. Amphion incidentally played the lyre so well that his music could sway the trees and move stones. It is said that the walls of Thebes were rebuild by this magical music of his. Niobe had seven handsome sons and seven beautiful daughters (the number of children differs from text to text), collectively referred to as Niobids. It is said that Niobe too had the genetic fault of hubris that she had inherited from her father.

In Thebes, during annual festival of honouring Leto and her offspring’s, Apollo and Artemis (aka Diana), Niobe is supposed to have ridiculed Leto. Dressed in her royal finery, she chastised people for worshipping Leto and her children. She felt that it made no sense in worshipping those who could not be seen. She belonged to the house of Tantalus, the one who dined with the gods. She was the queen of the Thebes, and the wife of Amphion who had built the city. Most importantly, she was the mother of seven sons and seven daughters, whereas Leto had only one son and a daughter.

 

           A 1772 painting by Jacques Louis David depicting Niobe attempting  to shield her children from Artemis and Apollo.

This brazen display of arrogance hurt Leto so much that she complained to her children, Apollo and Artemis. Apollo shot at Niobe’s sons and Artemis killed all her daughters, leaving her without any children, her objects of pride. Amphion killed himself when he saw the sight of his fourteen dead children. It is said that the dead bodies lay in a pool of blood for nine days and later the gods buried them.

It is said that a violent whirlwind later took Niobe from Thebes and dropped her at Mount Siphylus where she is supposed to be shedding tears till date. The Weeping Rock in Mount Siphylus is supposed to be Niobe which resembles a mourning woman. The rock is always wet, which is why it is called the weeping rock. Geographers and mythologist have found many features on the rock which resemble a face of a sad woman. From a distance, one can see resemblance to long hair, eyes, and nose, etc. This spot today is a major tourist attraction, a stone which is always wet.

 

The Weeping Rock

This is an interesting myth, where a very loud message is being given. First, that the follies of parents can have repercussions right down to their children and so it is advisable to follow the path of righteousness, not just for one’s own self, but also for their children. Second, pride and arrogance is always the cause of downfall. Niobe was extremely proud of her background, her husband and her children, needless to say, that none of which came to her aid. Her pride was reduced to a pile of dead bodies and her, a stone. Finally, it is good to learn from the lessons that have been laid down before you. Niobe had seen her father’s predicament and ought to have known the outcome of going against the gods, but she too had the streak of hubris in her which led her to a worse state than her father and brother, Broteas.

Modern day scholars might see this as an act of vengeance by the gods, but the Functionalist school of mythology sees this as setting a norm of behaviour in the ancient times. Such tales set an expectation from people towards their gods. The fact that gods were for reverence and not ridicule gets reiterated in the tragedy of Niobe, who doesn’t learn from her father’s tragic end. Except for Pelops, who gets resurrected by the gods, the entire family of Tantalus had tragic end and the successive generations didn't do any better, which were all tragedies of epic proportions.

To conclude, the element Niobium was named after Niobe and in the Periodic Table finds a place right under the element Tantalum, named after Tantalus, Niobe’s father! In the early days, a number of elements were named after Tantalus’s children, like Pelopium, Dianium, Ilmenium, however by the time the Periodic Table was finalised in 1950, only Niobium survived, while the others might have been re-christened.

Is this a case of another tragedy inflicted on Tantalus’s children by the scientists of today?!?

 


Pics courtesy - Wikipedia

The Crime and Punishment of Tantalus

The myth of Tantalus is an interesting Greek myth.

Tantalus was a mortal son of Zeus but unlike other mortals, was a favourite with both the gods and Zeus. He was probably the only mortal, who was allowed to dine with the gods, especially the dinner-for-gods-only kind!

However, such love was not quite reciprocated by Tantalus. He had the habit of listening to the divine secrets of the gods and pass it down to the humans, more as a boast to prove his divine proximity. A few times he even tried to steal the ambrosia, divine drink of the gods, to share it with the mortals. Once, one of the gods stole Zeus’s golden pet dog and gave it to Tantalus to hide it. Later when the god came to ask for it, Tantalus claimed ignorance and said he never was given such a dog. It took Zeus’s intervention, who sent his messenger to find the dog. Such acts of misconduct were occasionally pardoned, as he was the favourite and thus Tantalus never took the gods seriously.

Once to prove the gullibility and the foolishness of the gods, he invited them for dinner to his castle. He then cut his son Pelops to pieces and made a stew out of it and served to the gods. None of the gods had quite had the stew except for Demeter, who unmindfully chewed into what turned out to be the shoulder of Pelops. She was not in a proper frame of mind as she was mourning for her daughter Persephone (Read more about it in This is Utkarsh Speaking: Demeter & Persephone). When she realised what had happened she alerted all the gods, who were now furious.

Zeus decided to punish him severely for this act of trying to make cannibals out of the gods. As a punishment he was sent to the Tartarus, the lowest region of the Underworld. There he was chained in a lake and made to stand under a tree full of ripe and juicy fruits. However, whenever he tried to pluck a fruit, the fruit would move away from him and whenever he tried to drink water from the lake, it would recede, thus depriving him of all nourishment. This gives us the word, tantalise, meaning ‘to tease someone with the sight or promise of something that they cannot have’ (Oxford Dictionary). To tease him further, sometimes the waters of the lake would rise up to his chin, but the moment he tried to drink, the waters would recede and all he would find was mud all over him. If he tried to take the waters in his hands to drink, it would flow off his hands by the time it reached his mouth. This left Tantalus eternally frustrated.

 

Tantalus by Gioacchino Assereto (1640)

Some authors have also said that Zeus punished him further by hanging a stone over him which was always threatening to fall on him and he was eternally trying to dodge the same. The gods were so disappointed with him, that the entire family and the descendants of Tantalus were cursed to end in tragedy. (next time we will read about his daughter Niobe). However, the gods managed to resurrect his son Pelops, with an ivory shoulder, since Demeter had taken a bite of the shoulder. Pelops goes on to live a long life (To read more about Pelops, read This is Utkarsh Speaking: Olympic Games – Mythical Origins), and was probably the only one who escaped the wrath of the gods.

Many scholars were of the opinion that Tantalus was a historical figure possibly the ruler of a city called Tantalis or of a city by the name of Siphylus. Near the present day Mount Siphylus, many archaeological remains have associations with the House of Tantalus and his children.

What is of importance is the crime and punishment. Tantalus’s crime seems to be less of killing his son, than of making the gods cannibals! In the ancient times, killing ones blood-related was a grave crime, but the focus in this myth has been more of god’s deception. The gods were angry because they were misled with an ulterior motive of trying to prove that the gods were not all that intelligent as they seemed to be. Many have opined that the god’s reaction was less due to killing of the son by a father, but more due to sharing of the divine secrets with the mortals. This could have some bearing, as we have seen Zeus’s reaction to a similar incident that happens with Prometheus, a god, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to man (Read This is Utkarsh Speaking: The Gift of Fire ).

Another way to look at it is that message was being given to people that gods did not like human sacrifice and the society at large should not resort to cannibalism. This theory has a significant bearing, especially since there have been records of human sacrifices to certain deities in the Greek pantheon. This myth could be seen as a case of changing perceptions towards the same, especially since some of the versions state that Tantalus offered Pelops as a sacrifice to the gods. The punishment of depriving Tantalus of all food and drink eternally brings out the severity of the punishment by the gods and that too to the favourite of the gods.

According to the theory of functionalism of mythology, every myth serves a purpose. It has to have a cause or a reason for its existence. The above myth definitely sends a loud message, that no matter how close one is to the gods, there is no messing around with them. One cannot take them for granted and above all, they seek reverence and not ridicule. If one transgresses the lines drawn, one can face severe punishment and not just the concerned person, but his sons and other family members. The entire family and descendants have faced tragic deaths and this by itself is a very important lesson in this myth.

Next we will read about Niobe, the daughter of Tantalus.