Taurus Oedipus and the Riddling Sphinx: A New Interpretation

By John Knight Lundwall

Oedipus the King has been called the greatest masterpiece of Greek theater (Fagles 131) and the most famous narrative in Western civilization (Edmunds and Dundes vii). Aristotle asserts this play to be the most brilliant example of theatrical plot (Fagles 131), while Hegel and Nietzsche declare Oedipus himself a symbol of towering human intellect--a man who cannot stop until all riddles are solved (Edmunds 2).

The power in this Greek tragedy resides in its potent, fast-paced narrative. Oedipus is an oracle-made wanderer who must solve a series of riddles, the first of which emanates from an enigmatic, multi-formed creature named the Sphinx. Defeating this creature Oedipus becomes king of Thebes, but his kingdom soon disintegrates under the shadow of plague, famine, sterility, and death. Oedipus learns the only way to revoke this universal pestilence is to find the murderer of the former king, Laius, and punish the criminal with either death or banishment. “I am the land’s avenger by all rights, and Apollo’s champion too,” cries Oedipus (154-155). Thus, he who solved the riddle of the Sphinx now seeks to solve the conundrums of the kingdom. Yet, the blind seer Tiresias begs Oedipus to let some mysteries go unsolved: “How terrible–to see the truth when the truth is only pain to him who sees!” (359-360). Oedipus is a man of bold action and tosses Tiresias’s warnings aside. Unriddling is what Oedipus does best, and Oedipus unriddles a chain of clues dangling downwards from Apollonian heights. In the end, Oedipus discovers the terrifying truth: he is the murder of Laius, and Laius was his own father, and he has married and bedded his own mother. Oedipus is cause of the plague of Thebes!

Oedipus the King presents a compelling plot which has been analyzed for centuries. Numerous critiques have been superimposed upon this tale, ranging from Victorian analysis declaring the hubris of Oedipus brings about his own downfall, to Francis Fergusson’s suggestion that the tragedy is an Athenian mystery play revealing “a solemn rite of sacrifice that purges the community of its collective guilt by punishing a scapegoat...” (Fagles 134). Other analysts have declared the play a tragedy of fate, juxtaposing the idea of free will against god-ordained determinism. Josh Beer sees in Oedipus the King the political and social texture of ancient Athens, from the struggle against Persia which put at stake the Athenian way of life (Beer 21-22), to the long oratories of the tragedian chorus reminiscent of “the political and forensic speeches of its various assemblies and law courts...” (Beer 44). Robert Fagles, whose translation I am using, also defines the play in historic context, citing that fifth century Greece was a culture on the cusp of change between the Oracle of Delphi and a new age of reason unattached to archaic and prophetic models but having its own limitations: “The catastrophe of the tragic hero thus becomes the catastrophe of fifth-century man; all his furious energy and intellectual daring drive him on to this terrible discovery of his [own] fundamental ignorance...” (Falges 143).

Numerous critiques can be cited, but one revolutionary interpretation deserves mentioning: Sigmund Freud’s psychological approach. According to Lowell Edmunds, Freud presents a radical solution to the problem between legend and consciousness by “transposing the legend...into the unconscious. Oedipus is no longer the hero of a legend but the name of a complex” (Edmunds 3). Or, as Freud writes in Interpretation of Dreams: “[Oedipus’s] destiny moves us only because it might have been ours–because the oracle laid the same curse upon us... as upon him. It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father” (Fagles qtd. 132). For Freud, this Oedipal Complex is the under-girth of his psychological theory, a theory which brought a revolution of thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Finally, it should be mentioned that not all critiques have been favorable to the play. The well known Gilbert Murray of the myth-ritual school saw nothing but ambiguity in this tragedy: “Even the good things that have to be done in order to make the plot work are done through mere loss of temper. The spiritual tragedy is never faced or understood...” (Edmunds qtd. 2). And Walter Benjamin sees Oedipus as a bungler. When faced with full realization of the truth, Oedipus blinds himself with Jocasta’s brooches attempting a “flight from the realization” of who and what he is (Edmunds 3). Humphrey Kitto turns his ire not to the Sophoclean tragedy itself, but to all its interpreters: “Whatever Sophocles meant, he put his meaning into the play, and to get it out again we must contemplate the play–all of it, in all its aspects...” (Kitto 138).

In truth, Kitto’s proposition of examining the play, each character, symbol, and line, for what is in it and for what is not, is a tall order to fill; despite the scholars lining up to do so. Scholarly argument will always declare that any one approach falls short of such a full analysis, including Kitto’s. Nevertheless, in the numerous approaches to this play (literary, psychological, historical, and so forth) there is not one approach I have found that inquires after its mythologic basis. Sophocles did not invent the story of Oedipus; this tale was part of a mythos already hoary with age by the time the Greeks invented dramatic tragedy. Of course, so little is known about this oral myth as to not bother. However, I propose that Kitto has it partly right; there are vestiges of the myth recorded in Sophocles’ play–pieces that stand out as luminous signals as bright as Apollo’s crown. As each of these pieces are examined a matrix of connections emerge which pile up beyond the coincidental realm. We find in Sophocles’ version of Oedipus, and particularly in Sophocles’ version of Oedipus, hints of an ancient mythology of prime cosmological concern.

I therefore propose my own radical theory and new interpretation, which, as far as I am aware, is original, but not without basis. To begin, let us pick up some of these luminous pieces.

I. The Oracle: Kill the Father and Marry the Mother. King Laius of Thebes, son of Labdacus, marries Jocasta, daughter of Menoeceus. An oracle tells Laius that if he has a son, he will be killed and replaced (in the marital bed) by him. Laius and Jocasta have a son named Oedipus. To avoid the prophecy, Laius sends the infant to his death.

II. Binding the Feet on Mount Cithaeron. Laius orders a servant to kill the child. The servant, a shepherd, binds the infant’s feet together and leaves him on Mount Cithaeron. Having pity on the child, however, the servant saves Oedipus by delivering him to another shepherd, who eventually gives him to his foster parents of Corinth.

III. Family Heritage: Etymology. Thomas Worthen notes the etymologies of Oedipus’s family (Worthen 13). The name Oedipus means swollen foot. The name Laius means left-sided. The name Labdacus means lame.

IV. The King’s Company. King Laius travels to Delphi. Laius travels with four attendants, one called a herald (828-829). Laius also travels in a wagon or chariot.

V. The Crossroads. King Laius comes upon a place called Phocis where two branching roads meet, one from Daulia and the other from Delphi (808-809). At this crossroads Oedipus slays Laius and all but one of his attendants; the herald escapes.

VI. The Sphinx. Oedipus then meets an enigmatic creature: part human (female head), part eagle (with eagle wings) part lion (a lion body and legs), and part snake (a serpent tail). This creature is called the Sphinx, and broods over Thebes with a riddle about time. Only after slaying the Sphinx does Oedipus ascend to the throne.

VII. Decaying Thebes. Only after Oedipus has served as king over Thebes for a long period of time, “the count of years would run you far back...” (627) does the kingdom fall into ruin. The ruin is wholesale, as if it were an end of an era.

VIII. Death of Jocasta and Blinded Eyes. After all riddles are solved, and after Oedipus discovers what and who he is, Jocasta hangs herself, her body “cradled high in a woven noose, spinning, swinging back and forth” (1396-1397). Upon discovering her, Oedipus blinds his eyes with her brooches (1402-1405).

It is interesting to note that Sophocles’ play begins at point VII on my list. That is, items I through VI are all assumed events, occurrences that have already happened and are briefly alluded to within the text of Sophocles’ play. Yet, these events are central to the unfolding of the tragedy. Certainly the ancient Greeks watching this drama unfold were thoroughly familiar with the myth of Oedipus, and thus with the mythic context which Sophocles assumed his audience knew. Items I through VI therefore must represent a large body of the ancient myth, otherwise Sophocles would have had to begin his tale far earlier in the mythic chronology and with much more exposition.

Whatever the truth is regarding the ancient myth the Greeks knew, one image of that myth is certain–the Sphinx. Numerous portraits of the sphinx have been uncovered from antiquity. Images found on ancient vases show Oedipus facing this highly unusual creature. Further, statuary of the Sphinx has also been uncovered and reproduced. At least one history book on ancient Greece states that Sphinxes guarded the entrance to the Temple of Demeter and the Eleusian Mysteries (Petrie et. al. 2461-2496; see Appendix, figures 1-5). The Greek Sphinx was not just a mythological story, but a prolific, ancient reality.

The prolific image of the Sphinx exists well beyond the shores of ancient Greece. In the ruins of Persepolis, in ancient Persia, large bas-reliefs depict a tall, noble human figure thrusting a dagger into a creature whose form curiously mimics the Greek Sphinx (see Appendix, figure 6). This Persian Sphinx has a lion’s head and fore paws, eagle wings and talons, a scorpion tale, and what some interpret as a bull’s body. Multiple interpretations have been given of this Persian correspondence to the Greek creature, not to mention that a noble figure like Oedipus is slaying it while holding it by a top handle which emerges from its skull. Ker Porter believes that the human figure is Ormuzd (Ahura Mazda) who is fighting the powers of darkness represented by the Sphinx (Plunket 65). Emmeline Plunket also observes that within Persepolis numerous bas-reliefs are found of this bestiary type, always combining at least two forms of the four: lion, eagle, bull, and scorpion (Plunket 64).

This bestiary image also finds a parallel in Hebrew myth. In the book of Ezekiel a description of the cherubim reveals a near duplicate of the Greek and Persian types: “And I looked, and, behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself.... Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures.... As for the likeness of their faces, they four had the face of a man, and the face of a lion, on the right side: and they four had the face of an ox on the left side; they four also had the face of an eagle” (Ezekiel 1: 2-10; see Appendix figure 7). It is also interesting to note that the Hebrew cherubim are represented as being in wheels within wheels (Ezekiel 1: 19-22), not unlike the implied wheel of the turn handle on the Persian Sphinx or for that matter the turning wheels of the eagle wings each type bears (eagles are known to wheel about in the sky).

Without giving all the references (something for my dissertation) authors such as Emmeline Plunket, Samuel Mackey, Giorgio De Santillana, Thomas Worthen, Manly Hall, and a dozen others, all interpret the imagery of the Sphinx as the celestial zodiac, namely the constellations Leo (the lion), Taurus (the bull), Aquarius (the human) and Scorpio (the snake, scorpion, and/or eagle). These four constellations represent an astronomical colure, for each oppose each other on the zodiac table. Moreover, it is these four constellations in antiquity which held the rising sun on the days of equinox and solstice. Ancient astronomers looked upon the horizon at the exact point where the sun arose and saw the zodiac constellation still lingering in pre-dawn light receiving that celestial orb. Roughly, between 4500 B.C.E. and 2400 B.C.E. the sun rose on the morning of spring equinox in the constellation Taurus, on the morning of summer solstice in Leo, on the morning of fall equinox in Scorpio, and on the morning of winter solstice in Aquarius (see Appendix, figures 8-11).

It has been a long time since the dust has been blown off the solar interpretation of myth. In Frances Younghusband’s translation of C. Witt’s Classic Mythology, all the Greek deities are divided by cosmological type (myths of the sun, moon, dawn, wind, etc.). Under Oedipus we read, “Belongs to group of sun-myths. His story symbolizes the daily or yearly career of the sun...” (Younghusband trans. xxiv). Witt descends from the F. Max Muller school, and Muller himself writes “It is a thoroughly solar idea, for instance, that the offspring is destined to become the murderer of his father or grandfather. This fate seems inevitable with every young sun or coming day, whose very birth implies the death of the preceding day. Thus O[e]dipus is the predestined murder of his father Lai[u]s...” (Muller 526).

The Sphinx as astronomical symbol clearly informs a celestial interpretation to the Oedipus myth. Yet, Muller’s rendering of Oedipus is limited only to the daily rising of the sun; Oedipus slays the previous dawn and presumably marries the mother as part of the daily fertilization of the Earth. Muller ends his interpretation here. Curiously, Muller is silent with the Oedipal etymologies. Etymology was one of Muller’s prime supports for his solar theory. Indeed, many (perhaps we could say most) mythological deities show clear solar and lunar connections through their names. Yet point III in my own analysis shows a curious etymological heritage passed down from father to son in the Oedipus myth. I assert these etymologies are associated with a solar mythos, but well beyond what Muller had in mind.

The name Oedipus means swollen foot. Oedipus is a wobbler; apparently, so is Laius and Labdacus. If the Oedipus myth is about celestial mechanics dealing with the sun, then Oedipus’s condition of wobbling-lameness is truly curious. Oedipus has his feet pinned upon a mountain (point II). If we continue with celestial symbolism, in antiquity the mountain was always a symbol of the axis-mundi–the center of the world around which all ages of humankind revolved and the prototypical point of creation. Thus, the first dry land to appear (Genesis 1:9) is the cosmic mountain; an image repeated in most mythologies where universal creation is forged upon a rising mountain and where the mythic pantheon also resides (Olympus, Meru, Fiji, Sumeru, and Kenya are all types of this universal, mountain myth). Particularly, the cosmic mountain was the axis of the Earth, the pole upon which creation had been forged. While Mount Cithaeron is not technically such a place, it is a mythologic type, a node upon which creation and transformation occurs. The identity of Cithaeron as pole-axis is strengthened as Oedipus has his feet pinned together upon this mount. Even as Oedipus is lamed and made to wobble upon a swollen foot, so is the axis of the Earth a wobbling foot.

The Earth’s axis is tilted at a 23 degree angle. Due to the gravitational pull of the sun and moon upon the Earth, and because the Earth is not a perfect spheroid, but has an equatorial bulge, the Earth’s axis is pulled and shifted. Literally, the axis wobbles in a grand cosmic circle completing one circuit approximately every 26,000 years. Because of this axial wobble, the pole star shifts over time. The current pole star (North Star) is Polaris, but beta Ursae Minoris was once the pole star, and before that it was alpha Draconis. The effect of this wobbling axis-pole is precession of the equinoxes. In short, from the point of view of an observer on Earth, the sun rises on the horizon into a known zodiac constellation. The four pillars of the year are the equinoxes and solstices, and on the morning of these special days the sun rose into the four zodiac signs which represented the “four corners of the Earth.” However, due to precession, these zodiac signs slowly shift, moving one degree every 72 years. As each zodiac sign is 30 degrees, it takes 2,160 years for an entire zodiac constellation to precess out of its position of holding the rising sun. Again, from the point of view of an Earth-bound viewer, the four constellations which hold the rising sun on the mornings of equinox and solstice slowly disappear below the horizon, as a set of four new zodiac constellations take their place (see Appendix, figures 12-13).

Precession of the equinoxes was supposedly discovered by the Greek Hipparchus around 127 B.C.E. But as now a rising number of scholars are reasoning, Hipparchus’s discovery must have been a re-discovery of what “...had been known some thousand years previously, and that on [precession] the Archaic Age based its long range computation of time” (De Santillana and Von Dechend 66). Indeed, Girogio De Santillana, professor of the History of Science at M.I.T., writes in his ground breaking analysis of ancient myth, Hamlet’s Mill, precession must have been known far back in antiquity and vestiges of this knowledge is recorded in world myth:

The theory about “how the world began” seems to involve the breaking asunder of a harmony, a kind of cosmogonic “original sin” whereby the circle of the ecliptic (with the zodiac) was tilted up at an angle with respect to the equator, and the cycles of change came into being.... As we follow the clues–stars, numbers, colors, plants, forms, verse, music, structures–a huge framework of connections is revealed at many levels. One is inside an echoing manifold where everything responds and everything has a place and a time assigned to it.... To recapitulate for clarity, whatever is true myth has no historical basis, however tempting the reduction, however massive and well armed the impact of a good deal of modern criticism on that belief.... Myth is essentially cosmological. (De Santillana and Von Dechend 5, 8, 50)

Santillana argues that the heart of mythic cosmology is precession. This argument is picked up by Jane Sellers, who writes of ancient Egyptian myth, “I suggest that Orion’s precessionally caused failure to appear in his place at his proper time gave rise to long centuries of an oral tradition of Osiris’s death” (Sellers 3). Emmeline Plunket’s examination of ancient calendar systems, many more sophisticated than our own, aligns with these conclusions. Plunket believes, for example, the origin of the Akkadian calendar must date no later than 6000 B.C.E. and was crafted by those who were aware of precession (Plunket 1-23).

Whatever the truth of these claims, the myth of Oedipus rises from centuries of cosmological inattention as a prime candidate as a precessional myth. In points IV and V Laius rides with four escorts (the four constellated corners of the Earth), one a herald (the heliacal star of the vernal equinox constellation) where he arrives in a land named Phocis where two roads meet (the celestial equator and the ecliptic). It is here, and only here, that Laius falls to his son, or as Muller would say, where Laius is killed by his sun! Yet Muller does not understand the implications of this cosmology. Laius is not killed by the rising of a new day, but by the rising of a new precessional age.

It is no coincidence that after Oedipus slays his father he meets the enigmatic Sphinx. He slays this creature in a cosmic re-enactment of the killing he has just performed at the celestial crossroads. Neither is it a coincidence that the image of the vernal constellation (the bull) is missing in the form of the Sphinx. As noted, the Sphinx is made of four forms: human, lion, eagle, and serpent. In the astronomical colure holding the equinoxes and solstices the important image of the bull which marks the year and the cosmic age is nowhere to be found. How curious it is then, that when Tiresias identifies Oedipus as the killer of Laius, “This day will bring your birth and your destruction” (499), Oedipus flees into the palace. The dramatic stage is left empty, save for the chorus, who interdicts with one of its longest orations. R. W. Burton observes:

The most remarkable feature in the first half of [this] ode is the gradual emergence of a single concrete image. Suggested tentatively in the opening stanza with its impression of flight swifter than storm-horses, of assault... by the fires of Apollo, of pursuit by the dread κήρες, it acquires vivid form at 478 [544 in Fagles translation] in the phrase ό ταύρος, placed emphatically at the end of a clause and coming with all the force of a revelation of identity, ecce ille taurus, ‘Look! There he goes, the bull!’ (Burton 150)

Oedipus is the missing image on the Sphinx. Oedipus is the bull! Of course, Burton does not have precession in mind, but the images pile up as Santillana suggests, in an “echoing manifold where everything responds and everything has a place and a time assigned to it.” Truly Tiresias’s prediction, “This day will bring your birth and your destruction” is supremely on target; indeed, we could say Tiresias has scored a bull’s-eye.

Pardon the pun, but the bull’s eye is very important. Indeed, in the constellation Taurus is the red star Aldebaran–the eye of the bull. Aldebaran is a first magnitude star that rose helically on the morning of spring equinox (Sellers 14). For over two millennia astronomers would watch for this star blinking on the horizon in the pre-dawn light. Over time, however, and due to precession, the eye of the bull that had always been the “herald” for spring disappeared below the horizon. The whole heavens had shifted. The bull’s eye had been blinded.

Thus we get to points VII and VIII. Decaying Thebes is an image of the end of a precessional age, where the four constellations on the horizon are all descending into the underworld--heaven is falling out of place. This imagery is climaxed at the end of Sophocles’ play, where Jocasta hangs herself “cradled high in a woven noose, spinning, swinging back and forth” (1396-1397) and Oedipus blinds his eyes with her brooches (1402-1405). In this cosmological interpretation Jocasta is an image of the Earth whose swinging back and forth is a double image of Oedipus’s own wobble. She marries the father and the son not because of any psychological complex, but because she is the persistent link in the turning heavens. Oedipus blinds himself because, like his father before him, his age is ending, and Aldebaran, his eye, is no longer the herald of spring (see Appendix, figures 14-16).

In another curious coincidence the theme of blinding the eye is repeated in Homer’s Odyssey, where Odysseus blinds the cyclopean eye of Polyphemus. This occurs in a mountain cave. Oedipus’s swollen foot is replaced by a “lifted...olive pole...twirled...around as a man would drill the wood of a ship” (IX. 382-384). When Polyphemus is blinded Odysseus and his men escape out of the cosmic mountain under the belly of sheep, just as Aires (the ram) replaced the eye of Aldebaran in Taurus (the bull) due to precession.

In ending, I should note two things. One, Sophocles, as author of Oedipus the King, would not need to know anything about precession of the equinoxes. If Sophocles incorporated the original myth (which was the original carrier of this celestial knowledge) into his own dramatic play writing, which for all intents and purposes he did, expanding on themes and characters as a playwright will, then his own corroboration in writing precession “into” his work would be unnecessary. The myth would do this for him. Secondly, and finally, I am aware of a whole host of objections which can be given to this interpretation of the Oedipus myth. Do we find all these clues in other versions of the story? What other myths might corroborate a precessional interpretation? How could precession have been discovered as early as is claimed? Why hasn’t anyone else ever given this interpretation? And the list goes on and on. These objections are fair and worthy, and I can only remind readers that they are the exact same objections which should be prominent in the current theories of myth. What is accepted does not mean it is true. Meanwhile, we mythologists have much work to do.

Works Cited

Beer, Josh. Sophocles and the Tragedy of Athenian Democracy. Westport, CN: Praeger Publishing, 2004.

Burton, R. W. B. The Chorus in Sophocles’ Tragedies. London, UK: Clarendon Press, 1980.

De Santillana, Giorgio and Hertha Von Dechend. Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission Through Myth. Boston: David R. Godine Publisher, 1969.

Edmunds, Lowell. Oedipus: The Ancient Legend and Its Later Analogues. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1985.

Edmunds, Lowell and Alan Dundes. Oedipus: A Folklore Casebook. Madison, Wisconsin: U of Wisconsin P, 1995.

Fagles, Robert, translator. Introduction to Oedipus the King. New York: Penguin Books, 1984, pp. 131-153.

The Holy Bible, King James Version, 1992.

Homer. The Odyssey. Edited and translated by Albert Cook. New York: Norton, 1993. 3-268.

Kitto, Humphrey D. Greek Tragedy. London, UK: Routledge, 1966.

March, Jenny. Cassell’s Dictionary of Classical Mythology. London: Cassell, 2003.

Muller, F. Max. Contributions to the Science of Mythology, Volume II. Whitefish, MO: Kessinger Publishing, 1897.

Petrie, W. M. Flinders, et. al. The Book of History, Volume VI. New York: The Groiler Society, 1968.

Plunket, Emmeline M. Ancient Calendars and Constellations. Whitefish, MO: Kessinger Publishing, 1903.

Sellers, Jane B. The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt. Jane B. Sellers Publisher, 2003.

Sommerstein, Alan H. Greek Drama and Dramatists. Florence, KY: Routledge, 2002.

Sophocles. The Three Theban Plays. Edited and translated by Robert Fagles. New York: Pengiun Books, 1984, pp. 154-251.

Worthen, Thomas D. The Myth of Replacement: Stars, Gods, and Order in the Universe. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1991.

Younghusband, Frances, trans. Classic Mythology. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1883.

Ulansey, David. The Origin of the Mithraic Mysteries: Cosmology & Salvation in the Ancient World. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Posted by john at March 10, 2006 10:43 PM