December 8th, 2005
There are no myths, Greek, Roman, American, or ... um ... Babylonian, that capture my interest as much as the myth of Cassandra, daughter of Priam (he was the King of Troy) and foreteller of the future.
Her story in a nutshell goes like this:
The god Apollo loved Cassandra and it was he who gave her the gift of prophecy. But Cassandra wanted nothing to do with Apollo, so he added a curse to her gift that, although she could predict the future, nobody would believe her. And if you read Homer's Iliad, you may notice that she seems to be treated as tolerable, but kind of cranky and not entirely sane—but her Mom, Hecuba, loves her just the same. Eventually, because nobody believes her, Hector is killed, a big wooden horse digorges those nasty Greeks into Troy, and she is taken away as a sex slave by Agamemnon. Even then, she warns A. that treachery awaits him (pretty generous of her considering what he uses her for, eh?) but he ignores Cassandra and is killed by his wife's lover, and poor Cassandra falls under the same sword for being -er- not guilty by association.
She wouldn't put out for the god, and so she was ignored, belittled, forced into slavery, and ultimately killed. Wow ... that story kinda gets me right about the same place Aegisthus' sword got Cassandra.
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But I've recently started thinking a little more about what that curse really was: It is described as "nobody believes Cassandra" but I think that's only the way it appears. I think that people hear the truth of Cassandra's words, and they believe her. But they can't admit that they are in such a situation, they don't have the moral courage to change directions on a drachma, and they are just too afraid of what the truth will mean for them. So they choose to treat her as crazy; they choose to not believe her and put the unhappy reality out of their minds. They want to think they live in a safe world, and continue to do so right up until their last breath.
They are so afraid of Cassandra's truth that they choose not to believe her.
So, you know what that means about Apollo's curse? It means that he didn't add a layer of "disbelievability" over everything Cassandra predicted. Instead, it means that he made a slight genetic alteration to Cassandra's brain so that she no longer had a Safe World Mentality. Apollo removed Cassandra's ability to delude herself into thinking all would be safe. That's the curse. There's where the insanity comes from.
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You know, I think that is my problem. I'm starting to think that I don't have the Self Delusion Circuit that resides in most other peoples' brains. I think that I might be a genetic cul-de-sac because I can't pretend everything is all right, when I can clearly see it isn't.
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