#Jean-Pierre Vernant

[majestativa]

You deliriously dance the bacchanal of Hades.

— Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Medusa Reader, transl by Thomas Curley & Froma I. Zeitlin, (2013)

[citrineandrosmarin]

Athena Hippia / Khalinitis

Book: Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society by Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant

"Of all the places where an 'equine' Athena is worshiped together with the Poseidon who presides over horses, Corinth is perhaps if not the most important at any rate the most interesting."

"The Athena 'of the bit' [Chalinitis] first appears in a society dominated by the Bacciades, a land-owning aristocracy similar to the knights, the hippeis and the hippobotai who are attested in various other Greek cities at this time. The cult addressed to her is set up within a social group of 'knights', 'horsemen' for whom the beast of Poseidon is at one and the same time and instrument of war, an economic asset, a sign of social prestige and a symbol of political power."

"In the sphere of technology over which, as Chalinitis, she presides, Athena's method of operation can be […] contrasted to the type of invention peculiar to Hephaestus. The fact is that the bit […] is a masterpiece produced by a blacksmith and, as such, Hephaestus could well claim it for his own metis. And yet Pindar's myth is quite specific on this point: the bit which Athena gives Bellerophon is not regarded as a product of metallurgy […] It is thought of as a technical object which makes it possible to control a beast of unpredictable reactions. The clue to the mode of operation peculiar to Athena lies in the mythical representation of this instrument: she is the deity who presents to man, in the form of an instrument, a power both technical and magical to wield over the creature of Poseidon."

"[Athena] is a power orientated towards 'artifice' both in the sense of cunning and of technical *adroitness, and secondly because her action intervenes from the outside, is of short duration and is applied to a concrete object which does not belong to her; because she always manifests herself 'at the side', whether it be at the side of Bellerophon or at the side of Poseidon Hippios"

*adroitness: cleverness or skill; prowess; expertise; skill

[thesorcerersapprentice]

✦ A L T A L U N A & C U C U F A T E ✦ Research

"When Oppian describes the cunning of the fishing frog squatting in the mud, motionless and invisible, he compares it to the fox: ‘The scheming fox (agkulómetis kerdō) devises a similar trick; as soon as it spots a flock of wild birds it lies down on its side, stretches out its agile limbs, closes its eyelids and shuts its mouth. To see it you would think that it was enjoying a deep sleep or even that it was really dead, so well does it hold its breath as it lies stretched out there, all the while turning over treacherous plots (aióla bouleúousa) in its mind. No sooner do the birds notice it than they swoop down on it in a flock and, as if in mockery, tear at its coat with their claws, but as soon as they are within reach of its teeth the fox reveals its cunning (dólos) and seizes them unexpectedly. The fox is a trap; when the right moment comes the dead creature becomes more alive than the living. [….] If the metis of the fox is immediately detectable in its skill at playing dead, it is dazzlingly apparent in this sudden reversal. In effect, the fox holds the secret of reversal which is the last word in craftiness." - Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society by Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, pp. 35-36

[obsessioncollector]

What is this being that tragedy describes as a deinos, an incomprehensible and baffling monster, both an agent and one acted upon, guilty and innocent, lucid and blind, whose industrious mind can dominate the whole of nature yet who is incapable of governing himself?

Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd

[espejomonastico]

Pallas Athene

Pallas Athene es un perfume de Argos que posee una estructura olfativa que tiene acordes basados en notas florales, rosas, ámbar y algunos toques cítricos. Como es de suponerse, la fragancia homenajea a Atenea, la diosa griega de la sabiduría y el pensamiento. Sin embargo, así como dicha divinidad fue regente del intelecto, también lo fue de la guerra, el ingenio y la estrategia.

Si bien el historial de relaciones entre dioses y mortales está repleto en partes diferenciadas de alianzas y discordias, hubo un humano que gozó del favoritismo casi total (cosa difícil con los volubles olímpicos) de Atenea: Ulises/Odiseo, el héroe épico. La literatura no es concluyente respecto de los argumentos sobre los que se basa la predilección de Atenea, puesto que si bien Ulises es generoso en cuanto a sus libaciones a la diosa, esta también demuestra experimentar honesta admiración por él y complacerse por la compañía del mortal. Recuerdo haber leído alguna vez a un helenista señalar que Atenea veía en Ulises rasgos semejantes a los suyos y que por tanto la predilección se basaba en simpatía en el más puro sentido de la palabra.

Hacia el final de la Odisea, Ulises vuelve a Ítaca luego de años en el exilio y después de varias conversaciones con Atenea. Hay un episodio que siempre amé: en el regreso, Ulises debe parecer un extranjero en su propia tierra para reclamar su lugar y para ello es recubierto por un manto de nubes que Atenea le proporciona. En El ojo del espejo, Jean-Pierre Vernant señala incluso que Ulises «debe hacerse un cuerpo otro para no ser semejante ya a sí mismo».

Eso es lo que siento cada vez que uso ese perfume. Siento que cuando lo llevo hay una extrañeza de mí que me anima a exhibir, desde la velada exposición, lo que no soy en otros momentos. Siempre he dicho, más en broma que en serio, que es una fragancia que uso para confundir a otros, pero lo cierto es que es más bien un ardid para diferenciarme de mí, extrañarme y con-fundirme. Esto último se expresa en la dislocación de su significado: resultarme inesperado y al mismo tiempo invitarme a abrazar el resultado de la ambigüedad. No es azaroso que la sabiduría, el intelecto y la guerra se unan en Atenea; al mismo tiempo, tampoco lo es el hecho de que sus retorcidas artes sean tan sutiles como poco grotescas. Únicamente en la frontera del desconocimiento el tiempo es tiempo y no solo la grisácea sucesión de demoras. Una nube puede ser una dulce introducción al goce de la forma.

[radiogornjigrad]

Jean-Pierre Vernant: VASELJENA, BOGOVI, LJUDI [GRADAC – ALEF 52]

Naslov knjige Žan-Pjera Vernana Vaseljena, bogovi, ljudi govori da su mitovi sveobuhvatnost života. U njima je sačuvana tajna stvaranja, odnos bogova prema stvaranju, ali i čovekov položaj na ovom i na onom svetu. Put grčkih mitova vodi od pričâ dadilja (kako je to rekao Platon) do tragedija na antičkim pozornicama. Ali, taj se put nastavio do Šekspira, Rasina i Korneja, da bismo ih ponovo sreli…

[dipnotski]

Jacques Le Goff, Jean-Pierre Vernant – Tarih Üzerine Diyalog (2024)

Fransız tarih ekolünün iki dev ismi arasında tarih üzerine ufuk açıcı bir söyleşi. ‘Tarih Üzerine Diyalog’, Fransa’da Fernand Braudel ve Marc Bloch’un kurduğu “Annales” okulunun yetiştirdiği, Fransa tarihinin iki önemli ismi olan Jacques Le Goff ile Jean-Pierre Vernant’ın 2004 yılında Emmanuel Laurentin eşliğinde France Culture radyosu için yaptığı söyleşilerden oluşuyor. Ortaçağ uzmanı Le Goff…

[mask131]

Reblogging for the Jean-Pierre Vernant shout-out. He is one of the great experts and minds of France when it comes to Greek mythology, and his books are absolute must-reads.

And also for the cute little pigsies.

I'm going to start my third year of classics at Uni and last week I read for the first time the whole Homer's Odyssey and an analysis by Jean-Pierre Vernant "The Universe, the Gods, and Men". I was so hyped and amazed by this story -that I already knew but never read- that I picked up my pen again and I drew this.

I also listened to Epic the musical for the first time while drawing this and I was speechless!

So here's my interpretation of Odysseus and his dog Argos, surrounded by tokens of everything he went through :)

[fragbot]

For archaic thought, the dialectic of presence and absence, same and other, is played out in the otherworldly dimension that the eidōlon, by being a double, contains, in the miracle of something invisible that can be glimpsed for just an instant.

- from "The Birth of Images," Jean-Pierre Vernant; transl. Froma Zeitlin

[aboutanancientenquiry]

Les Origines de la pensée grecque- The Origins of Greek Thought

Jean-Pierre Vernant - Les Origines de la Pensée Grecque, Presses Universitaires de France (PUF) 1962, republished several times since then. 

" L'ambition [de cet essai] n'était pas de clore le débat par une étude exhaustive mais de le relancer... j'ai tenté de retracer les grandes lignes d'une évolution qui, de la royauté mycénienne à la cité démocratique, et marqué le déclin du mythe et l'avènement de savoirs rationnels. " En quoi consiste le miracle grec ? Quelles sont les innovations ayant marqué ce que nous appelons la pensée grecque et pourquoi se sont-elles produites dans ce monde grec ? Le mérite de Jean-Pierre Vernant est de réaliser une synthèse personnelle et accessible sur un sujet controversé où s'affrontent de nombreux hellénistes. Publié en 1962 dans la collection Mythes et religions, dirigée par Georges Dumézil, l'auteur a lui-même, à l'occasion d'une réédition parue vingt-cinq ans plus tard, réactualisé dans une longue préface certaines de ses interprétations (from the edition of 2013).

Jean-Pierre Vernant's concise, brilliant essay on the origins of Greek thought relates the cultural achievement of the ancient Greeks to their physical and social environment and shows that what they believed in was inseparable from the way they lived. The emergence of rational thought, Vernant claims, is closely linked to the advent of the open-air politics that characterized life in the Greek polis. Vernant points out that when the focus of Mycenaean society gave way to the agora, the change had profound social and cultural implications. "Social experience could become the object of pragmatic thought for the Greeks," he writes, "because in the city-state it lent itself to public debate. The decline of myth dates from the day the first sages brought human order under discussion and sought to define it.... Thus evolved a strictly political thought, separate from religion, with its own vocabulary, concepts, principles, and theoretical aims."

Jean-Pierre Vernant The Origins of Greek Thought, Cornell University Press, 1984

Jean-Pierre Vernant (1914-2007), known with the pseudonym Colonel Berthier as commander of units of the French resistance during WWII, was a French historian and anthropologist specialized in ancient Greece.

[pink-lemonade-rose]

The privilege that Mnemosyne confers on the bard is the possibility of contacting the other world, of entering and returning from it freely. The past is seen as a dimension of the beyond.

Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks

[majestativa]

What is this sinister power of enragement that finds its rhythm in the flute, “the music of madness”? The tragic poet supplies the answer: “It is the Gorgon, daughter of Night, and her vipers with their hundred clamorous [iachemasin] heads; it is Lyssa of the petrifying gaze.”

— Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Medusa Reader, transl by Thomas Curley & Froma I. Zeitlin, (2013)

[citrineandrosmarin]

On The Nature of Metis

Book: Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society by Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant

"In every confrontation or competitive situation […] success can be won by two means, either thanks to a superiority in 'power' in the particular sphere in which the contest is taking place, with the stronger gaining the victory; or by the use of methods of a different order whose effect is, precisely, to reverse the natural outcome of the encounter and to allow victory to fall to the party whose defeat had appeared inevitable.

[…] In some cases it will be considered the result of cheating since the rules of the game have been disregarded. In others, the more surprise it provokes the greater the admiration it will arouse, the weaker party having, against every expectation, found within himself resources capable of putting the stronger at his mercy. [...] [Metis] is, in a sense, the absolute weapon, the only one that has the power to ensure victory and domination over others, whatever the circumstances, whatever the conditions of the conflict.

[...] If Zeus is king of the gods, more powerful than all the other deities, even when they band against him, it is because he is, par excellence, the god who possesses metis. […] Zeus made himself pure metis by swallowing [The goddess Metis]. […] Hence-forth, there can be no metis possible without Zeus or directed against him."

[deadknot]

need to print these out for a greater agenda

[obsessioncollector]

The sudden rise of the tragic genre at the end of the sixth century, at the very moment when law is beginning to elaborate the concept of responsibility by differentiating, albeit still in a clumsy and hesitant manner, the “intentional” from the “excusable” crime, marks, an important turning point in the history of the inner man. Within the framework of the city, man begins to try himself out as an agent who is more or less autonomous in relation to the religious powers that dominate the universe, more or less master of his own actions and more or less in control of his political and personal destiny. This still hesitant and uncertain experimentation in what was to become, in the psychological history of the Western world, the category of the will is portrayed in tragedy as an anxious questioning concerning the relationship of man to his actions: To what extent is man really the source of his actions?

Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd

[mask131]

Greek monster myths (1)

Various mini-articles loosely translated from the French « Dictionary of Feminine Myths », under the direction of Pierre Brunel. (You could also translate the title as “Dictionary of Female Myths” – the idea being all the myths centered around women)

Article 1: Gorgô

[Note: this mini-article is distinct from the mini-article about “Gorgons”]

The appearance of Gorgô, at the end of the eleventh chant of the Odyssey, is meant to cause fright – not just to Odysseus himself who is just done with invoking the dead, but also to the audience hearing this rhapsody (the Phaeacians listening to Odysseus’ tale), and to the very listener of the Homeric poem. Gorgô forms the dominant peak of this “evocation of the dead” (nekuia), she is the “chlôron déos”, the “green fear”. Odysseus’ mother, Anticleia, just disappeared back again nto the Hades – the hero wishes to summon other shades, such as those of Theseus and of his former companion Pirithous, “but before them, here is that with hellish cries the uncountable tribes of the dead gathered”. And Odysseus adds: “I felt myself becoming green with fear at the thought that, from the depths of the Hades, the noble Persephone might sent us the head of Gorgô, this terrible monster…” (633-635). It is barely an apparition, it is the possibility of an appearance, but it is enough to terrorize the living.

Jean-Pierre Vernant, in his work “La Mort dans les yeux” (Death in the eyes), establishes the link which ties together Gorgô and Medusa. Because Gorgô is more than a singular unification of the three Gorgons: she is a superlative form of Medusa, she is what happens when her petrifying gaze survives beyond death. By studying the depictions of Gorgô in ancient statues, Vernant establishes two fundamental traits: the faciality, and the monstrosity. He explains that “interferences” take place “between the human and the bestial, associated and mixed in diverse ways”. Maybe Gorgô is, as Vernant suggests, “the dark face, the sinister reverse of the Great Goddess, of which Artemis will most notably be the heir”. But Gorgô is also placed in the function of watchful guardian of the world of the dead, a world forbidden to the living. The mask of Gorgô expresses the radical alterity of Death and the dead.

Article 2: The Graeae

Daughters of Keto and Phorkys (they are thus also called “The Phorcydes”), sisters of the Gorgons, these divinities of shadows, which were born as elderly women and doomed to share one eye and one tooth for all three, appear exclusively in the tale of Perseus and Medusa.

The most ancient mention of the Graeae comes from Hesiod’s Theogony, which only counts two of them and names them Pemphredo and Enyo (Enyo was also the name of a goddess of war within Homer’s Iliad). The third of the sisters appears within a fragment of the Athenian logographer Pherecyde: Deino (“The Dreadful”), later called Persis by Hyginus (in his “Preface to fables”). Other authors, like Ovid, prefer to stick with two Graeae. Hesiod makes a quite flattering portrait of them: he makes them elegant goddesses with a “beautiful face”, even though they were “white-haired (understand “having white hair due to old age”) since birth”. And while their very name means “old women”, the Antique iconography actually follows the Hesiodic model: the depictions of the sisters as disfigured by the effects of time are quite rare… At most the artists will just put a few wrinkles. These mysterious hybrids between youth and old age, virginal seduction and sinister ugliness, finds an echo within a few lines from Aeschylus “Prometheus bound”: “Three ancient maidens, with swan bodies, that share a single eye and a single tooth, and who never receive a look from the shinng sun or the crescent of the night.” Aeschylus had an entire tragedy written about them (Phorcydes) which was unfortunately lost – but Aristotle wrote about it in his “Poetics” and implies that the play insisted on their monstrous aspect, placing them within the legendary area known as “the gorgonian fields of Kisthene”, and closely associating them with their sisters, of which they form a reversed image. Indeed, the Gorgons have a very powerful eyesight which no mortal being can face, while the Graeae have an extreme form of blindness. This trinity of women, old by nature, can also be understood as the antithesis of the three Charites, the Graces which embodied eternal youth.

The Graeae seems to have only a role within the myth of Perseus. And, outside of a few details, this legend does not change much from Pherecyde to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, passing by Lycophron, Apollodorus’ Bibliotheca, and Hyginus’ Astronomy. In all those versions the Graeae are the jealous keeper of the secret path that leads to the Gorgons, and Perseus must steal their eye in order to obtain the knowledge needed to reach Medusa. However, Pherecyde did change an element: according to him the Graeae do not protect the path leading to the Gorgons, but rather the path leading to the nymphs that hold the magical items Perseus needs to fight Medusa.

Due to their limited presence in Greek mythology, the Graeae have quite a poor cultural posterity. In the 19th century Goethe will remember them: in his “Second Faust”, Mephistopheles appears under the guise of “Phorkyas”, a monster with only one eye and one tooth. In the world of paintings, Edward Burne-Jones, who created a true “Perseus cycle”, had a strong interest for them: he worked for a very long time on a painting of the Graeae. Their face is barely visible, but the cloth that wraps itself around their body is menacing ; they are within an arid desert, under a dark sky heavy with clouds – they perform a sinister dance, in a mockery of the Graces. Perseus comes to steal their eyes, and the grey color that invades all the nuances of the picture symbolizes the unique presence of those strange crones, both disquieting and pitiable.

Article 3: Echidna

Echidna, “the viper”, is according to Hesiod the daughter of Phorkys and Keto, themselves born of Pontos, the Sea, and Gaia, the Earth. Echidna’s sisters are female monsters like her: the Graeae, and the Gorgons. Hesiod describes her as having half of the body of a “fair-cheeked nymph”, while the rest of her body is the one of an enormous, big, cruel, spotted and terrible snake which “lies within the secret depths of the divine earth”. Echidna as such belongs to this large mythological family of snake-women, of which the most famous case in France is the fairy Mélusine. But unlike Mélusine, Echidna can never leave the snake-half of her body, and thus a better French heir would be Marcel Aymé’s depiction of the vouivre with her cohort of vipers.

Theodore de Banville, when he imagines Hesiod scolding him for sanitizing Classical mythology, makes of Echidna the symbol of the archaic mythology: he tells him that he is “making a toy out of the history of the gods” by depicting Love as “a sweet child, free of carnivorous appetites, ignored by the Furies and by bloody Echidna”.

Echidna precisely appears as a being led by an amorous desire within Herodotus’ tales, that he claims to have collected among the Greeks of Pontus Euxinus: as Herakles was sleeping, Echidna steals his horses away. She only agrees to give them back if he sleeps with her. When Herakles leaves her, she tells him that she will bear three sons from their union. He advises them to only keep with her one that would be able to bend a bow just like him, and to force the others to leave. She does that, and this favorite son is supposed to be the one that created the Scythian people. This meeting between Herakles and Echidna might be derived from the famous encounters between Herakles and three of Echidna’s other children: the Nemean Lion, the Hydra of Lerna, and Cerberus.

In Aeschylus, Orestes compares his mother, Clytemnestra, to “a horrible viper”. Sophocles has Creon call Ismene, which he believes to have helped Antigone, “a viper that slid in my house against my will to drink my blood”. These examples show a link between the Ancient metaphorical speech, and the mythological allusions. Indeed, only the context can allow us to determine if these authors meant “viper” as a common name, or as a proper name: as “Viper”, “Echidna”. But it confirms the idea that, in Ancient Greece, Echidna is a monster born of an archaic fear of the women, and embodying their supposed perfidy.