The Man Who Ate Himself: Scene III
Tags: Apocalypse, Earth, Mythology, Climate Change

The Man Who Ate Himself: Scene III

Erysichthon’s gluttony wasted his ancestral wealth and, when all this was eaten up, only his daughter Mestra was left to him. He’d sold the family silver, run out of money, gone bankrupt (but in the ungrounded, make-believe world of business and economics you just go into administration and rise again, there’s always more to make-sell-waste… until you run out of planet, that is). Although he had one last thing to sell… his daughter. He sells her to a slave master.

But Mestra refused to be sold. She hastened to the nearby shore and implored Poseidon, her lover, with her tears, “Oh, you who have deprived me of virginity, deliver me from such a master’s power!”

Matter is feminine. Women are earth-beings. Men are sky-beings. When violence is done to matter, violence to women follows. When violence is done to women, violence to matter follows. Matter–women, women–matter, both are different forms of the same thing. Erysichthon chops the head off someone who dares to oppose him (remind you of a President?). Then in his desperation for more he sells his daughter into slavery. This is the psychological picture of a culture that has sold this planet for lebensraum. (Lebensraum, or living space, was the ideological principle that led to the Nazi invasion of East and Central Europe). This never happens under conditions of adversity or poverty. It is only in circumstances where the ego has never been humiliated, relativised or learnt its proper size, that the potential for inflation and grandiosity comes about. At some point in our lives we need to lose as well as win. Always being a winner is dangerous. In Maoridom, however famous you are, however far away you are, or however rich you are, when you come back to the marae you are just another cuzzie-bro. And when you speak your name it comes last. You come fifth in line — after your mountain, your river, your iwi, and your hapu. Abraham Lincoln said, “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” Nothing wrong with power, just takes some skill to handle it. Erysichthon failed the test.

Poseidon (Neptune to the Romans) was the god of the sea. Mestra refused to be enslaved and who does she turn to in her search for freedom? She was one of Neptune’s lovers. Her first lover (perhaps her only lover, we don’t know) was a god. In this world she was bound to her father, as are many women — the economic father, the academic father, the career father, the legal father, and they play by the father’s rules. But in the other world something different happens. In her distress Mestra goes not to her friends, nor her human partner (if she has one), nor her community, nor her culture. They are all land-animals. She returns to the source, her first experience of being connected to, connected with, ravished by, and loved by something not of this world. Or, in psychological terms, the Self.

Two threads here. First, she refuses to be enslaved. To refuse she must see that she is enslaved, then give birth to the desire for freedom, and then oppose her predicament. This may be a lifetime’s work for an individual woman, or seven generations work for the family, or 2,000 years of work for the culture. The long game is important. Second, she returns to the sea of her deepest nature — and is changed (as we shall see) into a man. Whenever the journey goes deep enough or far enough we meet the opposite side of ourselves and become one-hearted. At the deepest layers of the psyche, under conditions of death and war, orgasm and ecstasy, and deepest joy and deepest distress, all things become their opposite — a woman can be more aggressive than a man, and a man can be more tender than a woman.

When the slave master sought her out by the shore, Poseidon changed her quickly from a woman to a man, giving her the features and garments proper to a fisherman. The slave master looked at her and cried out, “Now tell me where is she, who only now, was standing on this shore — for I am sure I saw her standing here, although no footstep shows her flight.” Her master, deceived, retraced his footsteps from the sandy shore. As soon as he had disappeared, her form was given back to her.

But Erysichthon discovered that his daughter could transform herself and escape whatever situation she was in. He went on to sell and re-sell her first to one slave-owner and then another . But Mestra got away as a mare, bird, a cow, or as a stag and brought food to ease her father’s greed. And so he lived until the growing strength of famine, gnawing at his vitals, had consumed all he could get by selling her. With nothing left to eat, he gnawed his own flesh, tore his limbs, and fed upon his own body..

So Mestra escapes the slave master but her father, seeing her new-found ability to shape-shift, uses her for his own ends. But what did we expect? He’s a risk-taker, an entrepreneur, a go-getter, ready to capitalise on growth opportunities. Even the miraculous ability to change form is not seen for what it is — a life-giving gift from the other world — but is only another commodity to be used. But even this does not feed Erysichthon’s ravenous appetite and stave off his spiritual hunger. With nothing else to gorge… he eats himself.

Welcome to our planet.