When Cassandra denied the God and his advances, he placed a curse on her, so that no one would believe her words or her predictions. He gave her a gift that would bring frustration and despair to her. In the tragedy Agamemnon, Cassandra appears to suggest the God to become hic consort but then breaks her promise, causing his wrath.
Thus, Apollo left her the gift of prophecy but cursed her so that no one could or would believe her. According to the second version, Cassandra went to the Temple of Apollo in Troy and his little Temple Snakes licked her ears, allowing her to listen to the future.
This theme is not unknown in Greek Mythology, as the snakes of Apollo have appeared in different myths and versions, allowing people to foresee the future and understand the language of animals.
Cassandra foresaw the destruction of Troy by the Greeks; when the Trojans found the big wooden horse outside the gates of their city Cassandra told them that Greeks will destroy them if they bring the horse in the city. No one in Troy believed her, and the horse was admitted in the city, with the known results for Troy. Cassandra died in Mycenae, murdered along with Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. Alas for my father's worship before the citadel, The flocks that bled and the tumult of their breath!
But no help from them came To save Troy Towers from falling as they fell! In most of them, Cassandra has a complicated relationship with the god Apollo, who is credited with giving Cassandra the gift of foresight.
According to one version of her myth , Cassandra was the mortal daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba, the royal rulers of Troy. The legend held that King Priam had 50 sons and 50 daughters. While she was in Apollo's temple, the god Apollo himself came to visit beautiful Cassandra, and offered her the divine gift of psychic powers. There was only one catch: she had to sleep with him.
After Apollo gave Cassandra the ability to prognosticate, she refused to be with him romantically, angering the deity. In revenge, Apollo cursed her: according to his abrasive vow, Cassandra could still predict the future, but no one would ever believe her.
She would become an outcast. In another mythic rendition of her origin, as recounted in Pierre Grimal's The Dictionary of Classical Mythology , Cassandra had a twin brother, Helenus.
While their parents celebrated the duo's birth and were not watching the children , two snakes came upon the babes and licked their ears clean. In the morning, the snakes slithered into sacred laurels, a sign of Apollo. Afterward, Cassandra and Helenus had the gift of prophecy. When Apollo, irate and rejected, later sought revenge, he took away Cassandra's confidence in her predictions.
Through his curse, she began to doubt her own worth. Although her insights had cultural and spiritual import, no one believed or heeded her. She was marginalized and called "crazy. Depressed and alone, Cassandra went "mad. She was eventually given over to Agamemnon, as part of the spoils of the Trojan war.
She died tragically , beheaded by Clytemnestra, who was angry about Agamemnon's betrayal of their marriage. For old patients, and perhaps would-be ones, I seem less stigmatized to them, making more normal interactions easier. Serving on a community board is much different than a professional board, and I think that is due to what having a psychiatrist on the board means. While I know that I can provide helpful insights into human behavior, situations, and organizations, many seem to feel ambivalent about that at best.
For instance, while I would assume that a major transition from a long-term beloved leader would cause some grief and anxiety about the future-which may need some sort of organizational response-others may deny that such responses exist and insist that everything will turn out just fine.
This Psychiatric Views on the News column is another way to try to connect with the public, and for psychiatry to engage more in societal issues. From the comments on this website, it seems that some useful interaction is occurring, although every now and then a diatribe against psychiatry pops up. Goodness knows, there are many social issues that have important psychological aspects to them. Still, I struggle to find the best balance for the right time to say something in public.
Like some people, should I go the non-verbal route out in public with a sign that says " free hugs from a psychiatrist "!? Alternatively, I can shut up professionally and try to respond like everybody else. Certainly, woe to the psychiatrist and his or her loved ones if you act like a psychiatrist in your intimate relationships.
Others have wondered, too, what to call my role. Cassandra pledges herself as a priestess to a female goddess as well as to Apollo. In addition. A lecherous Trojan temple priest molests Cassandra, and she refuses his advances… but then realizes that this may have been the god himself in human form. She keeps beseeching Apollo to lift the curse, although he clearly has no intention to, and accusing him of unfairness, which is equally pointless.
She gained a dignified serenity in her resignation. In the epic poem The Fall of Troy by Quintus Smyrnaeus , Cassandra takes physical action to avert the disaster manufactured by the Greeks.
No one listens to her words of warning that the Trojan Horse contains Greek warriors, so Cassandra grabs an ax and a burning torch and tries unsuccessfully to destroy the wooden horse and the Greeks inside it herself in order to save her home city. The ancient authors of Greek mythology agree on her fate: when the Greeks conquer the city of Troy, she gets raped by Ajax the Lesser of the Greeks, even though she has sought refuge in the temple of Athena, which is sacrosanct.
According to some accounts of myth, Athena later takes out her wrath against the rapist for the atrocity in the temple of Athena and its sacrilege. The victorious Greeks divide the spoils, and Cassandra gets allocated as concubine to the Greek King Agamemnon of Mycenae. One happy note is that ancient writers say Cassandra was deemed worthy of the Elysian Fields due to her piety.
She survives the murder plot against Agamemnon, escapes the fall of Troy along with eluding her own death, and starts a new life under an assumed identity, usually in a humble role in a peaceful idyll. In Cassandra, Princess of Troy by Hillary Bailey , she finds and marries a good man and lives out her life as a wife on a quiet farm home in Thessaly.
Free from Agememnon and Greek captivity, Cassandra subverts her tragedy and travels to Asia with plans to form an ideal women-ruled kingdom.
Some have used the myth of Cassandra as an example of a chaste virgin because she fought to keep her herself pure. Others have held her up as an example of an evil seductress, because Cassandra used the power of her sexuality to lure Apollo.
She has been portrayed as a bad woman, because she spoke up against the decisions of powerful males instead of keeping quiet as a woman should. But she was also held up as the victim of a woman-oppressing patriarchal culture.
Medieval Christians saw her variously as a proto-Christian, a true prophetess who foretold the coming of Jesus Christ, and as a martyr who suffered a terrible plight because she refused to obey the pagan God. Depending on whether or not she struck a deal selling her favors to Apollo, she is seen variously as a prostitute, as a contract breaker, or as as a victim of attempted sexual coercion.
In 20th century retellings, she is a mouthpiece for political dissidents who use recourse to permitted ancient legends to issue warnings that would otherwise get ignored or to tell the stories that would otherwise be censored if not shrouded in metaphor. During the Cold War period, Christa Wolf wrote Kassandra, using the long-ago happenings in Troy to alert fellow East Germans to the truths suppressed by the regime. Still, audiences pay attention to what Cassandra says in novels, poems, and plays about the fall of her home.
I find this deeply ironic, because during her lifetime, her words and warnings fell on deaf ears. But instead of satisfying my need, they increased my frustration. Of course, I understood that Cassandra was a character from myth, not based on a historical person but invented by storytellers.
Would Cassandra really grieve at the death of Agamemnon, the man who claimed her as his share of the spoils of war and used her as a concubine? I loved the emotional intensity in the rousing ballad by Friedrich Schiller , my favorite German poet. But would Cassandra, after years of suffering, walk into a laurel grove and lament her fate with such emotional intensity, beseeching the god to withdraw the curse?
Such passionate anguish would be psychologically plausible if she had just come to realize the enormity of her fate. But after years of suffering, the despair would have a quieter, resigned, bitter quality, like glowing embers rather than bright flames.
Much as I admire the 20th century retellings with their clever use of the Trojan War plot to create a message about their own time, their versions never quite resonated with me. The novels bestowing on Cassandra a lover who believes her even when no one else does, or a happy ending in idyllic rural anonymity, undermine and devalue the tragedy of her fate.
Its title and premise lured me again and again, yet each read left me unsatisfied. Supposedly a historical novel, and well-researched in some aspects, its depiction of siege warfare in the Bronze Age is far removed from historical reality. So, when I read the novel, I spotted implausibilities and they spoiled my reading pleasure. After a few months, mothers would dig the earth with their fingernails, desperate for a few grubs to feed their starving children.
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