Love Potion Number Nine

Ah, young love. You burn, you pine, you perish. A smile sends you soaring; a glare tumbles mountains around your head. You just have to feel for those two crazy kids, thrown together by their unruly hearts. Sometimes. After all, if the object of your affection doesn't return your

The Love Potion, Evelyn De Morgan

feelings, you can always brainwash them with a handy love spell! Those never backfire!

For all their ubiquity in myths, it is a rare story where the love spell actually works out all right. There's Cupid and Psyche, sort of; he scratches himself with the arrow of love, falls head over heels, and... abducts her, woos her while invisible, and has to abandon her to a torturous set of quests before they can be reunited. And that's the happy one.

It's much easier to find a love spell gone wrong. Sometimes it's played for laughs, as Shakespeare does in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Frequently it's the province of a villainous woman, a "false bride" seeking to blot out a man's memories of his beloved and claim him for herself. (There's a splendid Grimm story, Sweetheart Roland, in which the heroine's loss of her beloved is just one of the many trials she faces.) More often, however, a love spell leads to total disaster. And I'm not talking about Our Hero and Our Heroine not ending up together. I'm talking about the breaking of the world.

Aphrodite Leading Helen to Paris, Jack Pane

The most famous of these is, of course, Helen of Troy. The jury will probably always be out on whether or not Helen went with Paris willingly, but in the Iliad she has no doubt of the answer: she demands to know if she is to be sent hither and yon, crazed with desire, whenever Aphrodite has a new mortal favorite. Obviously this was a flawed love spell, since Helen's own wishes can still make themselves felt, but it's still highly potent. Helen does in the end sleep with Paris, and the direct outcome of Aphrodite's love spell is the destruction, not just of a city, but of an entire generation.

Helen is a particularly sad case because not only has she been brainwashed, she knows it. The gods can force mortals to do their bidding; Helen knows all too well that no matter how much she might want to go home to Sparta, she will never be able to fight off Aphrodite's mind control. The best she can do is complain about it, and even that arouses the wrath of a goddess who's notoriously vindictive when thwarted. There are plenty of love-spelled bridegrooms unaware that they're about to marry the wrong girl; Helen is fully conscious all the time of just how much she doesn't want what Aphrodite's love spell is forcing on her. Hell with brainwashing - this is torture.

Tristan and Isolde, Yoshitaka Amano

Later stories shift the blame away from the lovers. Tristan and Isolde drink a love potion unknowingly (again, the jury is still out on whether it really was an honest mistake, or whether Isolde's mother or maidservant thought that Isolde would be better paired with Tristan than with King Mark). It's just as unfair for them as it is for Helen; while their love is deeply felt, it's also created without their consent, and locks them into a fate as destructive as Troy's. For a long time they choose to deny their love, unlike Helen and Paris, for the sake of preserving the political alliance that Isolde's marriage creates. But all that that does is drive them to distraction and inflame Mark's suspicions. When they run away together, their guilty consciences send Isolde back to Mark and Tristan across the sea to Brittany, and ultimately into a marriage of convenience with a girl he never touches, who rightly becomes as suspicious as Mark. Conscience proves their undoing, since out of decency Tristan waits to seek Isolde's healing help until it's too late to save his life, and she dies of a broken heart when she arrives to find him dead. Their story is a tragedy where Helen and Paris's is not, primarily because they fight as hard as they can against a love that they know will doom them. But that knowledge gives them precisely zero help. The best you can do, apparently, is to live a tortured life of denial and hope that posterity thinks well of you.

Siegfried Meets Gutrune, Arthur Rackham

And that's only if your family is inclined to let it rest. Siegfried's wife Kriemhild enticed him away from Brunhilde with a love spell, but the ensuing love dodecahedron creates a situation where murder and mayhem are the only outcomes. Siegfried's friendship with Gunther, Kriemhild's brother, leads him to betray his initial (and real) love for Brunhilde by posing as Gunther in order to win her for his new brother-in-law; Brunhilde's outraged pride and rejected love make her arrange for Gunther to kill Siegfried, and then to throw herself on his funeral pyre; and Kriemhild, furious at her brother's treachery, has him slaughtered at the feast celebrating her second marriage and burns the great hall down around them all.

Brunnhilde on the Pyre, Arthur Rackham

The characters of the Nibelungenlied (or the Volsunga saga, whichever version you prefer) are neither heroic nor villainous. They do horrible things, but for reasons well within the code of their society. Kriemhild's terrible vengeance is something that her honor requires her to do; in the Volsunga saga, the gods decide that she did exactly the right thing and bring about a third (and apparently happy) marriage, this time to a Swedish king. Siegfried deserves more pity than condemnation; for most of the story, he operates under the brainwashing influence of the love spell, and can't even remember being in love with Brunhilde. As far as he knows, he's doing some iffy things in the service of his best friend and the woman he loves. Brunhilde, although vindictive as hell, also recognizes that she's gone too far (although arguably she's operating under the exact same rules as Kriemhild will later); her suicide reclaims for her a moment of true tragic dignity. Only Gunther comes off as a real lowlife, literally stabbing his best friend and brother-in-law in the back. The whole mess could have been avoided if the love spell had never entered the picture. Once it does, everyone involved is doomed. The rules of honor require them all to make the moves that will lead to their deaths.

Death of Tristan, Robert Engels

Which makes sense. Clearly we're uncomfortable with the idea that we can be brainwashed and never regain our true minds. But the horrific endings to so many love spell stories place the brunt of the fallout on the shoulders of the victims. Siegfried gets murdered; Tristan and Isolde both die; Helen sees herself become the byword for a faithless whore. Aphrodite never suffers for enchanting Helen. The queen of Ireland, who sends the love potion with Isolde, is punished not at all; nor is Kriemhild's mother, who puts the spell on Siegfried. In some "false bride" fairy tales, the villainous woman who tried to steal the bridegroom gets torn limb from limb by horses, or rolled down a hill in a barrel full of knives, or even just exiled or humiliated in front of the whole court. But in some (like Sweetheart Roland), there's again no punishment for the instigator of the mess.

The Death of Siegfried, Hermann Hendrich

It's incredibly unsatisfying to see relative innocents pay with their lives for the crime of another. But it reveals a realistic attitude towards life that legends and fairy tales (often unjustly) aren't seen as having. People escape justice all the time. Innocents suffer all the time. The punishment for making a mistake is often out of proportion to the mistake itself. These aren't giddy Disneyfied tales of happily-ever-after; these are tragedies of epic scope, designed to reveal dark truths about humanity and about life. Instead of spoon-feeding you a happy ending, the love spell stories and their awful endings force you to think about human nature: about love, about hate, about injustice.

It's heavy stuff. But it's what we have legends for. We tell those stories to remember what happens when we impose our will on someone else. And in telling them, hopefully we remember that that path rarely leads to dignity, or happiness, or anything we'd want for ourselves.

Life After Troy

The Burning of Troy, Francisco Collantes

Part of the sheer fascination we've always had with the Trojan War is its unbelievable death toll. The Iliad spends a whole chapter naming all the kings, sons of kings, and kings' lieutenants who sailed to Troy, only to describe in equally loving detail the manners of their deaths a chapter or so later. Morbid? Of course. But magnetic.

And it explains why imagination clings so desperately to those lucky few who make it out alive. Odysseus, Aeneas, Cassandra (for a while), Andromache, the house of Atreus - all are names to conjure with. They're the survivors. Be it luck, courage, or determination, they were still standing at the end. They're the ones we want to know more about.

But there's a very distinct line drawn even among the survivors. It's apparently not enough to survive a ten-year siege of nonstop brutality. The survivors who live past the war are the ones who get as far from the war as they possibly can.

Captive Andromache, Frederic Leighton

This dooms most of the women from the start. Women's fortunes in ancient Greece were tied directly to their men and their city. When both those mainstays disappear, the women have no status anymore. Andromache suffers the humiliation of slavery and gets lusted after by the son of the man who killed her

Ajax and Cassandra,
Solomon J. Solomon

husband. Cassandra - princess, priestess, and prophet - is raped by two Greek commanders and murdered as collateral damage in Clytemnestra's vengeance. (An alternate version lets her run away to start a new line, but while I'd love to believe it - Cassandra's one of my Iliad favorites - I can envision a bloodthirsty Clytemnestra mowing down everyone in her path much more easily than I can see an escape for Cassandra.) Hecuba, powerless to save her husband or her children, gets claimed as a slave by Odysseus, which means that unless she was on the ship he himself left Troy in, it's very likely that she drowned en route to Ithaca. Only Helen manages to be female and in a safe place by the end of the war, and even her peace comes through depressing self-slander. Women in a society shaped by fighting men have very few tools for forging their own paths beyond destruction.

Even among the men, it's tough to break away from the defining episode of their lives. Agamemnon is most obviously tripped by

Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, Pierre-Narcisse Guerin

it, and through his death his entire family becomes accessory to the destruction of the Trojan War. Ajax of Locris earns the enmity of Athena when he rapes Cassandra inside her temple; his prideful refusal to atone, or to acknowledge the power of the gods, is so outrageous that Athena and Poseidon put aside their own feud to tag-team on drowning Ajax. Menelaus jumps at the chance to relive the war when Telemachus comes to visit. In the guise of telling the young man about his unknown father, he journeys back to the thrill of war, something he's evidently missed in the past ten years of domestic calm. Keep in mind here that Menelaus is by far the most successful, of the men who get back to Greece, in living beyond the war. Even he can't get over it.

Ulysses and the Sirens, Roman mosaic, 3rd century CE

What about Odysseus, you say? Well, sure, Odysseus is really good at making his own life. The Odyssey is arguably more famous than the Iliad. And he does indeed return home, to where his loving wife and valiant son await him. But don't forget that it takes him ten years to get home, on top of the ten years he spent fighting at Troy. Don't forget that one stupid remark to Poseidon's Cyclops son dogs him throughout those ten years. And don't forget - however much you might want to - that tradition, if not Homer, sends him on still further journeys after his return to Ithaca. Odysseus' success in shaking off the Trojan War wakes in him a wanderlust that he cannot ignore. He all but creates the archetype of the restless wanderer, searching for something new and different. His life is big enough to contain the war and his own travels, but one snares him as completely as the other snares the women.

Aeneas and Dido, Pierre-Narcisse Guerin

And then there's Aeneas. Flat-out awesome in the Iliad, with no ending given him by tradition, he gets co-opted into a spectacular piece of poetic propaganda written to justify the Roman Empire. He's the only one who gets a truly happy ending: his journey done, his quest fulfilled, his line and city firmly founded. Like Odysseus, he has rough seas to sail; unlike Odysseus, he knows what he's looking for and when he's found it. In one sense, of course Aeneas triumphs in the creation of a life free of the Trojan War; the rise of Augustus Caesar demands the legitimation that only Aeneas can provide. But even within the story, as a character, Aeneas tries harder than anyone to break free. He may be haunted by his failure to save his wife from Troy, but it doesn't stop him from falling in love with Dido or marrying Lavinia. Offered the chance to call it quits and rule Carthage, he refuses. He clings to his search for a new city, far from his home, precisely because it is the only way to escape Troy. He creates his own life on his own terms, refusing to be defined by the war, and he alone manages to get a satisfying happily ever after. (It's telling, too, that in the happy-ending alternate version of Cassandra's fate, she also finds a home and a life far beyond Troy or the Greek city-states. Getting out of Dodge is the only way to escape.)

The Trojan War is a paradigm-breaker. It's massive, spanning generations and continents; its consequences define "far-reaching." It makes sense that a world trying to patch itself back together in the image of the past is a world doomed to failure. Aeneas and Odysseus are the only ones who realize the impossibility of going home after the breaking of the world, and only Aeneas realizes it in time.

Not Like It's Important

Why does everyone ignore the prophet?

The Sabine Women, Jacques-Louis David

Plenty of legends come equipped with a voice of either doom or reason, laying out the future in five easy steps, free of charge. Soothsayers, hedge witches, fortune tellers: if you're living in a legend, there's almost always a prophet of some sort lurking around the next corner. What's better, their prophecy will come true.

But if you're living in a legend, it's all but required that you ignore it.

Cassandra wailed of doom for Troy for ten years, to no avail. Moses pulled off an astounding number of miracles while Pharaoh just scoffed. Merlin, taking it perhaps farther than any other prophet, foresaw the exact manner of his own death and still fell into Nimue's trap. Once, okay, you ignore portents of ruin and hope for the best. But when they come true, it would make sense to listen next time.

Moses and Aaron Before Pharaoh, Robert Leinweber

And these prophets in particular had excellent track records. Arthur has no excuse for ignoring Merlin's warning; when the brain behind your throne tells you something, you'd better pay attention. Moses turned the only source of water in a desert kingdom to blood on, essentially, a dare. That alone should have made Pharaoh sit up and take notice. Cassandra had been foreseeing all manner of unpleasant things for years, although her case is particularly cruel. Because she refused a randy god's booty call, no one was ever going to be able to believe her.

Ignoring the prophet creates not only a crushing loss in-story, but a particularly frustrating read. While characters blunder on down the plot road, the readers are left scowling and upset with their heroes, who just can't seem to clean the wax out of their ears long enough to hear the crucial tidbit. "Why didn't you just not marry Guinevere?" I've wanted to yell. "Why can't they just give Helen back? Why don't you let his freaking people go?" Like the prophets, we see it coming a mile away. Watching doom draw closer and closer is agonizing, especially when it's coming for people we've grown to care about.

King Arthur and Merlin at the Lake, W. Otway Cannell

And that's exactly the point of including a prophet. It's a fantastic writer's tool for creating narrative tension. We want to assume that Camelot would always stand; once Merlin tells us that it will fall through the illicit passion of the Queen and her champion, we're on the lookout for every hint the story lets fall. Lancelot's arrival is doubly portentous because we already know what he brings to Camelot. The ten plagues would be completely anticlimactic without Pharaoh ignoring the prophet; Moses would never truly prove his strength as an individual rather than a mouthpiece for God, and God wouldn't be able to demonstrate his complete dominance over the gods and people of Egypt. (Not to mention that if the story ran on common sense rather than escalating tension, there'd probably be only one plague and no Red Sea miracle.) Cassandra's prophecies of doom add even more poignancy to the fact that most of the major characters in the Iliad are vividly aware of what will happen when they die. Hector's speech to Andromache about how he most fears her falling into enemy hands as a slave is extra heartbreaking because we know, even if he doesn't, that his worst fear will come horribly true.

No one listens to the prophet because he's not in the story for the characters. He's there for us. The prophet exists to make us nervous, to remind us that happiness is transitory, to let us know what to watch out for. A prophet can't teach his or her fellow characters anything; it's too late for them, their story's already set in stone. The people who can learn from a prophet are the readers for whom he or she is the surrogate within the story, the more detached observer who can tell how things will play out.

Oh, princess, how they'll whisper your name...

Hands up if you knew Cassandra had a suitor. (Not counting Apollo, that is, or Ajax of Rapetown in the shire of Rapesly.) Two suitors, in fact. At least. Coroebus and Othronus, foreign princes who fought and died for Troy because they wanted to marry Cassandra.

Cassandra, Frederick Sandys

I wonder why so few Iliad adaptations mention that? What part of "feared and shunned prophesying madwoman" doesn't
scream dude magnet?

I like that Cassandra had suitors. It's a canon confirmation of how fascinating a character she's always been. We're not the only ones interested in a dead-on accurate and utterly ignored prophet. Even then, even among the people who stuffed their fingers in their ears, someone saw something in her that made them want to know more.

And in a serious way, too. It would be different if Coroebus came to Troy, saw a hot princess (Homer compares Cassandra to Aphrodite at one point), and decided she wasn't interesting enough to risk his life for. Instead, he made it all the way through the war fighting for Troy, only to die trying to defend Cassandra from Ajax of Locris.

Cassandra Dragged from Athena's Temple, Antoine Rivalz

Poor Othronus comes late and leaves early, arriving and dying in the Iliad. Homer takes the time to inform us that Othronus is there only so he can marry Cassandra, and that he would have married her even without a dowry.

We're not talking puppy love here. There was something about this woman. (Sure, at the beginning an alliance with Troy probably helped. But after ten years of war, with all its deprivations and losses, there was something else keeping them on that battlefield.)

So what is it about Cassandra that's so magnetic? Her own people don't like her, at least one god has a serious vendetta against her, and she cares very little for her own personal image, or she wouldn't be quite so prone to public screaming prophecies. I'm going to hazard a guess that whatever drew Coroebus and Othronus to her was not the prophetic gift that so enthralls modern readers. That particular blessing had very little value, either to Cassandra or to anyone who heard her. The benefit of hindsight makes it easier for us to appreciate Cassandra than it was for the Trojans.

Cassandra, Evelyn De Morgan

And she never stops fighting. In the face of scorn, ridicule, and disbelief, she never falters or betrays what she knows to be true. A Trojan, living day-to-day with an uncanny child prophet who grows more unhinged with each year, would not be kindly disposed toward her; an outsider, already prepared to like a rich and lovely princess, could easily be surprised and touched by her tenacity and her struggles. (Loyalty and courage being traits that ancient Greek society prized highly.)

But the repercussions of a lifetime of denial would have been very visible. Cassandra's a loner, a dreamer, a half-mad voice of reason at the mercy of unwanted powers.

So it's a lot to read into three characters who barely rate a mention in the Iliad. But it's a hard question to answer, and one that few people have even tackled. And in my head, at least, it gives Cassandra a measure of the sympathy and kindness that her people couldn't find for her.

And now you know what a softy I really am.

For extra fun: this song, from which I took the title of the post, might as well have been written by one of Cassandra's suitors.