TIRESIAS

Yesterday we looked at the degradation of love and sex through The Fire Sermon, by T. S. Eliot. The narrator, as we saw yesterday, is the transgender blind seer, Tiresias. Today I shall tell you who he is and how he came to be.

Ovid’s Metamorphosis tells us the story. Juno (Hera for the Greeks) and her husband Jupiter (Zeus for the Greeks) quarrel about a very sensitive issue. They can’t agree on who enjoys sex more during intercourse, the man or the woman. Juno thinks that she is merely servicing Jupiter, while Jupiter believes that Juno is the one who is enjoying the act more. To settle this dispute, they decide to call Tiresias, the blind seer who has lived as both man and woman. Tiresias, in fact, was transformed into a woman when, walking in the woods, he hit two copulating snakes with a stick. 

Don’t mess with Nature because she’ll mess with you! Tiresias was a trifle hardheaded, since several years later, walking in the woods as a woman, sees the snakes again and hits them, yet again, with a stick. He is the turned back to a man. 

Anyway, back to our story. In this dispute, Tiresias agrees with Jupiter, saying that women actually enjoy sex more than men. Juno is outraged that Tiresias does not agree with her, and so punishes him by blinding him. Jupiter feels sorry for him and so gives him the gift of prophecy, hence the blind, transgender seer!

T. S. Eliot says that Tiresias is the most important character in The Waste Land, since he knows all and represents all mankind, irrespective of gender. 

Do you remember how he was described in yesterday’s piece, The Fire Sermon? “I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs”. Tiresias also reminds us that he was in Thebes, walking with “the lowest of the dead.” Tiresias was there indeed. The reference here is to the episode in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, when Tiresias is well aware that the aridity and blight of Thebes is due to the incestuous marriage between Oedipus and his mother, Jocasta. He had unwittingly married her after killing his own father, Laius. 

Tiresias is one of my own favourites. He encapsulates all that is human, all that is spiritual and all that is knowing; or should I say, she.