Cassandra’s Curse
In Greek mythology Cassandra was the daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy during the time of the Trojan War. She was a princess of the highest order and was considered the most beautiful of Priam and Hecuba’s daughters. She is often depicted as having flame colored hair and gave the impression of possessing a fiery personality.
She was also known as a priestess and prophetess at the temple of Apollo and possessed the gift of knowing the future (only after she talked Apollo into giving it to her). This gift of prophecy was also considered by most to be a curse. It isn’t clear, however, if the cursed part of knowing the future was in itself a problem, or if the problem was the actual curse of not being believed. A curse Apollo put upon her because she refused to play his game. More on that in a moment.
Cassandra was not happy. She spent most of her life slowly going insane, prone to wild fits and an easily unleashed anger. She became known for not only her fiery hair and personality, but her fiery temper as well. Cassandra had visions of disaster, and she desperately wanted to share these prophesies with her loved ones to spare them pain, but no one paid a speck of attention to her. No wonder she went nuts.
Sounds familiar, eh?
So what exactly was this curse? Essentially the ol’ princess could see the future pretty accurately, yet any time she told anyone what that future was, no one believed her. She couldn’t even lie, as she was only capable of telling the truth and couldn’t try to trick people by telling lies. Nothing worked. She was a Trojan Chicken Little. No one believed her.
And to add insult to injury, her prophecies were only of bad things that would be occurring in the future, nothing good. So no one wanted her dark cloud floating around. Even though they didn’t believe her, they got tired of hearing her ranting nonstop. She was a drag.
The back story is that Apollo, the most venerated of the Greek pantheon, gave his priestess/princess the power of prophesy as a way to lure her into his clutches. She accepted the gift, but refused his demands, and to punish her insolence he put the curse on her: the power of prophecy, but with the curse of disbelief.
Things don’t go well for our heroine. Although there are many versions of her ultimate fate, few depict her as having a happy ending. Basically she laments and wails about her predicament—usually to anyone who was within earshot, but also continuously to Apollo, begging him to release the curse.
It is interesting to me that she didn’t simply stop prophesying, or at least stop telling people what she saw. Maybe she did, and that is a little detail left out of her story. Apparently she could not just stay silent, that would have been too easy. Most of us, unlike Cassandra, have stopped beating the drum of truth to deaf ears. It also seemed that all she could do was complain about her situation, rather than try to make some use of it. (She did single handedly attack the Trojan Horse when it rode into town.) The story says she went insane and is typically depicted as a crazy kook that just ran around telling everyone conspiracy theories about the great horrors that lay ahead—and then becomes terribly sad when no one listens to her.
These strong archetypal characters were not created just for the heck of it. There was an intentional purpose behind the story of Cassandra. What was it? There is something about her desiring to be a prophetic princess that strikes a chord with me. But maybe she wanted nothing to do with that power. She was a priestess in Apollo’s temple, and he must have gotten a hankering for her pleasures. He was a god, she was not a goddess, and it was his own powers of prophesy he apparently shared with her when she asked for it. Or did he try to seduce her with the offer? Did she make promises to him she did not intend to keep? Was she that ambitious? He got rather angry with her to “spit” the curse into her mouth when she kissed him, but only after refusing him.
It is hard to say if Cassandra was a conniving seductress or an innocent maiden coerced into a deal she wanted no part of. Considering the power of Apollo, a god she was in service to, it more than likely was the latter. She was even obliged, as a priestess in his temple, to remain chaste. So her agreement (if she indeed made one) put her into a serious double bind. In fact, she probably didn’t want any part of the lousy deal, and got betrayed in the process.
Did any of us today ask for the role of “knower” and “seeker of truth?” I don’t think so. Why have we been blessed to know and spread this information, yet also cursed that no one will listen to us? Did we make some sort of deal? With whom?
I doubt if the story has much relevance to our own predicament other than to say that we, for whatever reason, have the power to know the truth and to see the future that most people are blind to. We try to tell them, but they don’t believe us. As a result we go a bit crazy, and certainly become very frustrated. I don’t think any of us have any special powers like Cassandra did. What we know was not all that difficult to come by. We just listened to the right people, and didn’t listen to the wrong ones.
I would like to think there is more to it than that. This “disbelieving the truth that only the few possess” does seem to be a very common theme in literature, movies, and TV. It is an Invasion of the Body Snatchers tale—at least in the 1958 version of the movie that opens with the protagonist pleading with doctors, who think he is insane. He desperately tells them that he has seen the end of the world due to the invasion he experienced—killer plants from outer space no less. How many films have we seen that have a similar theme? “Believe me, believe me, I’ve SEEN it, you’ve got to listen, you’ve got to!!!” This plea is then usually followed by the nice doctor in the white coat injecting a sedative saying in his soft, soothing, voice, “Rest now, everything is going to be OK”—“soon you will be one of us.”
This is Cassandra. And we can all empathize with her plight. How horribly frustrating that must have been to know that disaster was right around the corner and that no one would listen (hmmmm). Maybe that is the moral of the story for us—no matter how rejected we become, we must make every effort that we don’t go crazy like Cassandra did, and that we don’t continue to rant and rave and play the victim. I think most of us have stopped most of the ranting and raving, and are not playing the victim. I think there is something more important that we have been spared for. We have a greater role than to try to convince deaf ears we know something that they don’t know. Our real purpose has not yet become known.
Love these refer to mythology. Someone should have taught her to play poker with a badly dealt hand.
I enjoyed the refresher on Greek mythology. Of course, even if Cassandra was a seductress, Apollo outranked her both as an immortal deity and her Temple boss. I think she may have a case, providing the statute of limitations has not yet expired, for workplace harassment. Perhaps we should #cancel Apollo. But I digress... I was wondering where you were headed with this. The last few sentences made it apparent. It’s a pep talk of sorts, a call to regroup and conserve our energy for impending battles. Perhaps the rest will awaken and we won’t go crazy like Cassie. Any message of hope is appreciated at this present juncture.