Page 22 - GALIET INFINITE MEDEA: Euripides IV

talented niece of sorceress Circe and eastern queen of chthonian chaos, spreads perversion and incinerates Corinthian Princess Glauce and, accidentally, King Creon with their own regal symbols. Medea scorches to white ashes the palatial, golden architecture of order, that Athenian Periclean noble ideal of the mighty ‘glory of Athens’ and of one’s ‘sacrifice for the sake of state.’ This chthonian and magic triumph, far removed from 458’s Oresteia’s super-rescue-team, Apollo and Athena (Think Bush-Guliani), evokes Euripides’ Bacchae. Medea and Dionysus, having been denied citizenship, liquidate society’s despicable monarchs. Needless to say, Medea is launched the year before Athens is ravaged by a ‘presumably eastern’ plague (Pericles first blames Egypt as its source) which spreads total lawlessness, crime and self-indulgence: “men came indifferent to the rule of law and religion” (Thucy. II-52). Medea’s paradoxically maleficent and beneficent sorcery and her divinity 3⁄4 this duality 3⁄4 added to her eastern-ness, become mind-fixed, intertwined: Fury-like.
Medea, Hecate’s39 priestess and daughter, shows benign aspects: her goodness is highlighted by Hesiod’s epithet ‘nurturer of the young’ (Hes. Theog. 450). The Hecate of Eleusian myth is caring and propitious: she helps Demeter find Persephone and becomes Kore’s helper (Hom. Hymn Demeter). Medea’s dual magic restores and destroys (herself and Jason), rejuvenates and boils (Aeson and Pelias). Like the
39Hecate, presumably from Caria, SW Asia Minor, is a trimorphic goddess (Hecate of the heavens, of the Underworld, of the three roads, etc.) associated with cult of magic and witchcraft, lunar lore and night creatures, dog sacrifices. She is also protector of doorways and crossroads. Like all chthonian figures, she is simultaneously terrible and benign.
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