Apollo and Daphne
This is an
ancient Greek myth so let us start by examining how the ancient Greeks
understood love. They referred to love in various ways and one word they used
for it was epithemia. In colloquial American English, the closest
word to epithemia is the word “horniness”. To the Greeks, epithemia represented
what man had in common with the animals: an instinctive urge towards touching,
caressing, that expressed itself as an inner tension in the body that needed to
be relieved. Epithemia was accepted as natural and never judged, and there was
hardly any morality associated with it. The Greeks were really saying that the
body has its own drives, its own needs and desires that should be honoured. Modern
society has a very distorted view of the whole function of epithemia. It doesn’t
know what to do with this aspect of love at all, except to urge us all to
sublimate it.
The Greeks
had some stories that dealt with epithemia. I want to tell you one about Apollo
and Daphne. Apollo was the Sun god and Daphne was a very beautiful river nymph,
a virgin lusted after by many of the male gods. Apollo chased Daphne, and
although she ran very quickly, he was the god of light and air and was fast
enough to catch her. Apollo pleaded with her to turn around and see who was
chasing her, but she wouldn’t. Just as he was about to reach out and grab her,
Daphne called upon her father Peneius for help. At that moment Peneius changed
her into a laurel tree (see image above).
The myth of
Daphne and Apollo conveyed a number of messages to the Greeks. One of them was
that if you denied epithemia (which is what Daphne did by running from being
touched), you were denying the power of nature and you would be turned into
something that was not human anymore. Daphne never turned around to see that it
was the god of light who was chasing her, which conveys the Greek belief that
if you deny epithemia – your basic, instinctual bodily needs – you are denying
the awakening of consciousness that the god of light would bring to you. Another
thing that this tale points out is that the undifferentiated daughter tied umbilically
to her father cannot become fully human. In other words, because Daphne turned
to her father for help rather than looking around to see who was chasing her,
she never had the chance to separate from her father and become a person in her
own right. Instead she ends up as a tree, something less than human.
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