Learning From Myths #3

The Greek Myth of Perseus is longer and complicated, but rich in wisdom!

We begin with Dr. Paul Blythe's explanation: Many myths have been entertained for understanding in uncertain times and situations. Currently, the corporate world is using the myth of Camelot and the Arthurian Legend to explain why certain leadership styles are valuable to all and sundry. The new biology and new physics have a lot to contribute but their images and metaphors seem too hard for most people to embrace. Aboriginal and Asian myths have also been used, as have fairy tales such as ESP's fables.
No myths, it seems to me, are more rich and powerful than the ancient Greek myths. In an instant, we can see that Hercules has been the Hero of the 20th Century, especially in the 'Western World.'
Yet, the 21st Century needs a new myth; one of collaboration, of reflection on the unpredicted circumstances, one of honoring the power (for good or bad) of the feminine (without simply paying lip service). The myth of Perseus is certainly one for our time. Moreover, it is the myth of male mid-life. Also, it is the myth of mature, responsible expression, which could cause the USA to sign a Declaration of Interdependence, rather than embracing the "Independence one" (a stance befitting normal 12-14 year old adolescent development!

The Adventures Of Perseus

Kings and other personages of myths and fairy tales did not live in a particular place or historical time; they are eternal beings, who belong to us all, for they inhabit our inner lives. Our earliest heroic myth begins with an episode from the life of an old king, whose name indicates no particular king, but a description.

Once there lived in Argos a king, Acrisius by name, meaning "he who cannot make a choice." He was famous because of the great beauty of his daughter Danae, that is "the Danaan woman." She was the most beautiful woman in the land, and Acrisius loved her dearly. He was proud and somewhat amazed that a child of his loins could have grown to such beauty. Sometimes, though, and gradually more often, he found himself wishing he had had a son instead, someone in whom he could find himself again in a fresh and unspoiled beginning. Anxious to know whether the divine world would still grant him this son, he traveled to Delphi to ask Apollo what fate had in store for him. The sacred moans and grumbling of the Pythia in trance made a strong impression on him, and when the attending priest began interpreting her utterances the king knew that the answer would be harsh. No longer would he be able to beget a son, the priest stated, but he would have a grandson. However, this son of Danae would one day kill his grandfather in order to take his place. Bewildered and hurt, the old king went home and decided that he would try to circumvent fate, and had Danae imprisoned in a tower of bronze, windowless, and built mostly underground. The only opening was in the roof to let some light and air enter. In this way Acrisius intended to make sure that Danae could not become pregnant and give birth to a dreaded grandson who would become king in his place.

Listening to this narration, the ancient Greek audience knew that the king was wrong and sinful in his attempt to deceive the divine world and they began wondering how and when the unavoidable fulfillment of Delphi's prophecy would come about. Or, if they already knew the story, which almost always was the case, they could feel the structure of the myth beginning to shine through the tale. Underlying their appreciation of the singer's art was a patient attentiveness with which they awaited the realization of the prophecy at the end of the story. The narrator, on the other hand, would know the myth in all its details. It lives in his memory; he tells it "by heart," as if playing a concert instrument. He cannot read, and would have no use for notes. Reading and writing had not yet been invented in these "prehistoric" times of myth-producing thinking. The people who invented myths, or passed them on to others, did not consciously try to be artists. Art was an all-pervading quality of their culture. In everyday life they thought in living pictures dramatically interconnected with each other. Abstractions indicative of states of being or developments in time did not occur to their thinking. Their thoughts took a concrete pictorial form; instead of thinking "greed," they "saw" wolf. To understand such picture thinking we must translate it into abstract, logical thinking that we commonly use today. The interpretations in this book take as their point of departure the idea that all beings in Greek myths are depictions of man's inner tendencies and forces.

At the beginning of the Perseus myth, we meet Acrisius at the moment in his development when he has tuned his emotional life to such a fine harmony indicated by his having a daughter of such great beauty that the longing awakens in him for a strong, fresh impulse, a totally new beginning. Although the wish is born to have a son, his thinking is not clear enough for him to realize that his renewal cannot come from outside and that it should rather come forth as a metamorphosis of his developing feelings. When a new and higher form of his being is born, it will as a matter of course replace the self with which up to now he has been familiar.

Imprisoned in the tower, Danae does not feel the loneliness, for she has substance and power enough within and memories sufficient to inspire her continued development. Light and air flow continuously to her from above. They convey the presence of the great god who lives in this illuminated air, father Zeus. He communicates with her by manifesting in the form of fine drops of gold that rain down upon Danae, and soon she finds herself with child. In due time she gives birth to their son, a demigod, Perseus by name, meaning "the destroyer" (the destroyer of evil, as it becomes apparent in the course of the story. Although a not uncommon name, it is one that makes King Acrisius shudder. Apparently at this stage it was impossible for the king to halt his soul's development, try as he might, to deprive it of all sense perceptions and deny his emotions. His soul stays alive with its own forces of maturation, and the world of the gods remains accessible.

In frustration and despair the king wants his daughter and her child out of his sight. He has another prison made this time a wooden chest not much larger than a coffin, in which they are cast upon the sea. For one entire night they sail in their dark confinement, bobbing up and down on the waves, the lovely Princess Danae and her new born child, warm in his little red mantle. The next morning they reach land and the chest comes to shore off the island Seriphus. There they wait for someone to rescue them and return them to solid land.

Now the king, afraid of the growing power of his young new being, gives up on the further development of his soul, and sends them over the waters to a different country (which means that he expects finally to have done away with them. From this point King Acrisius disappears into oblivion, returning at the end of the story to receive what we all know fate has in store for him.

The story of Acrisius and Danae is the introduction to the myth of Perseus himself. He is a newborn semidivine being whose father is a god, and whose mother, Danae, is the essence of the tribe of the Danai to which he belongs through her. The Mycenaean tribal name of Danaus could also have been given to Perseus and it is important to note that Perseus was not fated to be a mere tribal being. Perseus is a hero; that is, an ideal human being whom all of us listeners should be happy and proud to look up to as our example in life. In the days of tribal culture, when this story was first conceived and told, many people must have felt a great desire to see before them the image of a real "individuality," someone able to develop his life on the basis of his own power without the support of mother or father, that is without the support of tribal customs or of ancestral traditions.

In mythopoetic thinking there exists a basic pictorial alphabet, in which the emblems father, mother, children are of great and specific importance. They can be translated or "understood" in the following way. My father ("my because mythical persons are within everyone of us) is concerned with the continuity and honor of our parentage. My father is my link with the past of the family, with my ancestors. My mother surrounds me with her warmth and her care; she protects and feeds me; she creates the mood and the style of family life. This home life is embedded within the cultural life of our tribe. My mother depicts the present. My children are my future. I bring them forth out of myself. They are my productions and my reproductions. My lovely, prudent daughter depicts what is developing within the life of my feelings, my emotional life. My wilful, wild, courageous son depicts my inner willpower, the carrier of the essential activity that I call 1, still young and growing. The ancient storytellers were in tune with the basic tendencies and stages of human growth, and could express through mythology their ideas of mankind's future development.

Like many other Greek heroes, Perseus is at birth abandoned by his family, in particular by his grandfather, with whom he will sever all connections after he has grown up and proven his mettle as an individual. In a stage of transition, carried by the waters of the night, the new born hero sleeps enveloped in a little red mantle. No arbitrary embellishment, the mantle depicts the protective warmth of the hero's blood and accentuates the strength of this being in its growth toward individuality. Warmth is a very special "element", one of the four elements we share with nature; we participate in air, water, and earth. The warmth within us, however, is our very own. We have to maintain its intensity throughout our lives; otherwise we become feverish and lose consciousness. The picture of the little red mantle represents the enveloping warmth of the blood, the vehicle of the forces of selfhood, which manifest themselves in the nuances of our consciousness.

Although his mother accompanies him to the island and will feed and take care of him as long as he is dependent, her task on arrival is practically taken over by a foster mother, to whom she, being still young herself, becomes as a child. Perseus and Danae are found by an old fisherman appropriately named Dictys, that is "net." A net is an instrument for catching what one needs without having to take the inessentials with it. The chest, floating in from the mainland, is the fisherman's catch of a lifetime. He and his wife become the foster parents of both Danae and Perseus, and at this point the hero starts the initial hidden stage of his development. In modest circumstances he grows up completely on his own without traditions, either familial or tribal, to influence the manner of his life. Among the audience of the early storytellers there must have been young people who could enjoy this part of the myth as an ideal introduction to a secretly fancied life on one's own.

On approaching the independence of adulthood, which heroes, as a rule, experience earlier than we common people do, Perseus is confronted by Polydectes, the king of the island, who desires to marry Danae. He happens also to be the brother of her foster father. Quite often a confrontation between two mythical beings depicts the meeting of a person with his reflection. In myth a being can see approaching him what in reality streams out of himself as a vice, a virtue, or a tendency. The hero's own aggressive attitude, for instance, will appear to him in the form of a sudden, ferocious tiger glaring into his face. Our hero, himself a royal prince in disguise, sees certain tendencies in his own development mirrored in King Polydectes. At this crucial stage of his life, where he has to make the choice of becoming either Perseus or a Danaus, he feels a strong urge to take the easier way and fall back upon the traditional habits of the tribe, the urge to totally merge and identify with the tribe as the kingly husband of a Danae. Instead of Dictys, "the catcher of the essential," now Polydectes, "the grabber of much," becomes to him the example of adult life. The danger confronting him is his own greed in the form of Polydectes. Unconsciously, his greed has already come to the decision to return to tribal life and become one of the Danai.

Greed, his reflected pseudo ego, is already busy organizing a prenuptial feast to which not only all its friends, a group of vices, are invited, but also young Perseus, who is not aware that it is his mother whom the king intends to marry. All Polydectes' friends have a present for the bride-to-be; all but Perseus, the youngest of the guests. He is innocent of what is customary to greed- and his fellow vices. He stands in their midst empty-handed and greatly ashamed. In youthful eagerness, he hastily promises to bring the king whatever he should wish. What is it that greed wants most? To have everything, of course; to have the ruling power of the world, to have the head, the essence, of Medusa. On hearing the dreaded name of Medusa, that is, "she who rules," the audience holds its breath and the storyteller makes a dramatic pause, for Medusa is the source of petrifaction, which destroys life and soul.

People still of a mythopoetic frame of mind live in a strong, uninterrupted connection with living nature, which streams through them from all sides. This participation overwhelms their consciousness and makes it impossible for them to gain the distance needed for objective perception and reflection. They are, of course, not unaware of the mineral tendencies, the Medusa element, as an essential skeleton within the world and within themselves, but they easily avoid this factor in their thinking. It is not yet time for them to be put out of their paradisiacal state into the hard, cold world of matter. Medusa rules the world by her deadening power of petrifaction and the enormous fear it inspires. Polydectes wants to have the power to make everyone, out of fear, give him whatever he wants. Then he would be able to paralyze his opponents. Greedy as his nature is, he takes it for granted that somebody should give him this power, namely young Perseus. Our real self, Perseus, has been tricked by our lower egoistic self, Polydectes, into either capturing the essence of matter, or perishing in the process. If we should acquire the coveted Medusa power, the Polydectes in us would be in possession of the ultimate Midas touch. Then, instead of participating in a living world, we would, through our materialistic attitude, turn nature into a storage room full of dead objects.

In the two introductory episodes of the myth, we have learned of Perseus' birth and of his growing up on the island. Now the storyteller is going to treat us to the myth of the grand, impossible mission that the hero will have to accomplish. This will gradually lead to the hero's initiation into nontribal, individual life, something which, for members of his audience, was still far in the future.

In a great hurry, without taking leave of his mother or his foster parents, Perseus sets out for Delphi. He seeks the oracle to tell him where on earth he can find the source of matter's great and dangerous power. However, the seeress at Delphi does not know the answer. The oracle, a typical tribal institution, cannot offer help for the problems of an individual's consciousness. The only aspect of his quest that the attending priest recognizes is its fundamental nature. The priest knows that the young visitor will have to go to the realm of the archetypes, which can only be approached through the world of the past. Therefore, Apollo sends Perseus to his father's oracle in Dodona. Here, the same thing happens; this oracle of Zeus cannot help him either. The Doves, as the priestesses are called at this sacred place, can only give him the assurance that the gods have their eyes on him. Then, while walking about in Dodona in great, silent expectation, Perseus becomes aware of a divine presence. Soon the wonderful moment arrives when Zeus' son and messenger, Hermes, the agile god of action, steps out of his invisible realm, the spiritual world, and becomes his friend and mentor. Immediately, Hermes points out to him that it would not be enough to be shown the place of the Gorgons, the name given Medusa and her two immortal sisters. To accomplish his impossible task he should also be properly equipped. Hermes, whose daily task it is to take the souls of the dead on their last great journey, now becomes Perseus' divine guide to the end of the physical world, that is, to the shore of Ocean, that wide river streaming around the edge of the terrestrial disc. Then he leads him to the other side, to the dusky intermediate area he knows so well from crossing it daily on his way to the spirit world. This is where the sisters of the Gorgons, the Graeae, live. As counterparts of the material forces within the realm of spirit, they will be able to help him on his way. These three sisters together form one threefold being, with one cyclopic eye and one tooth for the three of them to share. They are old grey birds, these Graeme, swans perhaps. But they have human heads, in which they place by turns their common eye and tooth.

Birds and bats in the dark form a common image in Greek pictorial thinking about the world of the dead. However, in confronting them, Perseus sees reflected the great guardian of his inner threshold. It is the same three-bodied being that Hercules encounters in Geryon, and the same being as the winged Sphinx that appears before Oedipus at one of the seven gates of Thebes. It is the image of his own threefold soul, its processes of thinking, feeling, and acting in a form not yet harmonized and unified. Its riddle has to be solved; that is, it has to be organized into harmony before entrance into the world of the spirit can be found. In the case of Oedipus, the solution is most explicitly given. The solution is MAN, the harmonized human being, presented in the three stages of his life. In Perseus' story the riddle is solved in an aggressive and playful way.

At the instigation of Hermes, Perseus captures the element that unites the three incomplete Graeae, that is, their solitary eye, and forces them to give the required information in exchange for its return.

The three Graeae, as if out of one mouth, tell him how to go to the land of the Hyperboreans, i.e., "the land beyond the north wind," where he will be equipped for his expedition. This fabulous land is not in the physical world and no physical ways lead to it. After passing the threshold guarded by the Graeae, the hero has to enter spirit land. Already before his death he is able to penetrate into the spiritual world under the guidance of Hermes, the initiator.

The "land beyond the north wind" looks like a picture of the paradise dream, mankind's golden age, a primordial state of lightness and innocence, a place full of festivities, music and dance, a good life in the midst of nymphs and angels. The guardians have shown Perseus the way back into the past of the human race, where the eternal gods, who do not live within space and time, enjoy an occasional visit. Apollo especially, and also his twin sister, Artemis, come to Hyperborea every winter. The nymphs with friendly grace receive Perseus, introduced by Hermes. He takes part in all the festivities and makes many friends. This is one of the most delightful mythical episodes, guaranteed to cheer the hearts of any audience. In later days, when myths no longer were alive, stories of eternal Hyperborea were still very popular, especially in books for children. For instance, we know from Plutarch's The Art of Teaching Poetry about a fantastic story, "Abaris," by Heraclides, that dealt with a Hyperborean of that name who managed to travel all over the world by holding on precariously to one of Apollo's shining arrows, as it was shot from the god's silver bow. During the first part of his initiation young Perseus experiences these archetypal inner developments as a spiritual being among others in the land of the spirit, and emerges equipped as a conscious spiritual individuality on earth. The nymphs have given him winged sandals, modeled after those of Hermes, so that he can fly and overcome physical gravity. They gave him a cap to wear, the cap of Hades, which makes him invisible to physical eyes, and also a purse, which can encompass anything by adapting its form and size, so that it is able to carry things that are not even in space.

On leaving this paradisal training ground, trying his wings, and eager to start his mission, Perseus realizes that he is not yet completely equipped and prepared. He still does not know where to look for the Gorgons, and hopes for Hermes' help in finding the right way. He will also need weapons, and wonders whether he will be worthy to receive such implements as only the gods can provide. He drifts away invisibly. But he does not have to wait very long. There again is Hermes' presence approaching from the right. Into Perseus' hand he puts the never-touched hilt of an adamantine sickle, made in heaven. Since Hermes hardly ever uses a weapon himself, we can assume that this is not his own, but one that the fire god, Hephaestus, has made especially for this important occasion. Now Perseus has the rank of a warrior, a knight with a sacred sword. But where will he find a shield with which to protect himself against the powers of petrifaction? There approaches from the left another divinity, the virgin goddess, Athena. She is full of assurance, calm, and wise. Born directly out of Zeus' head she is the instrument of the gods' thinking, the brains of Zeus, appearing as an independent being. Since man is not able to endure direct contact with the awesome power of reality it would either petrify him, or burn him up, as happened to Semele nature in her wisdom equipped him with a cerebral reflector of great complexity. Brain thinking reduces the essential being of reality to a flow of images. That we can endure. Athena, the ruler and patron of man's cerebral activity, now comes close to Perseus, who is soaring invisibly with Hermes at his right. On his left arm she places her own bright shield polished to mirror brightness. Looking at this, as into a mirror, he will be able to come close enough to the power of matter to destroy it, without himself becoming petrified, that is, totally materialized.

And now the three beings soar forward over Ocean's boundary. The Gorgons do not live in heaven or in paradise, but, of course, on the physical earth itself. The gods guide the hero in the right direction. Perseus, now completely equipped, hovers high over the rocky island where the three sisters are sleeping. Medusa, being mortal and vulnerable, lies between her immortal sisters. While the divinities look on from above, the human hero descends invisibly and fulfills his incredible task. He severs the head of Medusa with one stroke of his divine sickle, while guiding his hand in accordance with the picture that comes up before his eyes in Athena's mirrorlike shield. When the head is off, Perseus puts it away in the fitting purse the Hyperboreans gave him. At the same time Medusa, through her severed neck, gives birth to the winged horse Pegasus which had been sired by the god Poseidon. Athena and Hermes now fade away into the sky. Perseus has done his work on his own; now he must take care of himself. He flies away as fast as he can. Medusa's sisters wake up. They see what has happened, jump into the air and pursue him with all speed. But he is safe in his invisible state and they cannot find him anywhere in the sky.

Thus Perseus overcomes the power of matter, the ruling queen of the world. Without her great and tragic head, Medusa looks like a winged dragon. Her naked body is covered with scales. Her wings of horn are formed like those of a bat. Her head is surrounded by hair made of thin snakes, capable of staring anybody down with the intensity of their glaring, lidless eyes.

She is the essence of physicality, the crushing condensation of weight, and the massive lifeless
solidity of stone. When a man falls in love with her which happens all the time he becomes a compulsive materialist, an ardent collector of petrifacts. Polydectes, for whom Perseus had to capture Medusa's head, is just such an accumulator. His name, both in this form and in the variant Polydegmon, is often used as a characteristic of Hades, who in due time will "collect us all." By killing this force with the help of the divine weapons, and after a long training under soul-guiding Hermes, Perseus becomes a savior of man's evolution. He removes the forces of petrifaction that destroy life and soul. Had they gone unchecked, these forces would have turned the earth into an arena for robots. Perseus gives man the opportunity to stay productive in the life of his soul.

The three Gorgons are the earthly sisters of the Graeae who guard the threshold "on the other side." In Medusa and her two immortal sisters we meet the fierce guardians of another threshold destined to scare man away as long as possible from the hidden realms of material existence, which in our time have proved to be deadly. Just as their sisters are comparable to the Sphinx, so the Gorgons have characteristics in common with threefold Cerberus, the terrifying hound of Hades. He too has hissing snakes for hair. As matter opens up and softens, Pegasus can be born among us out of Medusa's vocal chords. He is the winged horse who takes the poets on his back and flies with them to the wellspring of inspiration. He gives their songs life and wings.

Now, Perseus goes on his way back home to bring Polydectes his due. He flies a roundabout way, as if he wants to survey the boundaries of the physical world, Medusa's former domain. Invisible, he glides over the southern land where the Ethiopians live, whom the gods often visit because they like them nearly as much as the Hyberboreans in the Far North. And it so happens that he has to perform his Medusa killing again, this time all alone. Chained to a rock on the African shore, he sees a wonderful maiden. Already close by her in a cloud of foam, a water dragon, scaly and loathsome like an enormous alligator, rushes toward her. Perseus takes off his cap of Hades, at the same time descending at great speed. His hair stands on end and his eyes blaze. The maiden looks on unbelievingly how he kills the dragon with the sharp power of his divine sickle and sets her free. She is a princess, called Andromeda (i.e., "she who cares for man."). Then, in confrontation, he recognizes in her his real self, the spiritual reality of his own being, the real goal of his dangerous quest. Having overcome the materialistic tendencies in himself, that is, having killed the greedy dragon that threatened to swallow his spiritual being, Andromeda, the eyes of his soul are opened. With her parents' grateful consent, they marry. Perseus unites himself with his spiritual form, who under the name of Andromeda is going to lead him through their joined life. Had he forsaken his quest for individuality, Medusa would have ruled him, as she did the tribal King Polydectes.

There is another point of view from which one can understand the familiar image of a maiden chained to a rock. The image also depicts the human soul chained to the physical body. The Medusa force of Poseidon's sea dragon would have swallowed his soul completely and made her all stone, if Perseus had not appeared and destroyed the monster.

There is yet a third point of view. The prophetic projection inherent in all mythopoetic images, timeless as they are, gives the Perseus development its historic place in circumstances where people are in the process of losing their religious foundations and are not yet able to find within themselves the means to organize their soul life. This shows up clearly in the background of the Andromeda episode. Her mother, Cassiopeia, queen of the Ethiopian people, i. e., the maternal power, the cultural life of that tribe, has in defiance boasted that she and her daughter are more beautiful than the daughters of the god of the sea. When a tribe no longer recognizes the superiority of the gods, they become remote and dim and eventually disappear altogether into a "Gotter dammerung, " a "dimming of the gods." Then, instead of populating their spiritual waters with gods, they find scaly monsters and their thinking becomes intellectual and infected with materialism. One of these monsters, a snakelike being, devours numbers of Ethiopians, until the queen decides to do what the oracle instructed and sacrifice her own daughter in expiation. If this sacrifice had been performed, the tribe would have lost its cultural identity, since the princess, as her child, is the essence of her mother, i.e., the tribal culture. Only Perseus, who is no longer living in mere tribal consciousness but who has developed himself into a true individual, is able to overcome the beast of materialism and rescue the soul of the tribe.

United with Andromeda, Perseus then hastens home to the island of Seriphus. He finds his mother and his foster father in hiding from Polydectes, who cannot accept Danae's refusal to marry him. Perseus meets Polydectes and his companions at a banquet and turns them to stone by presenting the Medusa head, which Polydectes had wanted so badly.

The king's greedy Midas wish thus turns upon himself. This death was foreseeable. The greed that Perseus felt rising in himself, and which he saw reflected in the person of Polydectes, was already destroyed in him when he killed the dragon before it devoured his newly found spiritual being, Andromeda. The variant reading of the myth, in which the dragon is not killed with the divine sickle, but petrified with the Medusa head, also makes sense as a prediction of what will happen to Polydectes. The rescue of Andromeda, the essence of Ethiopian tribal culture, from the devouring dragon finds a structural echo in the rescue of Danae, the essence of the Mycenaean tribal culture, from her marriage to Polydectes.

The myth now enters its finale. Perseus makes his foster father, Dictys, whose modest net takes what should be taken, king in place of Polydectes, his brother. Perseus travels with both Danae and Andromeda to Argos, where they want to pay a visit to his grandfather. But the old king flees as fast as he can, when he hears of the arrival of Danae's son, and nobody knows where he went. Perseus, therefore, becomes king in his own right. But before he can settle down, he must first travel the world over. One of his journeys leads to the land of the Cyclopes, from where he brings back to Argos a number of brutish giants, each having only one solitary, circling eye. They build for him, out of gigantic blocks, the mortarless "cyclopic" walls of his new capital, Mycenae. This is the second time that we see Perseus in contact with one-eyed beings, representatives and stragglers of prehistoric cultures, whom he knows how to press into servitude. For the Perseus myth also tells the story of how the Mycenaean culture was founded by immigrating tribes who subdued the original populations. In myths and in fairy tales, however, giants depict our instincts. They are dumb but strong and have to be kept in check; otherwise they grow too powerful for us.

Later, during another of his travels, King Perseus visits the king of Thessaly in his capital Larissa. As the king's guest, he is present at the funeral games in honor of the king's father who has just died. Being young and heroic, Perseus wants to participate in some contest. He chooses to hurl the disc. Again, to show his power over matter, he sends the heavy stone disc spinning through the air in a well-contrived trajectory. It goes on and on, much farther than any of his competitors'. But then fate steps in. Suddenly, the spectators perceive how the disc swerves off course and glides in their direction. They are all looking at it, their faces frozen
with fear. The stone glides down, hits an old man and kills him: it is the old King Acrisius, who had been sitting there in disguise, and who, when he saw the fatal disc approaching, suddenly knew who had thrown it.

This accident fulfills the oracle, and brings the composition of the myth into balance.

Perseus has reached maturity. His mastery of the forces of matter brings a definite end to his connections with the past. The stone kills his ancestor. Now we see him before us as a hero, a human being who can actively support and develop himself with his own strength, and out of his own inner resources. His mother Danae had been able to do the same, and this had led to his birth as a demigod. His grandfather, Acrisius, had a strong desire to gain this status of new independence, but shrank from the ultimate consequence.

In antiquity, the only way to acquire the spiritual in dependence of a true individual was to go through an initiation, to submit to the long training in a mystery temple, which, through exercises and trials, led to establishing contacts with the spirit world and finding before death one's orientation in the realm of the archetypes. (Plato calls them ideas, or forms.) The status of an initiate, however, is not a mere acquisition, but must be defended against temptations, and recaptured many times. Father Zeus approved of it, Dionysus gave the inner impulse, and both Hermes and Athena, supplying agile willpower and pure thinking, were always ready to help.

Perhaps consider the Cinderella Story?
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