paragmos, Sparagmos, you're tearing me apart. You're ripping out my heart. I feel like I've been torn to shreds.Sparagmos is apparently everyhwere.
Dr. Keeler read us "Kneeling Down to Peer into a Culvert" by Robert Bly in 550 today. The end of it reads, " I am alone, with no duties, living as I live. / Then one morning a head like mine pokes from the water. /I fight—it’s time, it’s right—and am torn to pieces fighting."
Tennesse Williams includes the concept in Suddenly Last Summer where "Each male protagonist is pursued, ripped apart, and consumed by the members of a community he sexually infiltrated. The truth about each sparagmos (rending) and omophagia (raw-eating) is uncovered in similar scenes between “psychotherapist” and amnesia victim. But while the truth brings destruction to each murdered man’s mother, only in Suddenly Last Summer is anyone saved by the awful revelation (Janice Siegel, “Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer and Euripides’ Bacchae,” IJCT 11 (2004-2005), pp. 538-570).
We figuratively incorporate sparagmos, I think, in many cultural ways, including, but not limited to wills (particularly contested ones) and how we treat celebrities and political figures. Of course, it's present in the eucharist and in the myth of Dionysus.
Sue tells me sparagmos is in the myth of Isis and Osiris. Dr. Sexson referred me to Ovid's Metamorphosis. Let me know if you have any hot leads for me.
2 comments:
Mel, the sparagmos of Orpheus is in book XI of "Metamorphoses". But I can't figure out why, exactly, the the "Tharcian women" ripped the poet apart.
Ovid writes one of these women as saying, "He's there! The man who dares to scorn us." The only "scorn" that I can find is in book X, where after loosing his love Euridycie to the underworld the poet shuns "the love of women," and teaches the Thracian men the practice of "[bestowing] their love on tender boys, and so enjoy the firstfruits, the brief springtime, the flowers of youth."
In Jessie Weston's From Ritual to ROmance, she tells about ceremonies in Europe where women ritually rip up straw figures, then gather them up and put them back together. I think this act in varioius forms takes place in vegetation deity rituals. Frazer talks about Adonis and Attis as well as Osiris.
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