The Apple of Discord

 

    

    This is Discordia, or Eris, goddess of discord.  She is the reason for the Trojan War, which may as well be The War in mythical history, at least where humans are participants, or where human war is the subject of western myth in general.  It seems like the wedding feast of Thetis and Peleus, where Eris throws the apple down onto the banquet table with something like "for the queen of beauty", or "for the fairest" inscribed on it, is where so much of Greek myth merges.  This seems to be one of the defining moments where all of myth comes together with the resounding thud of a golden apple hitting a celestial table.  I'm still working through all of these mergers because there are so many, but this is definitely a cross roads in Greek myth where so many spin offs come together and separate.  This feast caught my attention due to the symbolism of the apple (as well as an association of the Kabeiroi and Thetis via Hephaestus).  What is going on with the apple being central to all that ends up being wrong for humans?  This feast is also, for the most part, Eris' divine cameo because after this moment she mostly is just briefly mentioned in the Illiad and here and there but nothing to noteworthy.  Who exactly is Eris, goddess of discord?  The most comprehensive analysis of associations with this goddess is no doubt Hesiod's list from Theogony with reference to Eris' children, who are fatherless just as she is.  Eris is the parthenogenic progeny of Nyx, the goddess of night born of Chaos.  Here is the list given by Hesiod in Theogony (I will just give the English for clarification as to what we are dealing with here):

    Toil, labor, hardship, forgetfulness, oblivion (Lethe), famine, hunger, starvation, pains, sorrows, combats, fights, battles, wars, murders, slaughterings, manslaughters, manslayings, slayings of men, quarrels, lies, falsehoods, tales, stories, words, disputes, unclear words, lawlessness, bad government, anarchy, delusion, recklessness, folly, ruin, oath.  

    That's quite the list!  All but "tales", "stories", "words", and "oath" seems to me to be a good comprehension of the deadly sins, or what the Ten Commandments are warning against.  All of that is what is thrown down on the banquet table by way of a golden apple.  Yet again, why the apple to carry such a message?  To the ancients, before agriculture the apple must have been as manna from heaven, right up there with honey (archetype for ambrosia), but even more important.  If you are hungry you can readily get pretty full eating apples, and the wild apple isn't really very sweet either.  An apple is tree food and it is nothing but good for the body.  Why else would we have that well known aphorism "an apple a day keeps the doctor away"?  Obviously the "apple of discord" and the apple from the "Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil" are not the same apple that we so love to eat and make delicious pies with.  "As American as Apple Pie."  Apples are not evil, and so why this negative symbolism?  

    For a long time I considered myself a Druid. I was a student of the Ogham which is an ancient Celtic oracle also know as "The Oracle of the Trees."  Each Ogham (or Ogam) few is a tree, and there are 20 of them (25 in later Oghams).  Number 10 is called Quert (pronounced kweirt) and it is the apple.  It is considered to be "earth of fire".  It's upright divinatory meaning as given in The Druidry Handbook is "happiness, healing, and recovery; awakenings and new experiences; an unexpected gift; the rewards of success; an opportunity to live more fully."  Eris sure did deliver an unexpected gift to the Olympian banqueters!  What is more appropriate however, in this context would be the negative manifestation for the meaning of this Few in divination.  That meaning is cited from the same book as:  "An unavoidable choice among alternatives; mixed gain and loss; a temptation to scattered effort or procrastination that must be overcome."  Now here in the "unavoidable choice among alternatives" we have the theme for The Judgement of Paris whereby Paris must decide which of the goddesses is the loveliest and therefore settle the Olympian dispute.  

El Juicio de Paris by Enrique Simonet, 1904

    He tried to divide the apple into three but Hermes would not allow it as Zeus had decreed that only one of the goddesses could be selected.  There are rumblings that Zeus and Themis were the original conspirators for the Trojan War, and maybe that's why Eris was not invited to the party?  How could a mortal Greek Don Juan possibly decide between Hera (Queen of the gods), Aphrodite (goddess of beauty and harmony) and Athene (goddess of the mind)?  That seems to me to be the mythical predicament of humankind, and that is precisely the point.  This is the meaning of the major arcana tarot card The Lovers.  One must decide one option amongst many, and there can be no compromise, and this is in exact opposition to what a compromise is about.  The compromise would be dividing that apple into three, but this is not an option.  How can harmony possibly be maintained in the teeth of such a choice?  Harmony, in this instance, is exactly what is not allowed.  There are no good choices, and so how is one to chose when there are no good choices?  What about fate and the will of the gods?  Is this just part of what the gods need us for, a means by which they can break their ties and settle their disputes?  We get war in return for our choices, and war is nothing if not the consequence where harmony is banished.  Which brings us back to Eris, goddess of strife and discord (Romanized as Discordia).  

Golden Apple of Discord by Jacob Jordaens, 1636

    Eris is precisely disharmony, and interestingly enough Aphrodite, whom Paris ultimately choses, is also associated with harmony in astrology in her guise as ruler of Libra.  Did Paris chose Aphrodite because he was a young man (or lets face it...just not an old man), or was it because that's the closest he could get to a harmonious decision?  Whatever the case, Aphrodite gives him Helen as a reward for choosing her, and this is the moment where the Trojan war begins.  Helen happens to be married to Menalaus and therefore not available for the taking, but Aphrodite does not care about such trivial human affairs.  Hera and Athena go off from this choice to plot the downfall and ultimate burning of the city of Troy.  Yet if we trace this all back to the root, that root is the apple of discord and Eris not being invited to the party.  Why would anybody invite Strife to a party?  Nobody wants strife and discord around because it is not pleasant, it's ugly, loud, smelly even.  But reality has a nasty habit of not being perfect.  Reality seems to require discord and chaos.  Chaos is really where this all leads to, and Eris is the daughter of Nyx who is the daughter of Chaos herself, so here we have Eris as the third embodiment of Chaos as her literal granddaughter.  She is none to pleased at this festive gathering of the gods...snubbed as if she weren't the granddaughter of the zero point itself, granddaughter of the big bang, of the principle by which all of manifestation ultimately has it's source, it's womb before creation itself.  Of course there will be hell to pay!   

    What about the Golden Apple of Discord and it's roll symbolically?  Again, why the apple?  Where did this apple come from?  It came from the Garden of Hesperides, and who were the Hesperides?   They were the daughters of Hesperos, which is where the name Hesperus comes from, and that is Venus (Aphrodite) as the evening star.  The Hesperides are "daughters of the evening" or "nymphs of the west."  They are also sometimes portrayed as the daughters of Nyx.  

Garden Hesperides by Edward Burne-Jones, 1869

    Look who joined their little dance party around the apple tree!  That looks a lot like the rod of Asklepios the mythical Greek doctor and student of Chiron king of the Centaurs.  And where did the banquet feast celebrating the marriage of Peleus and Thetis take place you ask?  I'm glad you asked!  Well it took place on Mt. Pelion at the mouth of the cave of none other than Chiron himself.  Chiron also happens to take possession of another fruit resulting from that wedding feast, and that fruit went by the name of Achilles.  

Thetis gives Achilles into the care of Chiron 17-18th century engraving-etching by Johann Balthasar Probst

Teti richiama Achille dal Centauro Chirone,  by Pompeo Batoni, 1770

    There are so many cross roads here, so many paths to go down, so many themes from Greek myth to tie together!  I'm called to tie all of those themes together into a book.  But again, what about the Apples of Hesperides?  What about that snake wrapped around that apple tree?  What about those three goddesses or nymphs associated with the setting sun and the West in general?  That direction where the sun goes to die everyday?  The direction where the ancient Egyptians buried their pharaohs.  These gifts from that place where the sun goes to die everyday?  This garden that belonged to Hera, queen of the Olympian gods, where Herakles has to go for his 11th labor, the first labor he had to attend to after he thought he had attended to them all.  You see at the outset there were 10 labors for Herakles (the dekad).  The Apples were originally a gift from Gaia to Hera upon her marriage to Zeus, and Hera convinced Gaia to plant them in her garden.  The Hesperides were placed in charge of Hera's garden, and they were to guard the apples, but they would occasionally eat them, and so Hera set a 100 headed dragon named Ladon to guard against the Hesperides taking of the fruit.  

    This garden of Hera's where the Golden Apples of Hesperides grew was the same garden where Eris acquired the Apple of Discord.  This is very reminiscent of another Greek story about the Golden Fleece, which belonged to Zeus.  There was a dragon that was set to guard this fleece as well, and Jason had to battle that dragon to acquire said fleece so that he could take his rightful place as King of Iolkos.  In fact the Argonauts refer back to this feast in celebration of Peleus and Thetis' marriage because Peleus is said to have been one of the Argonauts, as was Asklepios.  Here is a picture of Jason and Medea battling the dragon for the fleece:

The golden fleece and the heroes who lived before Achilles, 1921

      Doesn't that image harken back to the Garden Hesperides, as well as the Garden of Eden?  It's a snake in a tree guarding something precious and desired.  The heroes who lived before Achilles?  So before the Trojan War?  These are archetypal motifs, and so we see the symbols arriving throughout all of myth.  The snake is a prototypical archetype if such a thing can be said.  The snake in the Garden of Eden, the walled paradise, the well watered place.  The snake in the tree guarding the precious and desired commodity.  How did Eris come by her Apple of Discord?  Is Eris the snake with it's mythical associations with the Chthonic Earth, with the divine feminine, with the Tripple Goddesses in all of their guises, with Athena as the Gorgon Medusa, with the sorceress Medea, and with the rod of Asklepios as well as the biblical Moses.  What is this thing that ejects us from the garden?  This thing which the gods refuse to allow us to have.  What is being worked out and signified by Eris throwing this apple down on the table?  I've got some ideas about what all of that means (I mean...beyond this blog).  I've got a few books to read on the topic, but I will throw down my own Apple of Discord to wet the appetite of those of you who are interested enough to actually make it this far.  It to has to do with the snake wrapped around something like Asklepios' healing rod, or Hermes Caduceus.  It's a symbol of healing as well as discord.  It's name is Ophiuchus, and it is the 13th sign of the zodiac.  Talk about discord as a disruption of that perfect symmetry in the dodecagon and the perfect 12 fold division of the monad.  To the ancient Greeks Ophiuchus was Apollo battling the Python who guarded Delphi which was originally associated with the the Chthonic goddess.  It is also associated with Laocoon the Trojan priest of Poseidon who warned the Trojans about the Trojan Horse.  It also represents Asklepios who was slain by Zeus himself for bringing the dead back to life.  In medieval Islamic astronomy it was "the snake-charmer."  Here, in the constellation Ophiuchus we deal directly with that prototypical archetype, the iconic archetype that is the snake.  

Johannes Kepler's drawing depicting the location of the stella nova in the foot of Ophiuchus, 1604