The Origin of Coral

One cannot afford to be naive in dealing with dreams. They originate in a spirit that is not quite human, but is rather a breath of nature -- a spirit of the beautiful and generous as well as of the cruel goddess. If we want to characterize this spirit, we shall certainly get closer to it in the sphere of ancient mythologies, or the fables of the primeval forest, than in the consciousness of modern man. ~ Carl G. Jung, Man and his Symbols.

More than once we've noted that Metamorphoses is more like a dream-book than a wide-awake tale hewn from legend to serve the agenda of history, such as the Aeneid. Ovid's poem seems to hover over some border between the human and, as Jung noted, something that is not quite human. Perhaps we can look more closely at a sample passage to see how this works.

The other day we noted the oddity of how the tale (in Bk. 4) of Perseus's defeat of the sea monster and rescue of the maiden concludes:

Perseus evades the eager jaws on swift wings, and strikes with his curved sword wherever the monster is exposed, now at the back encrusted with barnacles, now at the sides of the body, now where the tail is slenderest, ending fishlike. The beast vomits seawater mixed with purplish blood. The pinions grow heavy, soaked with spray. Not daring to trust his drenched wings any further, he sees a rock whose highest point stands above quiet water, hidden by rough seas. Resting there, and holding on to the topmost pinnacle with his left hand, he drives his sword in three or four times, repeatedly.

Given the nature of the story -- furious combat motivated by love for the young maiden Andromeda threatened by the sea-monster -- every expectation is that the hero will at least courteously approach the girl, the "prize and cause of his efforts" and perhaps receive a chaste kiss -- some sort of romantic moment of recognition.

Instead, the sightline of the narrator goes insensibly past all that "human interest" to fix upon certain seemingly irrelevant details pertaining to the care and tender handling of Medusa's head, leading in turn to a seemingly unrelated "cause," an explanation of the origin of coral:

The shores, and the high places of the gods, fill with the clamor of applause. Cassiope and Cepheus rejoice, and greet their son-in-law, acknowledging him as the pillar of their house, and their deliverer. Released from her chains, the girl comes forward, the prize and the cause of his efforts. He washes his hands, after the victory, in seawater drawn for him, and, so that Medusa’s head, covered with its snakes, is not bruised by the harsh sand, he makes the ground soft with leaves, and spreads out plants from below the waves, and places the head of that daughter of Phorcys on them. The fresh plants, still living inside, and absorbent, respond to the influence of the Gorgon’s head, and harden at its touch, acquiring a new rigidity in branches and fronds. And the ocean nymphs try out this wonder on more plants, and are delighted that the same thing happens at its touch, and repeat it by scattering the seeds from the plants through the waves. Even now corals have the same nature, hardening at a touch of air, and what was alive, under the water, above water is turned to stone. Kline, 4.730-52

Litora cum plausu clamor superasque deorum
inplevere domos: gaudent generumque salutant
auxiliumque domus servatoremque fatentur
Cassiope Cepheusque pater. Resoluta catenis
incedit virgo, pretiumque et causa laboris.
740Ipse manus hausta victrices abluit unda,
anguiferumque caput dura ne laedat harena,
mollit humum foliis natasque sub aequore virgas
sternit et inponit Phorcynidos ora Medusae.
Virga recens bibulaque etiamnum viva medulla
745vim rapuit monstri tactuque induruit huius
percepitque novum ramis et fronde rigorem.
At pelagi nymphae factum mirabile temptant
pluribus in virgis et idem contingere gaudent
seminaque ex illis iterant iactata per undas.
750Nunc quoque curaliis eadem natura remansit,
duritiam tacto capiant ut ab aere, quodque
vimen in aequore erat, fiat super aequora saxum. ##

What fascinates the nymphae and the narrator is something that is mirabile, i.e., marvellous: the virga -- plants that are soft and alive beneath the surface of the water -- turn to stone upon contact with air. Within our "human" scheme of things, air gives life, makes our organic life possible. But here is something quite otherwise. Ovid is fascinated with thresholds between realms, and what happens when, as things cross over, they metamorphose.

Earlier we noted the motif of things either turning into stone or rising into the air coming into play in the transition from the Cadmus legend to that of Perseus. In Book 5, Perseus is about to turn a few hundred enemies, supporters of Phineus, his rival for Andromeda, into stone. The narrator is fascinated with this transformation. Here's Eryx, one of them, turning:

Increpat hos “vitio” que “animi, non viribus” inquit
“Gorgoneis torpetis” Eryx: “incurrite mecum
et prosternite humi iuvenem magica arma moventem!”
Incursurus erat: tenuit vestigia tellus,
inmotusque silex armataque mansit imago.

Eryx rebuked them, saying, ‘Lack of courage, not the power of the Gorgon, freezes you. Rush in with me and knock this youth and his magic weapon to the ground!’ He had started his rush, but the floor held his feet fast, and there he stayed, unmoving stone, a fully-armed statue. ##

Ovid's word which most translate as "statue" here is imago -- image. In other places, those hastening to kill Perseus are frozen into simulacra. Whatever else Metamorphoses is about, it is about things and images of things, and the metamorphic powers in between.

Perseus and the Graiai

Sea-foam and stars

Ovid's Graiai, daughters of Phorkys, are part of a cluster of entities linked to the sea. Indeed, according to sources, Phorkys was

an ancient sea-god who presided over the hidden dangers of the deep. He and his wife Keto were also the gods of all the large creatures which inhabited the depths of the sea. Keto's name means the "whale" or "sea-monster" ... Their children were dangerous sea-monsters : Skylla (the crab) a monster who devoured passing sailors, Thoosa (the swift) mother of the rock-tossing cyclops Polyphemos, Ladon (strong flowing) a hundred-headed sea-serpent, Ekhidna (viper) a she-dragon, the Graiai (grey ones) spirits of the sea-foam, and the Gorgones (terrifying ones) whose petrifying gaze probably created the dangerous rocks and reefs of the sea.

We noted the other day that the story of Medusa begins with the tale Perseus tells at the end of Book 4, the story of a beautiful girl raped by Neptune in the temple of Athena. We have no idea what she was doing there, but the upshot is Medusa is transformed into the hideous Gorgon, and all of this seems to have something to do with the oceanic world.

This might be why book 4 comes to be dominated by the imagery of the rocky cliffs overhanging the sea - which is where Perseus first sees Andromeda, who, bound to the rock, seems like a marble statue, and where he fights and kills the belua, the sea monster.

Perseus recounts how he got to Medusa - via her sisters, the Graiai:

THE GRAIAI (or Graeae) were two, or some say three, ancient sea-daimones (spirits) who personified the white foam of the sea. They were grey from birth, and shared among themselves a single detatchable eye and tooth. Perseus stole these and compelled the sisters to reveal the hidden location of their sister Gorgones. Three of their names suggest rather dire monsters--Deino "the terrible." Enyo "the warlike" and Persis "the destroyer." Another name, Pemphredo, "she who guides the way," simply refers to their role in the Perseus story.

Here's something to ponder: why do the Graiai become the ones who "guide" Perseus to Medusa? Medusa is she who cannot be looked upon without petrifaction. He finds his way by stealing their eye, disrupting the continuity of their vision.

Leaving that aside for now, there are several interrelated motifs (leitmotifs, as it were) going on here at the point where the Cadmus story ends and the Perseus story begins, and we might as well note them now. First, if the Graiai are the white foam of the sea, then they are somehow linked to Venus, who in Book 4, precisely at the moment of transition, at the rocky cliff overhanging the sea, reminded everyone of her birth from the foam, the spuma:

“O numen aquarum,
proxima cui caelo cessit, Neptune, potestas,
magna quidem posco, sed tu miserere meorum,
535iactari quos cernis in Ionio inmenso,
et dis adde tuis. Aliqua et mihi gratia ponto est,
si tamen in medio quondam concreta profundo
spuma fui Graiumque manet mihi nomen ab illa.” 4.532 ff.

“O Neptune, ruler of the deep, to whom,
next to the Power in Heaven, was given sway,
consider my request! Open thy heart
to my descendants, which thine eyes behold,
tossed on the wild Ionian Sea! I do implore thee,
remember they are thy true Deities—
are thine as well as mine—for it is known
my birth was from the white foam of thy sea;—
a truth made certain by my Grecian name.”

We might note that the existence of the rocky cliffs themselves was credited by some to the petrifying powers of Medusa:

The poet Hesiod seems to have imagined the Gorgones as reef-creating sea-daemones, personifications of the deadly submerged reefs which posed such a danger to ancient mariners. As such he names the three petrifyers daughters of dangerous sea-gods. One also bears a distincty marine name, Euryale, "she of the wide briny sea". Later writers continue this tradition when they speak of reefs being created where Perseus had set the Gorgon's head and where he had turned a sea monster to stone. ##

At this point Ino, bearing her son, has leapt from a cliff into the foaming sea, and everyone thinks they have perished. Instead, at foam-born Venus's behest, Neptune transforms Ino into Leucothoe ("white goddess") and Melicertes into Palaemon, a guardian of ports. We will recall how Ino's servants turn either into stone statues, or into birds. This bifurcation of living beings into either rock (gravitas) or creatures of air (levitas) becomes structurally important in Book 5. But for now, let's note that several key players in the Perseus story eventually turn into constellations, including Keto or Cetus, the monster from deepest Ocean (vide supra).

A few images from Urania's Mirror, a deck of cards from 1825 depicting the constellations: