Lyssa

Λύσσα — fifth-century personification of madness, replacing Homeric ate as tragedy’s preferred daimon of mental destruction. Lyssa has speaking parts in Euripides’s Heracles and in at least one lost play of Aeschylus. She is winged, snake-wielding, houndlike — an Attic vase of c. 440 BCE shows her with a dog’s head fitted over her own, urging Actaeon’s hounds against their master. The word lussa also means rabies. Lyssa is “wolfish rage personified, raging and destructive” (Padel 1992).

Euripides makes her ancestry explicit: “like Erinyes,” a “child of Night,” an “unwed virgin” born from Ouranos’s blood. She is Gorgon-like, her victim’s eyes glare like Gorgon eyes, she is “a Gorgon hissing with a hundred snake-heads.” In the Heracles, she drives Heracles to slaughter his own children — the paradigm instance of madness as annihilation of the household by the hero himself.

Together with ate and the erinyes, Lyssa epitomizes tragic representation of psychic disintegration: “Chthonic, exterior to self, swift, shining-haired, snake-wreathed, houndlike, female” (Padel 1992). She sites madness in the erinyes territory that tragedy makes its own. For Seba, Lyssa is the classical root of the archetypal experience of being taken by rage, of the hero’s self-destruction, of what Jungian thought names possession by an autonomous affect.

Relationships

• ate
• erinyes
• porous-self
• mania
• dionysos

Primary sources

• Heracles (Euripides, especially 815–73, 822, 834, 844, 868, 883–84)
• Aeschylus fragment 169 (from Xantriai, possibly Toxotides)
• padel-out-mind-greek (Padel 1992, ch. 5)