Erinyes

His words locate Erinys as in and belonging to, yet also menacing, phrenes. Reading this, as scholars have sometimes done, as "a watered-down 'psychological' Fury, an abstraction," distinguishing "abstraction," "nonliteral," and "psychological" from concrete, is anachronistic. Erinys was all at once: of and in phrenes, "psychological" and external.

Padel's central thesis: Sophocles' phrase *Erinys phrenos* makes it analytically incoherent to distinguish a 'psychological' from a 'literal' Erinys, since for Greek tragic imagination the figure was simultaneously interior and objectively real.

Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994thesis

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Earth-born Erinys is dark and female, like Earth. She is the possibility of a powerful relationship gone powerfully wrong. She is also the sender and apparition of madness. Spilt blood is the Erinys connection between murder and madness.

Padel argues that the Erinyes embody the chthonic nexus of blood, darkness, and madness, making them the structural link between the act of murder and the punitive insanity that follows it.

Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994thesis

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Tragedy explores damage within bonded relationships that is worked out by Erinys, daemon of the lasting reality of remembered hurt, of self's self-destructive awareness of other's anger. "Menis [Anger] and Erinyes belong together."

Padel identifies the Erinyes as the daemonic embodiment of relational damage, anger, and curse—operative across family, marriage, and oath-bonds, not merely in cases of murder.

Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994thesis

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The Erinyes' weapons include whips and skin disease, often associated with madness in Greek myth. They torture the body's outside. But their supreme instruments are madness and terror: violence within. The madness is the whip; the whip the madness.

Padel demonstrates that Erinyes instrumentalize both external physical torment and inward madness as inseparable punishments, with the boundary between somatic and psychic violence deliberately collapsed.

Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994thesis

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They are called upon to witness oaths; for the oath creates an assignment, a moira. The connection of Erinys with moira is still attested by Aeschylus, though the moirai have now become quasi-personal; and the Erinyes are still for Aeschylus dispensers of ate.

Dodds establishes that the archaic Erinyes are structurally bound to *moira* and *ate*, functioning as enforcers of cosmic assignment and dispensers of mental clouding long before their moralization in tragedy.

E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951thesis

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Tisis, revenge, is written into the name of the Erinys titled Tisiphone, "Blood-Avenger." In other contexts, too, Erinyes haunt possibilities of family bloodshed, or blood shed in relationships bonded by oath.

Padel traces the Erinyes' domain across the full range of bonded relationships—family, marriage, and oath—reading their names and roles as encoding a comprehensive theology of retributive blood-justice.

Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994thesis

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Lady Erinys has great power among the immortals and with those below earth. Among human beings Erinyes work visibly, perfectly, giving song to some, to others life dimmed with tears.

Padel reads Athene's installation of the Erinyes as Eumenides as tragedy's central question—where fury can be housed bearably in human community—recognizing their terrifying faces as a source of civic benefit.

Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994thesis

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The persecutors are the Erinyes. Thus the old gods and the new here encounter one another. The primal divine law of the earth protests against the new Olympian spirit. Two worlds are locked in struggle.

Otto reads the trial of Orestes as a cosmological collision between the chthonic blood-law represented by the Erinyes and the emerging spiritual freedom of the Olympian order.

Otto, Walter F., The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion, 1929thesis

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Epic Erinyes monitor anger in crucial personal relationships, above all the relationship between parent and child.

Padel establishes the Homeric Erinyes as primarily guardians of hierarchical familial bonds—parent-child relations above all—before their tragic transformation into punishers of murder.

Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994thesis

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Erinys 'hears,' and punishes Meleager. She would 'hear' Penelope if Telemachus banished her, and punish him. Erinyes make the wish for other's destruction, spoken by the hurt self, come irrevocably true.

Padel argues that the Erinyes' function of 'hearing' curses within relationships renders harm-wishing words self-fulfilling, making them agents of an irreversible causality inherent in damaged bonds.

Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting

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The Erinyes have power to wither, to make land and human beings barren. Their anger can be poured out as drops that 'wither human seed.' They bloodily grind human splanchna. But they also have power 'to save human seed,' to quicken growth in earth and in human bodies.

Padel highlights the Erinyes' constitutive ambivalence—their power to blight or to fructify land, bodies, and community—as the theological pivot of the *Eumenides*.

Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting

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It is a primeval law they represent, and they prosecute breach of this law with 'pitiless heart'—the law of consanguinity. The most powerful example is the fate of the matricide Orestes.

Otto frames the Erinyes as guardians of an archaic law of blood-kinship, predating Olympian jurisprudence and enforcing it without mercy across generations.

Otto, Walter F., The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion, 1929supporting

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I assume that Erinyes were an effective part of tragedy because they were a part of life, relationships, consciousness, of which the audience was intermittently aware.

Padel insists the Erinyes were not theatrical convention but corresponded to lived daemonic experience in the imagination of fifth-century tragic audiences.

Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting

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Aeschylus made Orestes' vision come true in Eumenides, whose audience saw what Orestes had seen. They were not (or not only) doxai. Euripides takes an opposite path. His play seems, at least, to embrace 'seeming' as an important truth in itself.

Padel contrasts Aeschylean and Euripidean epistemologies of the Erinyes: where Aeschylus validates their objective reality, Euripides opens the question of whether they are genuine perceptions or painful illusions.

Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting

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Erinyes who guard bonded relationships also send ate, to brutalize self's sense of other's rights, and make self savage the relationship. By sending ate, Erinys made Agamemnon insult Achilles, damaging their relationship.

Padel demonstrates that the Erinyes' dual role—as guardians and destroyers of bonds—is not contradictory but structural: they both protect and, by sending *ate*, violently rupture the very relationships they oversee.

Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting

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Erinyes also tend to have wings. The Eumenides' priestess says they look like wingless Harpies. Winglessness is easier to stage. Vase-painters, however, representing this play and others, give Erinyes wings, which are presumably fun to paint, and also truer to the language's sense of daemonic aerial attack.

Padel uses iconographic and theatrical evidence to argue that the Erinyes' winged, swift form expresses the immediacy and inescapability of their response to transgression.

Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting

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Erinys punishment, in Aeschines' day, may well be madness itself, concretely imaged as a harrowing of the flesh.

Padel traces the persistence of Erinyes as living imaginative realities in fourth-century Athens, arguing their punishment continued to be understood as concrete psychosomatic disintegration.

Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting

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And on his descendants the curse of the Erinye

Greene invokes the Erinyes as carriers of hereditary curse within the house of Pelops, linking their action to the astrological concept of fate transmitted across generations.

Liz Greene, The Astrology of Fate, 1984supporting

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ate in Homer is not itself a personal agent... ate is a state of mind—a temporary clouding or bewildering of the normal consciousness. It is, in fact, a partial and temporary insanity; and, like all insanity, it is ascribed, not to physiological or psychological causes, but to an external 'daemonic' agency.

Dodds' analysis of *ate* as externally caused psychic clouding provides the structural context within which the Erinyes function as daemonic agents of mental disruption in epic.

E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951supporting

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The Erinyes are said dod Zéntos podeiv epvOpov éx pedewv méXavov. In this they closely resemble the 'vampires' which we hear of especially in Slav popular mythology.

Rohde connects the Erinyes' blood-drinking with archaic chthonic soul-beliefs and cross-cultural vampire mythology, grounding them in the earliest stratum of Greek religion.

Rohde, Erwin, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894supporting

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Foul liquid oozes from the Erinyes' eyes. This play's first choai are those which Clytemnestra's ghost remembers pouring to Erinyes.

Padel traces the imagery of polluting liquid—libation, blood, and the Erinyes' own bodily effusions—as a unified symbolic field in the *Oresteia*.

Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994aside

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It used to be argued, mainly from Oresteian evidence, that Erinyes 'were originally' the vengeance of the dead, the snake-embodiment of a murdered person's spirit or dying curse. This argument was being dismantled by 1955.

Padel reviews and rejects the older genealogical hypothesis that Erinyes originated as snake-embodied spirits of the vengeful dead, insisting the question of origins is methodologically misconceived.

Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994aside

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