Erinys

The Erinys — plural Erinyes — occupies a privileged site in the depth-psychology corpus precisely because she refuses reduction: she is simultaneously external daemon and interior psychological force, blood-avenger and punisher of violated relationship, figure of archaic law and agent of madness. Ruth Padel’s sustained treatment in ‘In and Out of the Mind’ (1994) is the corpus’s most exhaustive engagement, tracing the Erinys from Homeric epic through Aeschylean tragedy and into Sophoclean elision, demonstrating how the figure enfolds moira, ate, and the blood-nexus of guilt into a single daemonic economy. Padel’s governing insight — that Erinys is ‘all at once: of and in phrenes, psychological and external’ — challenges any anachronistic reduction to mere abstraction. Dodds (1951) places the moira-Erinys-ate complex at the oldest stratum of Greek psychic vocabulary, older perhaps than Zeus’s appropriation of ate. Kerenyi (1949, 1951) illuminates Erinys’s chthonic underside through the Black Demeter and the Brimo-name at Eleusis, while Hillman (2007) recruits the figure to his polytheistic psychology, reading Athene’s reconciliation of the Furies as the ego’s negotiation with necessity. Otto (1929) anchors the Erinyes in consanguinity-law and the holy order of blood. Together these voices establish the Erinys as a master term for the archaic, relational, and chthonic dimensions of guilt, retribution, and the mind’s self-destruction.

In the library 22 passages

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 foundational claim: the Erinys cannot be demythologized into mere psychology because she was always simultaneously an interior state and an external daemonic presence inhabiting the phrenes.

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 defines the Erinys as the daemonic personification of remembered relational injury and its self-destructive psychological aftermath, linking her inseparably to anger (menis) and curse.

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

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Erinyes operate within this earth-nexus of blood, darkness, good turned bad, fertility made barren. 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.

Padel situates Erinys within a chthonic complex of blood, darkness, and madness, arguing she embodies the catastrophic inversion of bonded relationship and is the mythic link between murder and the madness that both punishes and perpetuates it.

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

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Erinyes make the wish for other’s destruction, spoken by the hurt self, come irrevocably true. All this is crystallized in the way Erinyes hear curses. They are activated by harm-wishing words spoken within a relationship, which change the future.

Padel argues that the Erinys’s primary mechanism is the activation and self-fulfillment of curses uttered within a bonded relationship, making her the agent who converts relational harm-wishing into inescapable fate.

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

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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, although both they and it have been moralised. It rather looks as if the complex moira-Erinys-ate had deep roots, and might well be older than the ascription of ate to the agency of Zeus.

Dodds locates the moira-Erinys-ate complex at the archaic stratum of Greek psychic vocabulary, proposing it antedates the Olympian theology that assigns ate to Zeus’s agency.

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

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Tragedy made Erinyes very much its own. Their cluster of roles suited the genre. After the Oresteia, Erinyes were connected profoundly, but not only, with tragedy, whose subject matter was central to their daemonic province.

Padel argues that the Erinyes were effective in tragedy not as mere convention but because they corresponded to lived imaginative experience in fifth-century audiences, their daemonic roles perfectly suited to tragedy’s subject matter.

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

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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 documents the Erinyes’ specific domain — blood vengeance, oath-bonds, and kin murder — by reading their very names and the mythic contexts in which they appear as summoned and as avengers.

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

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Epic Erinyes monitor anger in crucial personal relationships, above all the relationship between parent and child. Telemachus… Erinys sends ate on Melampus’s phrenes.

Padel establishes that in epic the Erinyes function as guardians of hierarchical personal bonds — especially parent-child — and as senders of ate that destroys the moral sense governing those bonds.

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 and Achilles’ sense of his self.

Padel articulates the paradoxical double role of the Erinyes: they simultaneously guard bonded relationships and, by dispatching ate, cause the very violations of those bonds they are charged to punish.

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

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We can still find it in Homer himself: 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 reads the Erinyes as enforcers of an archaic, pre-Olympian law of blood-kinship, whose pitiless prosecution of violation — epitomized by Orestes’ matricide — constitutes an order older than Olympian morality.

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

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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.

Through Athene’s speech in the Eumenides, Padel shows that the integration of Erinyes into civic Athenian order does not diminish their power but re-channels it into a twofold capacity to bless or afflict human life.

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. Aeschines in public polemic may freight tragic Erinyes with sophisticated ironies of detachment, but this does not mean they are not alive in his audience’s imagination.

Padel demonstrates the Erinyes’ continued imaginative vitality in the fourth century, arguing their punishment remained understood as concrete madness experienced as bodily disintegration even when cited rhetorically.

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

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Strangest of all is the explanation of the goddess’s dark Erinys aspect. She is wroth because of the rape of her daughter and at the same time because of the marriage by rape which she herself had to undergo.

Kerenyi illuminates Demeter’s Erinys aspect as arising from doubled violation — rape experienced both as mother and as daughter — grounding the terrible chthonic goddess in a mythologem of traumatic wrath.

Jung, C. G. and Kerényi, C., Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, 1949supporting

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The curse, however, is heard and fulfilled not by a vague throng of vengeful spirits but by the underworldly Zeus and Persephone. The second time the curse is addressed to the rulers of the Underworld. The utterer of the curse beats the earth with her hands. She is heard by Erinys, the mist-wandering g[oddess].

Kerenyi demonstrates the structural equivalence of Erinys with the underworld rulers Zeus-Persephone, showing that in the Iliad the Erinys who hears the curse is simultaneously the chthonic divine pair — collapsing plurality into a singular terrible power.

Jung, C. G. and Kerényi, C., Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, 1949supporting

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Athene shares limiting, harnessing attributes with Ananke. Besides, she has a Persephone aspect; a horse aspect like the Erinys; she wears on her breast the Gorgo, that terrifying image of irrationality.

Hillman reads Athene’s mythic attributes — including her Erinys-like horse aspect and the Gorgon on her breast — as evidence that even the goddess of Nous contains the irrational, chthonic, and fateful dimensions she ostensibly overcomes.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting

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Rather than looking to unprovable origins in horse-daemons, we might take the Erinyes’ swift feet as a detail that suggests the immediacy of their response to crime. They appear instantly after murder, running after the killer.

Padel rejects phylogenetic speculation about the Erinyes’ origin and instead reads their physical attributes phenomenologically as expressing the instantaneous, inescapable quality of guilt’s daemonic pursuit.

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

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Erinyes were potentially involved in contexts unconnected with murder. 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 critically reviews and rejects the snake-origin hypothesis for the Erinyes, insisting on the plurality of their pre-Oresteia functions and warning against using Aeschylean evidence to reconstruct archaic belief.

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

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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 reads the liquid imagery of the Eumenides — oozing eyes, libations poured to Erinyes — as part of a sustained bodily and ritual economy connecting blood-guilt, madness, and the Erinyes’ appetite for visceral retribution.

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

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There is even a moment when she feels her human personality lost and submerged in that of the alastor whose agent and instrument she was.

Dodds, analyzing Clytemnestra’s sense of possession by an alastor, illuminates the broader archaic category of daemonic participation to which Erinys-agency belongs, where human and daemonic identity partially merge.

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

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