---
title: "Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness"
author: "Ruth Padel"
year: 1995
shelf: "ancient-roots"
purchase_url: "https://bookshop.org/search?keywords=Padel+Whom+Gods+Destroy"
in_stock: false
related: ["padel-out-mind-greek", "dodds-greeks-and-irrational", "snell-discovery-of-the-mind", "onians-origins-european-thought", "kerenyi-dionysos", "jung-aion"]
collections: []
content_type: "book-commentary"
key_takeaways:
  - "Padel completes the project begun in *In and Out of the Mind* by demonstrating that the Greek vocabulary of madness—*atē*, *mania*, *lussa*, *erinys*—names a coherent ontology in which madness arrives from outside the porous self, lodges within the body’s organs of feeling, and constitutes both punishment and revelation, with the consequence that any depth-psychological reading of possession that bypasses the philological evidence reduces to amplification rather than scholarship."
  - "The book establishes that *atē* is not punishment in the moralized sense the Christianized West later imposed on it but a cognitive catastrophe in which the agent’s own faculty of judgment is darkened by divine action, so that the “fall” of the tragic hero is not the consequence of a prior moral fault but the visible structure of the mind’s own undoing—a finding that reshapes what depth psychology can mean by “possession.”"
  - "Padel’s tracing of tragic madness from Homer through Euripides into the medieval, Renaissance, and modern lexica of melancholy and fine frenzy supplies the long historical arc that Foucault’s *Madness and Civilization* attempted at the genealogical level, but which Padel grounds in the philological evidence of the actual Greek vocabulary, with the result that depth-psychological accounts of madness inherit a specifically Greek, specifically tragic substrate that modern psychiatric categories obscure."
references:
  - "Padel, R. (1995). *Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness*. Princeton University Press."
  - "Padel, R. (1992). *In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self*. Princeton University Press."
  - "Dodds, E. R. (1951). *The Greeks and the Irrational*. University of California Press."
  - "Foucault, M. (1961). *Madness and Civilization*. Plon."
  - "Kerényi, K. (1976). *Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life*. Princeton University Press."
glossary_terms:
  - "ate"
  - "mania"
  - "possession"
  - "tragedy"
  - "thumos"
scholar_prompts:
  - "Padel argues that *atē* is a cognitive catastrophe rather than a moral punishment; how does this reading bear on Hillman’s account of pathologizing in *Re-Visioning Psychology*, particularly Hillman’s claim that the soul’s afflictions carry their own intelligence, and where does the philological evidence Padel adduces support or constrain Hillman’s claim?"
  - "Padel’s treatment of *lussa*—the wolf-rage of the Erinyes and of Heracles in Euripides—presents madness as carnivorous, hunted, and hunting; how does this hunter-prey structure of tragic madness map onto Kerényi’s account of Dionysiac possession in *Dionysos*, and what does the difference disclose about the gendered politics of Greek madness?"
  - "Padel reconstructs how the Greek language of madness fed the medieval and Renaissance vocabularies of melancholy and “fine frenzy”; how does this long arc reframe Robert Burton’s *Anatomy of Melancholy* and the modern psychiatric category of major depression, and what does depth psychology inherit from each stage of the lineage?"
seo_title: "Whom Gods Destroy by Ruth Padel — Greek Tragedy, Madness, and the Porous Self | Seba.Health"
seo_description: "Padel’s philological reconstruction of *atē*, *mania*, and *lussa* recovers the Greek tragic ontology of madness — divine visitation in the porous self."
---

**Madness Comes From Outside and Lodges Within: The Tragic Geography of Mind**

Padel’s *Whom Gods Destroy* is the deliberate sequel to her *In and Out of the Mind*, and the two books are best read as a single project. Where the earlier volume reconstructed the Greek tragic image of the self as porous, invaded, and constituted by what passes through it, the second volume turns to the specific case of madness and pursues, with the same philological rigor, the question of how that porous self is undone. The opening thesis is simple in form and devastating in implication: in Greek tragic thought, madness arrives from outside the self, enters through the body’s organs of feeling, and inhabits the agent for a duration the agent cannot control. This is not a metaphor the Greeks reached for in the absence of psychology; it is, as Padel demonstrates by tracking the lexicon across the corpus, a coherent ontology of mind. The vocabulary of *thumos*, *phrenes*, *splanchna*—organs that in *In and Out of the Mind* were shown to be the seats of feeling and judgment—becomes in *Whom Gods Destroy* the topography upon which the gods act when they wish to destroy a mortal’s capacity to think. *Atē* darkens the *phrenes*; *mania* boils the *thumos*; *lussa* enters as a wolf-spirit and turns the agent into a hunter who cannot distinguish kin from prey. The destruction is not simulated madness used by the poets as dramatic shorthand. It is the literal description, in the only psychological language fifth-century Athens possessed, of what the Greeks took to be happening when a mortal’s mind was ruined by divine action.

***Atē* Is Not Punishment Alone but Cognition’s Own Catastrophe**

Padel’s most consequential single chapter develops the analysis of *atē*, the Homeric and tragic concept that the moralizing Christian West later flattened into “punishment for hubris.” She demonstrates that *atē* is something stranger and more precise: it is the agent’s own faculty of judgment turned against the agent, a darkening of the mind by which the mortal proceeds, with apparent confidence, into the action that destroys him. Agamemnon in *Iliad* 19 is the canonical case, and Padel reads the Homeric account with care: Agamemnon does not say, “I was punished,” he says, “*atē* came upon me,” a divine cognitive intervention for which he is paradoxically both responsible and not responsible. The tragic poets inherit this paradox and hold it open. When Sophocles’s Ajax slaughters the cattle in the conviction that he is killing the Achaean leaders, the action is not a moral fall produced by a prior fault; it is the visible structure of a mind whose own resources have been turned against it. This understanding of *atē* has direct consequences for depth psychology. The Jungian language of complex possession, the Hillmanian language of the soul’s pathologizing, and the Kalschedian language of the archetypal self-care system attacking the symbolic function—all three are dependent, often without acknowledgement, upon the Greek tragic structure Padel recovers. The clinician who meets a patient in the throes of what the Greeks called *atē* is not meeting a moral failure to be corrected but a cognitive catastrophe whose duration and shape are not within the patient’s power to revise.

***Lussa*, Wolf-Rage, and the Hunting Goddess: Why Greek Madness Is Carnivorous**

Padel’s treatment of *lussa*—the wolf-rage personified as a goddess in Euripides’s *Heracles* and pursued through the Erinyes of Aeschylean tragedy—develops one of the book’s most original contributions. *Lussa* is not generic anger or generic madness; it is specifically a hunter’s rage, a transformation of the human into a wolf that loses the capacity to distinguish appropriate prey from inappropriate prey. Heracles in his *lussa* slaughters his own children. The Erinyes hunt Orestes across the Greek landscape with the same hunter–prey structure. Padel demonstrates, through close reading of vase-paintings and tragic verse together, that the Greeks experienced this form of madness as a recovery of an animal substrate the civilized mind had only provisionally suppressed. The gendered politics of *lussa* receive careful attention: the Erinyes are female; Lussa is a goddess; the wolf-rage that transforms the male hero into a child-killer is named and personified as the eruption of a feminine cosmic principle that the patriarchal tragic order cannot finally absorb. This material connects directly to Kerényi’s reading of Dionysiac possession and to recent feminist scholarship on the Maenads, but Padel’s philological care prevents the analysis from collapsing into either celebratory paganism or pathologizing critique. The Greeks did not have a stable position on whether *lussa* was the worst thing that could happen to a person or the doorway to a sacred knowledge. They held both possibilities open, and the tragic stage was one of the few cultural institutions large enough to sustain the contradiction.

**The Long Tail of Tragic Madness From Dionysus to the Modern Asylum**

The book’s closing chapters perform a tracking operation across nearly two thousand years: how the Greek vocabulary of madness—*atē*, *mania*, *lussa*, *melancholia*, the divine darkening of the *phrenes*—travels through the Hellenistic and Roman literatures, into the Patristic and medieval lexica of demonic possession and Christian folly, into the Renaissance discourses of melancholy and “fine frenzy,” and finally into the modern psychiatric and psychoanalytic vocabularies. Foucault’s *Madness and Civilization* attempted a parallel arc at the level of social history; Padel’s contribution is to ground the arc in the actual lexicon, demonstrating which Greek terms were preserved, which were transformed, and which were lost. The implications for depth psychology are significant. Modern psychiatric categories—major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, brief psychotic disorder—are the inheritors of a vocabulary that began as the description of divine action upon the porous self. The clinical vocabulary has lost the cosmology but preserves the structural intuition: that whatever is happening to the patient is happening to the patient, that the patient’s ordinary agency is suspended for the duration, and that the patient’s subsequent self-understanding will have to incorporate an episode whose meaning the patient did not choose. To read Padel is to recover the philological depth beneath the diagnostic vocabulary, and to see why depth psychology—Jungian, archetypal, relational—keeps returning to Greek tragedy as the literature in which the structure of mind under invasion was most exactly described.

The book matters for any practitioner whose work touches the territory of severe affective and psychotic disturbance. Padel does not offer a treatment protocol; she offers a vocabulary, anchored in the oldest evidence the Western tradition preserves, by which the experience of being unmade by forces the self did not generate can be named without shame and without metaphor. After *Whom Gods Destroy*, the analyst working with possession states, manic episodes, dissociative breaks, or the ordinary tragic *atē* of someone who has, with apparent confidence, destroyed the life he intended to build, has access to a philological substrate the modern clinical literature does not by itself supply. The Greeks did not solve madness. They named it with a precision the tradition has never improved upon, and Padel recovers the names.