“When a living organism is cut off from its roots, it loses the connections with the foundations of its existence and must necessarily perish.”
— C.G. Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self
Each time I examine Oedipus and the Sphinx, I am under the impression that Gustave Moreau is attempting to reveal the secret of one of the most paradoxical scenes in Greek mythology: why does the Sphinx decide to commit suicide when Oedipus solves the riddle? The painting shows the characters in a confrontation that exudes sensuality: they are antagonists and yet intimately united. They project themselves onto one another. They gaze fixedly at each other in sculptural communion. Moreau exhibited the work at the Paris Salon in early 1864 and it met with success as unexpected as it was overwhelming. Napoleon’s nephew paid eight thousand francs for it. Critics rushed to celebrate the bold transgression of narrative codes presented in the composition. They assumed, correctly, that Moreau’s thematic choice implied a challenge to the hegemony of Ingres, who was then considered an icon of cultural conservatism.
In opposition to Ingres, who had presented in his own painting a withdrawn, ominous, hieratic Sphinx, partially veiled by shadows, Moreau shows a supplicant and anxious Sphinx who clings to Oedipus’s chest. The tragic hero does not appear, in the painting, intimidated by that mythological monster who accumulates corpses in an abyss that opens at its feet. Conversely, his posture suggests total indifference to the dangers associated with that encounter. He stands half-naked, casually gripping a spear planted in the ground as he rests his elbow on a rock, allowing an approach marked by erotic desperation. The Sphinx’s emotional display, on the other hand, demonstrates that Moreau attempts to highlight the human facet of the monster. He sketches for us a girl with adolescent breasts and an aristocratic profile who wears a diadem on her head and her hair gathered at the nape of her neck. Her claws dig into Oedipus’s himation like fingers that beg for mercy. The angle of her gaze conveys a mendicant condition. There is, in that gaze, expectation, a plea, but what could she be asking for in such a state of submission? Moreau thus contradicts the narrative of the canonical myth, which assumes the Sphinx to be a fearsome abomination that torments the city of Thebes.
With the painting, the French Symbolist reinvents the relationship between Oedipus and his antagonist. Of the hero we know his intentions precisely: he is there because it is a necessary challenge to win the throne. The Sphinx, however, what purpose does she have? We know that she has been prowling the outskirts of the city for some time, singing a riddle and devouring those who fail to answer it. Whilst we can take for granted that part of her aesthetic is an appropriation of Egyptian mythology, in Greek imagery her nebulous origins make any attempt to understand her difficult. No one knows for certain where she comes from; why she has settled on Mount Phicium; what drives her to devour those who encounter her on their path. Everything that has reached us is composed of conjectures, speculations, versions that varied with each tragedian and scholiast across the centuries. We know, at least, that her appearance in the Greek bestiary predates the Homeric poems and that she adopted canonical form at the end of the Archaic Period. The Oedipodea, which was part of the Theban cycle, and The Sphinx, Aeschylus’s satyr play, were the only works in which she featured as antagonist, but only commentaries or scarce fragments of them survive. Some authors say that the Sphinx came from the confines of Ethiopia under imprecise circumstances. Pausanias, in Periegesis Hellados, proposes that she either disembarked at Anthedon in a smugglers’ expedition or that she was the bastard daughter of Laius, Oedipus’s father. In Theogony, Hesiod affirms that her parents are the dog Orthrus and Chimera; Pseudo-Apollodorus indicates in Bibliotheca that she is the daughter of Echidna and Typhon. Others propose that Hera, enraged with the Thebans for not punishing Laius after he raped Pelops’s son, sent her to the city to torment the population. The Sphinx, in short, comes from everywhere and nowhere.
There exists, however, a curious and ignored version that reverberates in Moreau’s painting. It is found in the scholium of a Byzantine codex of The Phoenician Women, Euripides’ tragedy, and was compiled in Scholia in Euripidem by the German philologist Eduard Schwartz. The scholia, I should clarify, are for the most part anonymous annotations that appear in the margins of ancient works. They may be the faithful reproduction of an earlier annotation or a new occurrence by the copyist. That is why, in most cases, it is impossible to trace their true origin. The scholium affirms that the Sphinx was one of the women whom Dionysus abducted and drove mad when he visited Thebes as punishment against Pentheus, who refused to recognise his divine origin. It is not difficult to imagine the scene. Euripides had already described for us in The Bacchae the debauchery of the festivities in honour of the god of wine and, according to Robert Graves, a raw mushroom was consumed in the rites, “amanita muscaria, which induces hallucinations, senseless rioting, prophetic sight, erotic energy, and remarkable muscular strength.” Thus we can see that nameless girl in her delirious wandering through the forests, tearing animals apart in a furious frenzy or dancing with her peplos torn as she metamorphoses into the feline figure, winged and with a woman’s torso. What is interesting about the scholium is that it offers the Sphinx a human and Theban origin. Moreover, it attributes her transformation to what could be interpreted as a curse inflicted by Dionysus. It is not an idea incompatible with the mutations in the form of punishment or reward that abound in myths. Zeus converts Lycaon into a wolf after the latter offers him a banquet with the flesh of his own son; Hera, out of jealousy, transforms Callisto into a bear after discovering her relationship with Zeus; Athena converts Arachne into a spider after the young woman challenges her to a weaving competition; Daphne, fleeing from Apollo, is converted into laurel by her father. That the Sphinx has been transformed into a hybrid monster fits with the delirious experiences of the rites. We see her, then, as an accursed exile; a composite monster that anxiously stalks her past and lost homeland.
Where all versions of the myth coincide is that, at some point, Oedipus confronts the Sphinx. After receiving the dire prophecy of incest and parricide from the Delphic oracle, Oedipus heads towards Thebes, fleeing from those he believes to be his true parents, unaware that in doing so he would fulfil the oracle’s prediction. For as soon as he undertakes the journey, he murders his real father in a dispute on the road, and when he arrives in Thebes, he accepts a challenge whose reward is his mother’s bed. Creon, Jocasta’s brother, has declared that whoever manages to dispose of the Sphinx will receive not only the throne but also the queen’s hand. It is not clear how the Thebans know that the Sphinx poses a riddle whose resolution will free them from her presence. After all, no one who has confronted her has survived to tell the tale. Hyginus, the Latin writer, attempts to correct the inconsistency by arguing that the monster must have reached an agreement with Creon. More ancient authors affirm that only an oracle could have warned the Thebans of the Sphinx’s intentions. Excepting some iconographic representations that suggest an armed confrontation, the majority of accounts of the myth converge in that Oedipus, determined to win the throne and the queen, advances alone towards Mount Phicium and presents himself before the monster. The famous fifth-century BC Attic kylix describes the scene for us, but unlike Moreau’s painting, it inverts the angle from which the characters are studied and thus configures its own relationship of power. Although they are also depicted in profile, gazing intently at each other, in the kylix the Sphinx is seated atop an Ionic column while Oedipus, below, dressed as a traveller, ponders the question she has just posed: what is that which has a single voice and is four-footed, two-footed, and three-footed? As soon as the tragic hero solves the riddle, the Sphinx throws herself from the cliff.
What could explain such a drastic reaction? If the Sphinx were a descendant of primordial gods, suicide would seem incomprehensible to us. Even incongruous. Oedipus does not represent a threat to the Sphinx. There is no pact between the two characters in which she stakes her life. As for the riddle, it is not even the Sphinx’s own creation. The myth indicates that it has been taught to her by the Muses, though it refrains from clarifying its purpose. Perhaps the proverbial riddle and its solution are not merely an intellectual game but ritual prerequisites for accessing a secret, and for the Sphinx, that secret is herself. If we accept the version of the scholium, the monster originates from the delirium of Dionysian rites. The rites imply a severe transformation of being, the empire of instincts, the loss of reason and memory. The Sphinx, in short, has lost her identity; she is a shadow incapable of recognising her original form and wanders the margins of her own land singing a litany that no one understands. The Muses seem to have given her that riddle as an instance which, when solved, triggers the revelation of her true nature. And in that insatiable search for herself, the Sphinx sings the riddle to travellers, but all fail. If she tears them apart with her claws, it is the effect of frustration rather than cruelty. When Oedipus unravels the answer, the Sphinx is finally able to remove the veil that obliged her to wander like an accursed sleepwalker. In the hero’s pupils, for the first time, she can perceive herself in all her fullness; she observes with stupor the abomination into which she has been converted, the different elements that comprise her, discrepant and absurd. She is not lion, nor eagle, nor human. Only parts assembled in a capricious divine design. She is simultaneously the young woman usurped by Dionysus and a spawn despised by the Thebans. Greek mythology is intolerant of what escapes aesthetic order: monsters are a plastic representation of the irrational; they exist to be destroyed because thus they establish a hero’s legend. So, in an act of sudden repulsion, the Sphinx leaps into the void; she constitutes herself as the antithesis of Narcissus who, enraptured by his own beauty, also plunges into the depths.
It would be a mistake to attribute the Sphinx’s suicide to a merely aesthetic dilemma. The decision cannot be explained solely as a rejection of the dissonance between the original woman and the monster that results from the Dionysian anathema. However unprecedented the transformation may have been, there is also an ethical element: without a riddle to sing, without a purpose to fulfil, her existence lacks meaning. Her suicide is both an act of aesthetic desperation and an existential collapse. Oedipus is, in this way, both her executioner and her redeemer and yet is incapable of noticing in that reaction a premonition of his own destiny. He too will discover years later the identity he pursues with inexorable insistence. Through the blind Tiresias, he will learn that his children are the fruit of incest and that he is a parricide. He hence fulfils the oracle’s prediction. Instead of leaping off a precipice, he pierces his eyes with pins that he removes from his mother’s peplos. We understand, at this point in the myth, that identity is somehow determined by the very search for identity: Oedipus has consummated the oracle, unknowingly, precisely as a consequence of the enquiry into his origin. And he only discovers the truth after prolonging that enquiry in the encounter with Tiresias, who uselessly attempts to warn him of the danger posed by his questions. Thus the scholium presents us, with the Sphinx, a surreptitious play of mirrors, an extraordinarily subtle anagnorisis, an antecedent to the myth of Oedipus. It tells us that the search for identity is a potential catalyst for self-destruction. That is why we see, in Moreau’s painting, the Sphinx’s eyes wide with what appears to be a mixture of disquiet and incredulity. She has finally understood! We tend to assume that the Socratic maxim “know thyself” is necessarily a journey towards liberation, but we ignore that it can also bring about a condemnation. Who is capable of unravelling the most hidden secrets of being without exposing themselves to fear and repugnance? Only then do we realise that, in the painting, Moreau presents the dialogue between two who have been condemned.