Originally published in the Opinion page of the Herald-Zeitung in New Braunfels, Texas, June 13, 2024. A-4 and A-10.
As a lifelong student of mythology from many cultures, I am always asking how ancient myths shed light on our contemporary world both locally and globally. Because myths tell us ageless stories of who we are, what we seek, the values we adhere to, and what connection to the divine seem to be constants in their stories, I found the ancient story of the Greek hero Theseus and his ordeals with human situations worth exploring.
Myths often appear as puzzles that we puzzle over to see what gold might be contained in them. Theseus’ story initially centers on whether he is in fact the son of King Aegeus, who instructs the young man’s mother, Aethra, to take Theseus to a particular rock to test whether he has the strength to lift the rock and find beneath it his father’s sword and sandals. Then he is to journey to Athens to give them to his father and declare himself the legitimate son.
But instead of taking the safer passage across water, Theseus chooses to travel along the coast which is peopled by all sorts of criminals. In his journey to Athens, he is confronted with one after another of ordeals who test his skills as a man and warrior.
One of the last ones he encounters is Procrustes, perhaps the best known, according to mythologist Edward Edinger (The Eternal Drama: The Inner Meaning of Greek Mythology). Procrustes delighted in capturing travelers and laying them out on his famous bed, the bed of Procrustes. All had to fit his bed perfectly. If they were too long, he cut them down to size to fit the bed’s length; if too short, he stretched them out until they filled the bed.
Edinger helps us to think about what is taking place psychologically and culturally in this mythic tale: “A procrustean bed is a rigid, preconceived attitude that pays no attention to the living reality one is confronting, but brutally forces it to conform to one’s preconceptions.” Remember that myths are not to be taken literally but metaphorically. So, we must imagine into the action of the story to glean its insights but avoid getting caught on the procrustean bed of literalism.
What the myth reveals, as Edinger describes it, is using alien standards by which to judge something or someone while sacrificing our own standards for what is real, what false. Amputating or stretching some situation or condition beyond their normal shape ends with a distortion of reality, while ignoring its natural condition.
We might see in this simple but profound story what harm is done by deforming, bending and fantasizing the truth of a shared reality so that what we generally agree on as to what is real is open to all forms of grotesque convulsions. Making up reality to enhance or encourage a fiction that serves an ideology harms the body politic and the health of a people or a nation.
Distortions pretend that they are the real truth, while harboring a more sinister design, often led by appetites for power, control and finally, domination. At the same time, all contrary points of view are vilified and dismantled to keep the distortion supreme. Pretense is at the heart of Procrustean malformations.
Finally, when a myth is active, organic and assists us all to further align our purposes with principles that serve the common good, Procrustes is silenced and his actions muted. But Procrustean influences are never far from the surface.