What do you think about Hercules and Antaeus and their fight Sheila?
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| Antonio del Pollaiolo |
Hercules is a positive symbol, strength with intelligence, and no brute force like Antaeus.
This is exactly what happens in Tai Chi Carlo, what you do? You lift up the diaphragm to move the other energetically. Antaeus is a strong man, he must use the ground to be strong, what does a Tai Chi master with strong people? He lifts them up pulling up the diaphragm and inverting their ground polarity. So this is the ancient Tai Chi statement: lift several pounds with only some oz of weigh.
More deeply Antaeus is our external way of acting, our muscles and strength stupid approach to life, Hercules lifts to the sky his Antaeus part, he reverses it and wins in himself his ego side freeing his energy.
You should post the poem and then offer the explanation or your perspective.
Hercules and Anteaus is not a poem about Hercules’ triumph over the evil and dark Antaeus but quite the contrary and you should read about the pagan tradition of the peoples of today’s Great Britain – the Irish, the Scots and long before them, the pagans that “invented” the Great Goddess, her champion the “Snake” and the sun-god.
I cannot help myself posting this – the lightening of Hercules is in fact the triumph of the destructive that Man has over the natural or better yet the principle of Nature, whose representative here is Antaeus who is in the end weaned (from his Mother Goddess, mother Earth, from Nature herself – I say herself because the pagans believed that it was the Mother of all things, so when they demonized her later on (the Anglo-Saxons, for example), they only kept the negative, dark and evil aspect of her like in Beowulf, you must’ve seen the movie, Grendel, a mother and a killer… though I can go deeper in discussing this, there’s little time and really it’s to be done face to face with an audience
). Next, Hercules in fact goes after the “apples” – in the earlier legends the apples are given to heroes by the druids in the name of the Great Goddess. However, by the time the patriarchal order took over, heroes did not only get apples by killing old monsters (those representations of the Great Goddess the Man feared but the children of the GG as well) – Medusa, ie.
In this sense, we see Hercules blinded by his ratio, blood-thirsty and eager to commit matricide because Antaeus is the only chthonic, pre-historic, constant natural force – directly linked to Nature. Antaeus (any living creature) is only strong and alive when in direct contact with nature. When he is lifted up by the powerful, rational and war-loving Hercules in the air, he loses the first bond, the bond he has with the mother and he dies.
So, this poem is in fact a lament (I cannot go through my library to find the exact quote…) but when Antaeus realizes that his existence is over, he says something disturbing – that life of peace and birth will only be remembered by few and told as a legend. The point being, that that life will be only a fantasy.
And I could go on and on but… we all had myths and stories of origin. Our society, whether you are an AMerican or Belgian, or Serbian or South African, has the same myth of origin told to children today – that of the rational Hercules who goes off and fights for land, oil, democracy… the myth that kills Antaeus… that’s what Shaemus Heaney wanted to say with it, I believe, considering his background and other works.
I am not surprised you had the answer you did because… we are fed by the Herculian culture… I hope you publish this.
Great choice, though. Love Heaney.
Best regards,
Sanja
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