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APOLLO & CASSANDRA

APOLLO & CASSANDRA

In Greek Mythology, Apollo was the son of Zeus and Leto. Hera was Zeus' wife at the time, so Apollo was conceived during an act of infidelity.  Apollo was the most beautiful male of the Olympian Gods and also the most beloved.

Cassandra was one of the princesses of Troy, daughter of Priam and Hecuba. According to the Myth, Cassandra was shockingly beautiful.

As fate would have it, when Apollo saw Cassandra, he fell madly in love with her. When Apollo made sexual advances toward her, she shunned him. Finally, she gave in to his advances on one condition: he would grant her the gift of prophecy. It sounded like a good deal to Apollo, he would grant her the gift of second sight and then make love to her. According to the Myth, he did not hesitate, he gave her the rare gift she desired. After she received it, she refused to make love to him. She had planned to refuse the sexual adventure before she made the agreement. Apollo did not take kindly to Cassandra's refusal, so he decreed that no one would ever believe her words of wisdom regardless of the situation.

As the myth unfolds, Cassandra foresaw the destruction of Troy by the Greeks; when the Trojans found the big wooden horse outside the gates of their city, Cassandra told them that Greeks will destroy them if they bring the horse into the city. The saying "Beware of Danaos (Greeks) bearing gifts" belongs to her. No one in Troy believed her, and the horse was wheeled into the city. We all know what happened afterwards, under the cover of night's darkness, the hidden soldiers emerged from the hollow wooden statue and open the gates to the Greek army. The city was sacked.

When Troy fell to the Greeks, Cassandra tried to find a shelter in Athena's Temple, but she was brutally abducted by Ajax and was brought to Agamemnon (King of the Greeks) as a concubine. Cassandra tells Agamemnon that he will be slain when he returns to Mycenae but he ignores her seemingly disturbed prophecies. He thought her words were nothing more than ravings of a hysterical princess prisoner. Agamemnon did not know that his wife Clytemnestra had taken a lover in his absence, and his wife and her lover plotted to kill him when Agamemnon arrived home. And they murdered him while he was taking a bath after his return. Cassandra was also murdered at the same time. Although there is a great amount of deceit and homicide in this myth, it is not the point of the story.

Cassandra's second sight is the feminine power of intuition. Apollo represents the left brain, the rational and clear thinking. We often refer to this kind of cognitive function as discernment or discriminatory sight. Cassandra refuses to make union with Apollo, a metaphor which means she refuses to recognize her own rational thought as it relates to her intuition. Intuition, if left unchecked, renders women boundary-less or lost; they cannot tell where their personal self starts and the world begins. No one could believe her ramblings even if they were true.
On the other side of the coin is the King Agamemnon, who embraces the masculine rational mind so much that he refuses to listen to the slightest feminine whisper of truth. Intuition is the communication of the Soul, rationality is the transfer of information to the mind. The trip home for the King is a sort of a going back for us all. How many times have we tried to revisit our past, or return from whence we came and brought nothing back with us of any value to rediscover that our truth was far from what we had anticipated? The King refused to believe his wife and her lover would kill him. He was vulnerable.

It has been my observation over the past thirty years of practicing medicine that the Cassandra syndrome or complex exists in all of us; no one wants to believe the truth. We all have the tendency to deny it or substitute some other irrational understanding of our reality which is far less harmful to our own worldviews, but none-the-less dangerous to our health. Many have denied their intuition so they operate blindly and they have denied rational discrimination so long that they float almost unconsciously through every conflict, staying remote from the pain and suffering associated with a real authentic life. We all know these people who live in the land of delusion.