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reasonably expect that the hypothetical initiation myth would concern a girl whose attachment to her father (and mother) must be released, as well as a father whose proprietary claim on his daughter must be ended. We might also expect that this attachment be extended to king and god as well, just as Zeus appears in the exemplary myth of Io as god, king, and their representatives figure in the wide-spread practice of the ius primae noctis. And finally we might expect that the choros of Danaid maidens, in accordance with the basic principle of ritual to repeat a momentous and paradigmatic past event, would enact in identificatory repetition the triumphant ordeal of Io. |
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The Danaid trilogy was produced along with a satyr-drama, the Amymone whose plot probably was similar to the version of Apollodoros (2.1.45): Danaos sent his daughters to look for water; one of them, Amymone, threw a spear at a deer and happened to hit a sleeping satyr, who was aroused and desired to have intercourse with her; when she cried out, Poseidon appeared and the satyr fled; so Amymone slept with Poseidon, he showed her the springs at Lerna, and she became the mother of the illustrious Nauplios. For Dowden, ''Amymone is an exceptional Danaid, a named individual who . . . has nothing to do with the story of the fifty Danaids who flee the Egyptians" (1989: 151). It is true that Amymone presumably does not figure in the plot of the trilogy. Still it is clear that she is the double of the other named Danaid, Hypermestra, in that both of them come to regard sexuality, which they had first rejected, as something desirable (and the same must be true, ultimately, of the other Danaids as well). In fact the plot of the Amymone reflects in miniature the story of the trilogy, and could also have served as the myth of an initiation rite: the satyr may be compared to the sons of Aigyptos, lustful beasts in the eyes of the Danaids, and Poseidon, Amymone's rescuer and lover, is equivalent to his brother Zeus and the other paternal figures to whom the Danaids appeal for protection and ultimately for love. |
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Even the phallocentric discourse of Lacan fits into this picture. If the original desire of the Danaids to have the phallus of the father is eventually replaced by a new desire to have the phallus of a husband, the same transformation is the specific goal of the hypothetical initiation rite. And this transformation is the line of demarcation between the world of the family which must be left behind and the social order which, in fact, is constituted by this transformation. The central theme of Lacan and that of the initiation rite are the same: the exchange of women in society is parallel to, and dependent on, the exchange of the phallus within the family. |
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les femmes dans le réel servent, ne leur en déplaise, d'objets pour les échanges qu'ordonnent les structures élémentaires de la parenté . . . tandis que ce qui se transmet parallèlement dans l'ordre symbolique, c'est le phallus (1966a: 565). |
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