"The Golden Fleece" by Robert Graves
I unreservedly recommend Robert Graves’s phenomenal 1944 narrative of the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece as a rhapsodic work packed with adventure, erudition and a profoundly intuitive understanding of Ancient Greek culture.
Several years later, in The White Goddess (1948), Graves (b.1895) was to state his uncompromising philosophy of poetry based on a lifelong devotion to the Triple Moon Goddess, which placed him in opposition to the classical veneration of Apollo as god of music and poetry. A taste of his radicalism can be had from this statement from Chapter 25 entitled “War in Heaven”:
“Ceridwen abides. Poetry began in the matriarchal age, and derives its magic from the moon, not from the sun. No poet can hope to understand the nature of poetry unless he has had a vision of the Naked King crucified to the lopped oak, and watched the dancers, red-eyed from the acrid smoke of the sacrificial fires, stamping out the measure of the dance, their bodies bent uncouthly forward, with a monotonous chant of: ‘Kill! kill! kill!’ and ‘Blood! blood! blood!’”
The psychological background to Grave’s marvellous retelling of the story of Jason and the Argonauts and their quest for the Golden Fleece is grounded in the conflict between Athamas of the House of Aeolus (great uncle to Jason) and his wife Ino (daughter of Cadmus) over the best way to ensure the barley harvest in a time of drought. Ino is head of the College of Fish Nymphs at Iolcos and she and her fellow nymphs have been wont to couple with the centaurs of Mount Pelion at the sowing festival in honour of the Goddess to guarantee a plentiful harvest. Athamas, however, has removed the shrine to the mare-headed Triple Goddess on Mount Pelion, which was traditionally guarded by centaurs, and replaced it with an effigy of Zeus the Ram (or Zeus the Rain-Maker) from Mt. Laphystion. It is carved from an oak root and over it is hooked a great ram’s fleece―the Golden Fleece. As a result the rains have not come and the people are beginning to starve.
The Achaeans or Greeks, who have migrated from the north, have supplanted the Triple Goddess with her son, Zeus, who is the paterfamilias of the new divine family on Mt. Olympus. Patriarchal life has introduced marriage and the authority of the male over the female, and the old magical ways have been replaced by a scientific approach to life. Zeus has brought new agricultural implements and techniques, and a proper almanac to consult, while the once omnipotent Goddess has been dismantled and her universal realm divided up among tamer, more restricted divinities such as Hera, Athena, Demeter, Persephone, Hecate, Artemis, and Aphrodite.
In the end, when despite many hecatombs the drought still persists, the nymphs demand that Athamas sacrifice Phrixus and Helle, his children by Nephele, to propitiate Zeus. In a dream the Goddess instructs the pair to ascend Mt. Pelion and steal the fleece, which they are to take to Colchis on the Black Sea (in modernday Georgia) as a gift for King Aeëtes. At the same time they are to commit sacrilege against the image of Zeus the Ram and replace it once more by the Goddess’s mare-headed effigy. In case Phrixus and Helle are in any doubt about the gravity of the command, the Goddess describes herself to them in these terms:
“I am the Triple Mother of Life, the mistress of all the Elements, the original Being, the Sovereign of Light and Darkness, the Queen of the Dead, to whom no God is not subject. I rule the starry skies, the boisterous green seas, the many-coloured earth with all its peoples, the dark subterranean caves. I have names innumerable…”
Phrixus and Helle succeed in carrying out the Goddess’s command, however Helle dies on the way to Colchis by being flung overboard by a sudden tossing of the ship at the Dardanian Strait, subsequently named the Hellespont in her honour. The Golden Fleece arrives safely in Colchis and is hung from a cypress tree protected by an immense oracular python in the Grove of Ares. The spirit of Prometheus was said to reside in the python. Medea herself, the daughter of King Aeëtes, was priestess both of Prometheus and of the Bird-Headed Mother, Brimo, who was the form of the Goddess worshipped by the Colchians. (Aeëtes was of Cretan stock and had refused to accept the new Olympian order with its relegation of the Triple Goddess.)
Jason was brought up by Cheiron the centaur on Mt. Pelion, to which he was smuggled out by his mother when Pelias, his uncle, seized the throne of Iolcos from his father, Aeson. Jason was originally called Diomedes but was given the name of ‘healer’ by his four-footed Goddess-worshipping mentor. When Jason eventually returned to Iolcos, he arrived in the market place having lost a sandal crossing the river Anauros, thus fulfilling the oracle that had warned Pelias to beware a one-sandalled man. Pelias eventually agreed to hand over the kingdom to Jason on condition that he bring back the Golden Fleece from Colchis. And so the great expedition was assembled and the Argo built.
In the religious context which Graves has chosen for this hero’s quest, Jason is abandoning his devotion to the Goddess in order to retrieve his Minyan kingdom. To do this he sets off on a voyage dedicated to Zeus, in whose name and service the quest for the Golden Fleece is undertaken. (The very prow of his ship, the Argo, is made from a speaking bough taken from the oracular tree at Dodona in Epirus, where Zeus had his primary cult, a cult every bit as prestigious as that of Apollo at Delphi.) On setting forth from the Gulf of Pagasae, Jason is accompanied by thirty three heroes, including Hercules, known collectively as ‘the Argonauts’. His betrayal of the Goddess, though not overtly stated, is surely dramatized by his relationship with Medea, who put her magical skill at his service and gave herself in marriage to him only to be jilted when the prospect of settling down with her back in Greece began to frighten and revolt him. Besides, he had been offered a more invitingly conventional bride (and with her the kingdom of Corinth) in the form of Auge (or Glauce), daughter of King Creon.
To cut a long story short, the price of Jason’s abjuration of the Triple Goddess is no less than everything. He dies a broken, prematurely old man when the prow of the rotting Argo with its carved figure of ram-headed Zeus falls on him as he sits disconsolately on the shore at the Isthmus of Corinth and, falling, crushes his head.
Graves reserves his final words, however, for the death of antiquity’s supreme bard, who had himself been one of the Argonauts:
“Orpheus also died a violent death. The Ciconian women one night tore him to pieces during their autumnal orgies in honour of the Triple Goddess. Nor is this to be wondered at: the Goddess has always rewarded with dismemberment those who love her best, scattering their bloody pieces over the earth to fructify it, but gently taking their astonished souls into her own keeping.”
This is a poignant foretelling of Graves’s own death, which was also a kind of dismemberment―albeit a mental one―though it had none of the suddenness, alas, of Orpheus’s end, nor indeed that of Jason.