Offering: April 14, 2025
Unsettled epiphanies
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Hi All,
I’ve been in California this week meeting wonderful people, exploring piles of driftwood, finding starfish (!), and thinking of grief and old stories as always. On the long flight from Boston I read Isabella Hammad’s brilliant Recognizing the Stranger, and then spent the next days turning over her descriptions of recognitions and epiphanies in a context of mourning. I’ve also thought practically nonstop about the Roman poet Ovid’s telling of Actaeon’s brutal encounter with the water goddess Diana, which has a lot to do with recognitions as well. So that’s what I’m sharing today.
Disclaimer: It’s fragmented, and stops short.
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the brave hunter Actaeon follows a stream to its source after a long day of work in the sun. There he sees the bathing goddess Diana with a group of water nymph friends; a cloud nymph, a dew nymph, a nymph of vessels.
Understandably disturbed that a strange man has seen her so vulnerable, Diana curses the hunter. Splashing water on Actaeon’s face and hair she says, “Go tell it, if your tongue can tell the tale, your bold eyes saw me stripped of all my robes.”
Right away horns grow from his forehead. His neck lengthens, his ears become sharp at the top. His hands and feet turn to hooves and his arms turn to legs and a dappled fur coat spreads over his body. Shocked I assume, he tears off.
Glimpsing his reflection in the same stream that doomed him, he tries to name what he feels. But his efforts are futile as his words are displaced by a new kind of tongue. Groaning wth tears streaming down his elongated face, he contemplates what he should do.
—
Here, Ovid breaks down Actaeon’s basic dilemma:
“Should he return to his ancestral palace, or plunge deep in vast vacuities of forest wilds? Fear made him hesitate to trust the woods, and shame deterred him from his homeward way.”