Offering: June 22, 2025
Loss & the impossible self
I have a couple spots left for one-on-one tarot sessions this month. For more about what sessions entail click here and to book click here.
There is a story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, of a hunter named Actaeon and his tragic encounter with the goddess Diana. After a long day of hunting, he accidentally sees her bathing nude with her crew of water nymphs. Furious, Diana flings water on Actaeon’s forehead turning him instantly into a stag.
While fleeing, Actaeon sees his reflection in the same stream he’d followed toward his terrible fate. When he sees his antlers, elongated face and fur coat, the once-hunter attempts to lament in the way he’s always known how but quickly finds he cannot. His human words have been crowded out with a new kind of tongue. As Ovid tells it, the brave hunter would have said:
“Ah, wretched me!” but now
he had no voice, and he could only groan:
large tears ran trickling down his face, transformed
in every feature.”
It’s easy to understand Actaeon’s sorrow. With the flick of Diana’s watery wrist, his entire life’s changed. Change is part of life of course, but this particular one robs him of a discernible future. He stands there wondering whether to go home and face the pain of un-recognition, or start a new life in the forest.
The change amounts to a loss of what philosopher Louise Richardson describes as “identity-relevant” possibilities1, specifically the kind that make Actaeon who he is: A hunter, a friend, a family member, a neighbor. Perhaps above all, a human. In a stag’s body, each and every one of his “practical identities2” no longer make sense.
In his paper “On feeling unable to continue as oneself,” philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe describes the distinctive experience of feeling unable to continue as a particular self. He writes that this is commonly expressed through statements like, “I don’t feel like myself anymore; I don’t know who I am; I am no longer me.”
To some degree, not feeling like ourselves is common in day-to-day life. If we are very lucky, we have spaces that let us be who we feel like we are. Yet life still requires us at times to occupy spaces where we must mask, or conceal what feels best or most true. Ratcliffe is less interested in episodic experiences of not being able to be ourselves, and more in those times when one feels unable to go on as oneself altogether. Like Actaeon who, upon realizing he’s in a new body, is literally unable to continue as a human hunter, neighbor, or friend.
Hi, if you read these things regularly and want to support, consider hitting the like button!