Some argue that the Trojan princess is a representation of human morality, that part of our being that knows the dangers of committing certain acts, but which we often ignore. Cassandra is conscience, disregarded and ridiculed by excessive self-confidence.
Casandra
Cassandra, sometimes called Alexandra, was a priestess of the temple of Apollo in Greek mythology. She was the daughter of the legendary Trojan king Priam and Queen Hecuba, the twin sister of Helenus, and therefore sister to the Trojan heroes Hector and Paris, as well as Troilus and Polyxena. If you'd like to learn more, we recommend reading the article "Who was Cassandra?" and the reason for her curse.
Origin
According to the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus, Cassandra was a beautiful and intelligent priestess of the temple of Apollo, because she was a priestess she had taken vows of chastity, however the god Apollo granted her the gift of prophecy in exchange for becoming his lover, The young woman accepted the gift but at the moment of lying with the god she rejected it, he could no longer take away the granted gift, but instead he cursed her making no one believe in his predictions even if they were true.
According to another later uncirculated version of the myth, once in childhood, being forgotten by adults during a festival, Cassandra, together with her twin brother Helenus, fell asleep in the temple of Apollo on the plain of Troy, and there the serpents The sacred creatures licked or spoke to his ears, transmitting a power with which he could "Hear" the future. Various authors call Cassandra, in relation to Apollo, a virgin, Pindar calls her a "virgin-prophet". There is a version that Apollo also condemned her to celibacy.
According to the Greek poet Homer, she was the most beautiful of King Priam's daughters, but he does not mention her prophetic gift. Already in the cyclical poems she appears as a prophetess, whose predictions no one believes. Cassandra's tragic prophecies went unheeded, she was ridiculed and accused of being crazy. But what she foretold came true, like the death of her family and the destruction of Troy.
Homer simply calls Cassandra "the fairest" and compares her to the "golden Aphrodite." The Greek poet Ibicus also spoke about her beauty and calls her "blue-eyed maiden in lush curls." The ancient Greek playwright Euripides speaks of her "gold of her tresses."
Fall of Troy and aftermath
Even before the birth of Paris, it was predicted that he would become the culprit in the destruction of Troy, which is why the royal parents left him on Mount Ida. But the boy survived and then came down the mountain like an unknown shepherd, Cassandra was the first to recognize her outcast brother and wished him dead, foreseeing the trouble he would bring. However, he was solemnly received into the royal house.
While sailing to Sparta, Cassandra foretold a bitter future and on her return calls Elena to blame for the coming misfortunes for Troy, but they do not believe her. They all laughed at her like crazy and Priam ordered to keep her daughter locked away from her.
Cassandra predicted and gave details about the defeat of Troy. In several accounts of the war, she warned the Trojans about the Greeks hiding inside the Trojan Horse. She also foresaw the death of Agamemnon, including her own demise at the hands of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, the fate of her mother Hecuba, Odysseus's ten-year wandering before returning home, and the murder of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra by the latter's children, Electra and Orestes. For more information on this topic, you can consult the link about Apollo and his influence.
Cassandra predicted that her cousin Aeneas would manage to flee during the fall of Troy and later found a new nation in Rome. However, all of his predictions went unheeded. Coroebus and Otrioneus came to Troy's aid during the Trojan War out of love for Cassandra by claiming her hand in marriage, but both died. According to one version, Priam offered Cassandra to Telephus, in order to induce him to fight on the side of the Trojans. Casandra was also the first to see the body of his brother Hector when it was returned to the city.
In “The Fall of Troy” by the Greek epic poet Quintus Smyrna, he tells of Cassandra trying to warn the Trojan people that the Greek warriors were hiding inside the wooden horse that the Greeks left behind when the Trojans celebrated their victory over the Greeks with a feast. . They did not believe her, insulted her and humiliated her with disdain.
So she took an ax in one hand and a burning torch in the other and ran towards the Trojan Horse, intending to destroy the Greeks herself, but the Trojans stopped her. The Greeks hiding inside the Horse were relieved but alarmed at how clearly she had guessed her plan.
When Troy fell to the Achaeans, Cassandra took refuge in the temple of Athena. There she embraced the wooden statue of Athena in supplication for her protection, but she was savagely attacked and raped by Ajax the Less. Kassandra clung so tightly to the statue of the goddess that Ajax yanked her from its support as he dragged her along. One account claimed that even Athena, who had worked hard to help the Greeks destroy Troy, could not hold back her tears and her cheeks burned with anger.
In one account this caused her image to make a sound that shook the temple floor and the image of the goddess looked away when Kassandra was raped, though others found this account too bold. Ajax's performance was considered sacrilege because Cassandra was a refugee in the sanctuary and therefore under the protection of the goddess. Furthermore, Ajax desecrated the temple with her sexual intercourse by raping her.
Odysseus insisted to the other Greek leaders that Ajax must be punished for his sacrilege, which had angered Athena and the other gods. Ajax avoided his wrath, for none of them dared to punish him after he clung, as a supplicant, to the altar of Athena and swore an oath proclaiming his innocence.
Athena was enraged by the impunity that the Greeks left for Ajax's crime and sought revenge with the help of Poseidon and Zeus. Poseidon caused storms and strong hurricane winds destroying with his fury most of the Greek fleet when they returned after occupying Troy.
Athena herself inflicted a terrible death on Ajax, though sources differ as to the manner of her death. The inhabitants of Locris, where Ajax was prince, had to atone for Ajax's crimes by sending two maidens to Troy every year for a thousand years to serve as slaves in the temple of Athena. However, if the inhabitants captured them before reaching the temple, they were executed.
The Greek writer Philostratus of Athens maintains that Ajax did not rape Cassandra, but instead took her to his tent. When Agamemnon saw her, amazed by her beauty, he wanted to take her away from Ajax and accused him of sacrilege. Ajax fled. Earlier authors hold that Cassandra came to Agamemnon when he divided the spoils and became his slave. The ancient Greek poet Quintus of Smyrnsky narrates that the captured Trojans wept and worshiped Cassandra, remembering her prophecies, which they did not believe, but she laughed at them.
In one version of the myth, Cassandra intentionally left a chest in Troy, with a curse placed on the Greek who opened it first. Inside the chest was an image of Dionysus, god of wine and madness, made by Hephaestus, god of craftsmen, and donated to the Trojans by Zeus himself. It was given to the Greek leader Eurypylus, king of Thessaly, as part of his spoils from the victory at Troy. The king lost his mind when he opened the chest and saw the image of Dionysus.
Death
The King of Mycenae, Agamemnon, took Cassandra as his concubine. During the ten-year siege of Troy, Agamemnon's wife, Clytaemenestra, became the lover of Aegisthus, her husband's cousin. Clytaemenestra and Aegisthus began plotting Agamemnon's death. Clytaemenestra hated Agamemnon for the murder of her daughter Iphigenia. According to some sources, Agamemnon ordered the murder of Clytaemenestra's first husband, then raped her and forced her to marry him.
According to ancient accounts of the myth, upon returning from Troy, Agamemnon is murdered by Aegisthus, the lover of his wife Clytaemenestra. In some more recent versions, Clytaemenestra assists him or commits suicide in her own home.
The best-known version is Aeschylus's: Agamemnon, greeted by his wife, entered the palace for a banquet while Cassandra remained in the chariot. Clytaemnestra waited until he was in the bath, then entangled him in a net and stabbed him. Caught in the net, Agamemnon was unable to escape or resist his assassin.
Meanwhile, Cassandra had a vision of her and Agamemnon being killed. She vainly tried to get someone to believe her visions and help her. She resigned herself that nothing could prevent her fate and she resolutely entered the palace to meet her death. Some sources mention that Cassandra and Agamemnon fathered a son, Telodamus, or twins, Telodamus and Pelops, whom Aegisthus also killed.
Cassandra's tomb was in the ancient city Amyclae, and the tomb of her sons in Mycenae. However, according to Euripides, Cassandra predicted that his body would be devoured by animals, which explains the absence of a tomb at the place of death. In Amyclas and Leuctra in ancient times there were temples with statues of Cassandra, who was revered here under the name of Alexandra.
Her sanctuary was at Daunia, in southern Italy, where she was worshiped as a goddess. The Greek philosopher Plutarch gives an interpretation according to which Cassandra died in Talam (Laconic) and she received the name Pasiphae, under which she was revered for which she was identified with the local deity, whose oracle was in Talam.
Cassandra's syndrome
Cassandra syndrome (also known as Cassandra complex, phenomenon, prediction, dilemma, or curse) is a situation in which a reliable premonition or belief is devalued or overlooked and a person who knows about future events and cannot prevent them or convince others that the predictions are real. A primary role in this phenomenon is played by the lack of the gift of persuasion in the accuracy of the information provided.
The metaphor has been applied in a variety of contexts, including psychology, environmentalism, politics, science, film, business, and philosophy, and has been in circulation since at least 1914, when Charles Oman used it in his book “History of the Peninsula War”. "Both agreed to treat the Cassandra-like prophecies that Thiebault kept sending from Salamanca as 'swirling wild words.'"
Later, in 1949, the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard used the term "Cassandra Complex" to refer to the belief that things can be known in advance.
In psychology
In psychology, it is used by some experts for people who experience physical and emotional suffering as a result of impaired interpersonal perception and who are not believed when they try to share the cause of their suffering with others.
The renowned British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein proposed the Cassandra myth as the image of a person's moral conscience destined to be an admonition. The moral conscience in her image "predicts the coming of evil and warns that punishment will come and will have consequences."
Cassandra's need to point out moral violations and their social consequences is driven by what Klein calls "the destructive influence of the cruel superego," which in Greek myth is represented by the god Apollo, who dominates and tortures Cassandra.
With this metaphor, Melanie Klein emphasizes the moral nature of some predictions, which seeks to arouse in others "a rejection of belief in what appears to be true and expresses a universal tendency to denial, where denial is a powerful defense against anxiety. and guilt punished”.
In 1988, the expert in the field of analytical psychology, Laurie Layton Schapira, studied what she called the Cassandra complex in the case of two of her analysands.
Based on clinical experience, he described three components of the complex: (a) Unbroken relationship with the Apollo archetype; (b) Both emotional and physical distress, including hysteria; (c) Disbelief in analysands attempting to express these experiences to others.
Layton Schapira sees the Cassandra complex as the result of an ongoing relationship with what she calls the Apollo archetype, which represents the aspect of the personality that wants clear concepts, is drawn to mastering a skill, values order and harmony. An archetype that refers to the pattern of any individual or culture that is dedicated to, but limited by, order, reason, intellect, truth, and clarity, denying anything occult or irrational.
The intellectual specialization of this archetype creates emotional rupture and can predispose relationships to a lack of emotional empathy and the resulting disruptions. He further asserts that a "Cassandra woman" is highly vulnerable to hysteria, because she feels attacked both by the world around her and within her own body by physical ailments, especially gynecological ones. Addressing the metaphorical application of the Greek myth of Cassandra, Layton Schapira asserts that:
“What the Cassandra woman sees is something dark and painful that may not be apparent on the surface of things or that objective facts do not corroborate. You can imagine a negative or unexpected result; or something that would be difficult to deal with; or a truth that others, especially authority figures, would not accept."
“In her frightened, egoless state, the Cassandra woman may blurt out what she sees, perhaps in the unconscious hope that others might make some sense of it. But to them her words sound meaningless, disconnected and disproportionate.”
In 1989, Dr. Jean Shinoda Bolen, a medical doctor, psychiatrist, Jungian analyst, as well as a writer and lecturer, wrote an essay on Apollo detailing the psychological type of the "cassandra woman" and her dysfunctional relationship with the " Apollo man. According to Bolen, she Cassandra, as a woman, can display historical connotations and she may not be believed when she tries to share what she knows. According to Dr. Bolen, the Cassandra and Apollo archetypes are not gender specific.
She suggests that a person, male or female, suffering from a Cassandra complex may become more hysterical and irrational as a result of a dysfunctional relationship with the Apollo archetype and may not be believed when describing this relationship.
According to Bolen, the archetypes of Cassandra and Apollo are not gender-specific. She asserts that women can often find a masculine god within themselves, just as a man can identify with a goddess who feels a part of him. “Gods and goddesses represent different qualities in the human psyche. The pantheon of Greek deities together, male and female, exist as archetypes in all of us. There are gods and goddesses in every person.”
Of what she describes as the negative Apollonian influence, Dr. Bolen writes:
“People who look like Apollo have difficulties related to emotional distance, such as communication problems and an inability to be intimate. The relationship with another person is difficult for the Apollo man.
"He prefers to approach (or judge) the situation or the person from a distance, unaware that he must "get closer"—be empathetic—to truly get to know another person. But if the woman wants a deeper, more personal relationship, then there are difficulties. She may become increasingly irrational or hysterical."
In politics
The term "Cassandra effect" has become widespread and is quite common in the field of political decision-making. The problem is that it is more difficult to use intelligence information in a timely and adequate manner than it is to obtain it. It is not always easy to make the right decision based on the data obtained, since all the information is of a social nature and includes the mood of the society, that is, its various classes and circles.
In addition to prevailing social sentiments, a subjective view of the situation and the interests pursued by policymakers can serve as obstacles to correctly interpreting information. In this regard, cases of decision-making in world politics that contradict final intelligence data are quite common. The next reason for ignoring information provided is the psychological factor of antipathy toward information that has a negative connotation.
Government officials often react very painfully to information of this kind, as a result of which the informants themselves suffer. Another reason for the rejection of the information is the preference for the data obtained from the inner circle. The authorities believe that such information is much more reliable than that provided by the official intelligence service.
Thus, Jimmy Carter preferred to rely on information provided by SAVAK (Iran's intelligence agency) rather than the CIA; Boris Yeltsin preferred information received from his "close" people, however, he soon realized, by his own admission, the extent of its unreliability.
Japan's military plans for the United States were also known to President Franklin Roosevelt and the American leadership, but they categorically refused to believe in their reliability, based on the fact that Japan would probably attack the USSR, and the data obtained was disinformation by Japanese authorities to divert attention from Soviet leaders.
The psychologist Brendan Maher named a Martha Mitchell effect, similar to the Cassandra syndrome. Mitchell was the wife of John Mitchell, United States Attorney General in the Nixon administration. When she alleged that White House officials were involved in illegal activities, her claims were attributed to mental illness. Ultimately, however, the events of the Watergate scandal vindicated her and earned her the label "The Cassandra of Watergate."
Although it has been claimed that many of her allegations remain unproven, such as her claim that she had been drugged and placed under surveillance during a visit to California after her husband was summoned back to Washington DC, to prevent her from leaving the hotel or make phone calls to the media.
James McCord admitted in 1975 that his story was true, as reported in The New York Times. Further evidence supporting Martha Mitchell's claim that she was telling the truth was published in a 2017 article in Newsweek.
in the business world
Envisioning the possible future directions of a corporation or company is sometimes called a vision, however, achieving a clear and shared vision in an organization is often difficult due to a lack of commitment to the new vision on the part of some organizational officials. , because they do not share the vision with reality as they see it. Those who support the new vision are called "Cassandra", able to see what is going to happen, but they are ignored.
Sometimes the term “Cassandra” is applied to those who can predict rises, falls and, in particular, crashes in the world stock market, as was the case with Warren Buffett, who repeatedly warned that the stock market rise of the decade 1990 was a bubble, attracting the title of "Cassandra of Wall Street." Andy Grove, in his book “Only the paranoid survive”, reminds the reader of the helpful “Cassandras” who sense the signs of change before everyone else and are indispensable in managing through “Strategic Tipping Points”.
In the business sphere, the Cassandra complex is also quite common. For example, Polaroid ignored a 1997 report on the rapid adoption of digital technologies by young people and instead all but disbanded competitive intelligence units. In 2000, the company's products ceased to compete with digital photography, and in October 2001 the company began its first bankruptcy proceedings.
in the environmental movement
Many environmentalists have predicted impending environmental catastrophes, emphasizing climate change, rising sea levels, irreversible pollution, and an imminent collapse of ecosystems, including those of tropical rainforests and ocean reefs. These individuals sometimes acquire the label of "Cassandra," whose warnings of impending environmental disaster are disbelieved or mocked.
Ecologist Alan Atkisson wrote in 1999 that to understand that humanity is on a collision course with the laws of nature is to get stuck in what he calls the "Cassandra dilemma" in which a person can see the most likely outcome of actions. current trends and can warn people about what is happening, but the vast majority cannot, or will not, respond, and then if a catastrophe occurs, they may even blame the person, as if their prediction set the disaster in motion.
Occasionally there may be a successful warning, though the succession of books, campaigns, organizations, and personalities that we think of as the environmental movement have more generally tumbled to the opposite side of this dilemma: a failure to reach people and avert disaster. In Atkinson's words:
Too often we watch helplessly, as Cassandra did, as the soldiers emerge from the Trojan horse as planned and wreak the planned havoc. Worse still, Cassandra's dilemma seems to become more inescapable even as Cassandra's choir has grown.
Here are some links of interest:
