Metamorphoses

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“When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” I borrow the opening words from Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis since upon rereading it yesterday I found it consonant with much of mythology. Even the title chosen by Kafka resonates with Publius Ovidius Naso’s (Ovid’s) Metamorphoses. Transformation at the hands of the gods. The idea lives on in the concept of conversion, the religious experience of profound change at the behest of God; some claim a willful hand in their conversion while others simply give God the whole credit. Kafka, one of the great existentialist writers of the twentieth century, considers the transformation without the gods and the terrifying results.

Having discovered the existentialists in high school, I was immediately taken by their writings. Characters find themselves cast into a world devoid of meaning, a world that they can’t understand and in which they often suffer unusual consequences. Little did I know that I was in training for my own experience in the academic world. Academia involves a major metamorphosis, one from which the victim cannot return, and after which she or he will find him or herself ineligible for employment. Reading The Metamorphosis as an often displaced instructor who’s only ever received positive evaluations, I saw much in the novel this time that I could not appreciate last time I read it. In short, I had metamorphosized.

Gregor Samsa, discovering he is now a bug, immediately worries about how to get to work. The painful description of his financial worries and ultimate rejection resonated a little too clearly. Is conversion a positive phenomenon? It is difficult to evaluate. In my experience, those who’ve converted tended to have been pretty decent people in the first place. As Ovid notes over and over again in his lengthy epic poem, when the gods make you into something else a sadness will pervade this new existence. If you survive. As Gregor slowly starves to death (in a fate hauntingly similar to Kafka himself) he finds no divine consolation. The situation is absurd—best just come to terms with that. Kafka could have been a struggling academic in the century after his death and he would have found the same situation applies.

O Pomona!

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Ancient goddesses have long been a fascination with me. After writing my Edinburgh dissertation on Asherah, and taking employment at an Anglo-Catholic seminary that venerated the BVM – Blessed Virgin Mary, and not some underwear brand, as I had supposed – I realized that male-dominated religions still recognize the need for the sacred feminine. In my recent post on Halloween, I mentioned the Roman goddess Pomona. Roman religion is generally not treated with the finesse of classical Greek mythology, but it represents an important part of our western heritage. Pomona is an etiological goddess. Etiologies are stories of origins, and like other goddesses of the ancient world Pomona was used to explain the mysterious ways of nature.

The story that best describes Pomona is preserved by Ovid in his Metamorphoses. Pomona is one of the virgin goddesses, specifically the goddess of fruit. She has no known Greek antecedents. The myth involves her devoted chastity and her commitment to ripening fruit, particularly apples (and sometimes pears). Shunning all lovers, she was eventually wooed by Vertumnus, the god of changing seasons. Disguising himself as an old woman, Vertumnus visits Pomona and tells her of the wonders of love and of the attributes of Vertumnus especially. Eventually Vertumnus reveals himself, and Pomona, delighted at what she sees, loves him. Of course, apples ripen and seasons change. Winter is soon to come once the apples fall from the tree. The goddess has been subdued by masculine designs.

So it often is with goddesses. Men recognize the need for the divine feminine, but fear it and attempt to tame it. Pomona, however, survives. One of the memorable objets d’art at Nashotah House, where I sat in that chapel for over a dozen long years, was a frieze of the BVM. More technically, a Madonna and Child. The frieze hung over an altar in a side chapel behind the choir, so most people didn’t spend much time looking at it. Mary, holding Jesus, was surrounded by a frame of fruit rendered in plaster. Apples were prominent among them. There are those who suggest that apples show how Mary overcame the heinous sin of Eve. I believe, however, that the fruits surrounding the virgin demonstrate that Pomona, the virgin goddess who eventually succumbs to the advances of the male deity, still has a place in the patriarchal world of Christendom.