Book of the Sphinx 1st Edition by Willis Goth Regier ISBN 0803239564 978-0803239562

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ISBN 10:0803239564

ISBN 13:978-0803239562 

Author:Willis Goth Regier

Sought, the Sphinx seems everywhere, whether the guardian of the pyramids on Egypt’s Giza plateau or the beautiful man-eater with a deadly riddle, to be approached with awful caution. The Sphinx, that icon painted, sculpted, engraved, and exalted in poetry, fiction, and music, so impressed the philosopher Hegel that he pronounced the creature “the symbol of the symbolic itself.” With a wealth of illustrations, Book of the Sphinx confirms Hegel’s lofty judgment, finding the Sphinx everywhere: in tragedies, paintings, opera, murder mysteries, brothels, bars, and advertisements.

Pursuing the Sphinx through kaleidoscopic sightings and encyclopedic observations, Willis Goth Regier plumbs the symbol’s mysteries, conducting the reader down ever more perplexing and intriguing paths. Wonderfully readable, his highly idiosyncratic tour of the ages and the arts leads at last to a conception of the Sphinx that embraces nothing less than all that is unknowable—proving once again that confronting a Sphinx is one of the most dangerous and exhilarating adventures of the imagination.

Table of contents: 

1: Phix and Horemakhet
In ancient Egypt, Syria, and Greece, Sphinxes guarded gates of temples and cemeteries, perched on high columns, came in storms of wings and claws, and perfumed air like poison. Up the Nile, down the Euphrates, and all around the Mediterranean, they were thought to be supernaturally vigilant and wise. Patient, supple, strong, a Sphinx is a dream of mastery, concentrated thought annoyed by chatter. A sleepy Sphinx curls up like a cat, a question mark, a hook.

There are Sphinxes of Isis, Sphinxes for Christ, Sphinxes of heights and abysses, Sphinxes in ranks, rows, and pairs. Two Sphinxes rise above…

2: Secrets
In Europe Egypt was a symbol upon which the Sphinx attached as a supersymbol. Philo thought Egypt stood for childhood, a stage that must be left behind. For the Hermetica of Hermes Trismegistus, Egypt was the “widow of the gods,” an ancient land that once held divine wisdom and lost it. To church fathers and reformers Egypt meant oppression and temptation. In the sixth century, Cassiodorus explained, “Egypt stands for this world, which afflicts the Christian people with various calamities, but is inspired with fear by the Lord’s strength and power. Egypt denotes the affliction which does not release faithful…

3: Confrontation
Laius, king of Thebes, believed an oracle of Apollo who foretold he would be killed by his son. At the time he had no son, and thus no one to kill him. To prevent one, Laius abstained from women, angering Jocasta, his wife. He did not abstain enough. Drunk one night, Laius forgot the oracle’s warning. He was stark sober when Jocasta bore him a son.

Jocasta’s tears and pleas were in vain. Laius hired a man to take the baby out of the city and kill him. The man took the baby into the wilderness but was unwilling to…

4: Riddles
In Greek the riddle of the Sphinx looks stately and severe:

Τί ἐστιν ὃ μίαν ἔχον φωνὴν τετράπουν καὶ δίπουν καὶ τρίπουν γίνεται

“What has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed and three-footed?”

Who’s afraid of it now, this old thing? Who ever feared it? Joseph Conrad, Karl Kerényi, and John Symonds described the riddle as “childish.” Walter Benjamin called it einfältig—foolish, simple. D. H. Lawrence added, “To us it is rather silly.” Thomas De Quincey judged the riddle “deplorably below the grandeur of the occasion.”

Quick retellings of the riddle keep the Sphinx safely in the…

5: Body
In Ephesus, where Saint John began his church and the Virgin Mary breathed her last, a statue of the Sphinx once bent over her prey. She resembled a Sphinx on the throne of Zeus carved by Phidias and may be a replica of it, a Sphinx about 2,500 years old. Wars came and shattered her; her pieces sank in the earth. In different archeological digs in the 1890s, pieces were found and further separated by museums in London and Vienna. In 1937 Fritz Eichler began to reconstruct the Sphinx; the task took twenty years. By 1957 he had fit fifty-seven…

6: Ero
Anton Chekhov, The Seagull 

Medvedénko: Do you know the famous riddle? What goes on four feet in the morning, on two feet at noon, on three feet in the evening—

Sórin: (Laughs) Sure! And flat on his back at night!

Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802) concludes with a tale told by Klingsohr, the master poet. He says that Fable, the foster sister of Eros, searched for Eros down a secret stairway. At the bottom was a doorway, guarded by a sleepy Sphinx. The Sphinx asked Fable a series of questions:

“Do you know me?”

Fable said, “Not yet.”

“Where…

7: Mind
The Sphinx couchant is an emblem of dreams. Apollodorus reports that Oedipus learned the answer to the Sphinx’s riddle in a premonitory dream. The Sphinx of Giza, wrote Arthur Silva White, “is a dream in stone.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was Freud’s most studied case. He published his “fundamental work,” Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams), in the winter between 1899 and 1900. The book disclosed the deep meanings of dreams: who would not want its keys? The dreams he interprets are often his own. His interpretations introduce his personal history and medical problems in a sequence of unhappy episodes,…

8: Symbol of Symbols
That Hegel selected the Sphinx as his symbol of symbols settled nothing. The symbol of symbols has competition. There are symbols of symbols in music, chemistry, poetry, and physics. In search of divine knowledge, Aristotle stopped to wonder about numbers and geometry—powerful invisible rulers, hidden within nature and shining on it. Zero is a potent symbol of symbols, creating something from nothing, capable of infinite replication.

In Riddles of the Sphinx (1891), F. C. S. Schiller asserted that “the Crucifixion is the greatest and divinest of all symbols,” a symbol that left the Sphinx behind. But Hegel was Christian,…

9: Exit
In October 1981, parts of a hind paw of the Great Sphinx of Giza fractured and fell off. The oldest monument in the world paid its dues to time.

Sphinxes watch combat on vase paintings of classical Greece. They parade with a battle column and observe duels to the death. In the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a Sphinx watches Hercules kill Nessos; two more Sphinxes, nose to nose, watch Achilles kill Memnon, king of Ethiopia.

The story of Phix grew independently. Pottery paintings of a Sphinx chasing Thebans appeared in the sixth century BC, before depictions of…

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