Cassandra & Gaia
Cassandra has lived long in our collective imaginations because before her capture and enslavement, she lived a privileged life of a princess in Troy, but she lived with a serious handicap. Cassandra could foretell the future but no one ever believed what she said. The god Apollo, love sick and vexed, cursed Cassandra with this combination of accurately seeing the future and yet never being believed.
To call someone a “real Cassandra” is to say that, like this princess from ancient Troy, her dire warnings are accurate but unheeded.
Environmentalists sometimes seem like 21st century Cassandras. We raise the alarm about plummeting bio-diversity, plastics polluting the oceans, habitat destruction, and global anthropogenic climate change, but business largely continues as usual. Gaia is raped and raped again, and her defenders are too often ignored if not murdered.
Cassandra is a very minor character in Reborn Athena, but her character deserves more recognition. She appears in Reborn Athena only because Agamemnon brings her home with him from the Trojan War as his captive, his slave wife. When Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon (in retaliation from Agamemnon’s murder of their daughter Iphigenia), what happens to Cassandra is left unclear. Some legends say she was murdered along with Agamemnon. Other legends say that Cassandra escaped and regained her liberty.
Cassandra’s life, like the life of Queen Medusa, was marked by rape that took place in a Temple of Athena. After the Greeks breach Troy’s defenses using their famous Trojan horse, Ajax finds Cassandra clinging to the statute of Athena and rapes her there in the Temple. Long before that rape, Cassandra had already suffered at the hands of Apollo. He desired her, but she refused him, so he cursed her with prescience that gains no traction, with the ability to foresee the future but complete inability to do anything about what she knows will happen. Queen Medusa, as told in Reborn Athena, was raped by the God Poseidon in another Temple of Athena. While Medusa lived on after that rape cursed by Athena to have snakes for hair, Cassandra’s fate upon rape by Ajax was to become a slave wife. The parallel crimes suffered by Cassandra and Medusa produce parallel outcomes: monstrification and sexual enslavement. Ancient Athena’s justice punished these victims.
The Reborn Athena’s justice places the guilt on the perpetrators and protects survivors. Gaia is yet one more survivor in need of Reborn Athena’s justice. Cassandras of the 21st Century, living with the new justice, will be heard.
