Cassandra's Boycott

Maybe Apollo was the world's first for prophet/profit university

This spring I went to Athens on vacation. It was snowing, COVID was haunting us in confusing ways, and the invasion of Ukraine was taking place in full swing. Me and my boyfriend stayed in an apartment that was gifted to us on the outside of Exarchia. When I wasn't sleeping, crying, or eating, I was walking around archeological sites, freezing, and petting street dogs. 

There were many highlights of our archeological visits, including an ongoing presence of passive aggressive commentary about how many artefacts were now unjustly housed at The British Museum. Other highlights include the presence of Heinrich Schliemann as a kind of German pioneer (crazy man) amateur archeologist who excavated (destroyed) the sites of Troy and Myceanae, and also mislabeled historical sites in ways that have been proven to be incorrect. 

Visiting Myceanae, I expected to connect with my namesake, Cassandra. This place contains the burial site where it is commonly told that Cassandra was murdered alongside Agamemnon, by Clytemnestra. This is also a site that had been botched by Schliemann, so it is not so clear that it had anything to do with my girl. I think that Cassandra, if she was a god, a person, or both, was too smart to be captured or buried by the current myth making that includes her.

Cassandra was a prophet who predicted the Trojan war and her own murder. The current common mythology says that Apollo made her a prophet because he thought she was sexy and wanted some sort of romantic entanglement with her. Then, when she withheld herself, her love, her body, or all of the above, (from him) he cursed her so that no one would ever believe her prophecies. 

I love Cassandra. I have spent a lot of time as an amateur collective dream archeologist, wondering about the figure of Cassandra and what she has to do with me and us. As a child, I had many tantrums related to the fact that I knew the truth but no one believed me. Little did I know then that it is the plight of every child in a society that says that children are the future while it also has no interest in what they say. 

Even as an obedient smiling child I was proud to hate Apollo. In 3rd grade, I was made aware of what he did to Cassandra and I was disgusted with him. He seemed to me to be a dominator that passed as something more Piscean, slippery, charismatic and clean.  I still feel malice towards his serenity, muscles and his perfectly curly hair that had been gelled by history. Maybe if I knew Apollo as a person and not as a bright white god, I could forgive him. Maybe if I knew him and his great sense of humor I would laugh at his slithery ability to get away with murder, the way I do with many of the Pisces men I know.

Anyway there are a lot of things to say about the archeological sites, so don't judge me when I get straight to the point: the gift shops. Gift shops with handmade forgeries of Greek (and sometimes Greek flavoured) statues are in almost every neighbourhood in Athens. Thank the gods (literally, it is easy). I started to be curious why I didn't know what Cassandra looked like, so I began to ask souvenir shops if I could see anything that was being sold to represent her. I figured that maybe all the statues I wasn't seeing had been looted for  exhibition in Great Britain.

I visited my first souvenir shop just behind the Acropolis. This huge shop had thousands of sculptures of every g-o-d and their d-o-g. I walked straight in with too much purpose and the shop owner stopped me to see my ID and my COVID vaccine documentation. I didn't waste my time showing him, I just asked him if he had any Cassandra statues. He said no, and that after 40 years of working at this shop, I was the first to ask about her. He was sure that there were no Cassandra products on the market in any of the thousands of souvenir shops in Greece. 

I was amazed. In his own form of shock, he didn't look at my passport or COVID docs either. He seemed to feel guilty, and tried to help me find something in his shop that would fill the void of Cassandra. I didn't. 

After this profound visit, I began to do daily visits to souvenir shops, searching for Cassandra. One after the other, shopkeepers told me that there were no Cassandra sculptures or images. Some people would say yes to me at first, because they didn't know who Cassandra was. They would go ask the boss and find out that Cassandra had never entered the Greek Sculpture Reproduction Pantheon. 

After seeing how Cassandra has escaped the trap of the Greek Sculpture Reproduction Pantheon (I picture a time space multiplication of how Assata Shakur escaped the US Government and went to Cuba), I am not so sure that I would give Apollo so much power in this story. The moral of the story we get from the current mutation of the myth is that super clean, slippery, wet Apollo has a lot of power and he gets his way. Or else. But I am wondering if that story is only correct when we tell it really fast and don't ask questions.

Here's my thing. What if Cassandra was always a prophet? What if her fortune telling powers had nothing to do with Apollo. Maybe Apollo simply held a lot of power and was suffering from toxic patriarchy and thus simply took credit for something that always already existed in Cassandra. It reminds me of so many parts of reality today that accredit people with powers they already had as a way to keep the myth alive about the importance of an institution or person. Maybe Apollo was the world's first for prophet/profit university, granting talents to people at great cost, that they had anyway, while ruining their chances of thriving with debt or other forms of sabotage. 

So when Apollo gets angry at Cassandra for not giving him what he wants, he curses her. Because he is so powerful, what he says goes and no one will believe her prophecies. This feels like another blooper that we haven't caught soon enough. The lesson of this myth currently seems to be that if you mess with a strong male figure, he will ruin your life. I think that is and has been true for many hundreds of years! But if we break it down to look at what we know about how power, oppression and neuroscience works, we might be able to see this story with a bit more precision. Apollo, as a male and as a god, had many times greater power than Cassandra. He could and did dominate her. Without giving him a magical power, I feel that we could surmise that he used the power of suggestion, amplified by the power of patriarchy to debilitate Cassandra's ability to properly share her prophecies. 

It is not an uncommon effect of oppression for the person who is overpowered to internalize the words and ideas of the person or system that has power over them. This narrative, "No one will believe me when I tell them what I know to be true" can quickly become a truth if you have repetitive experiences of it. In fact, it seems that neuroscientists now take for granted the patterning powers of the brain. To save calories, Cassandra's brain may produce for her what she already believed to be true, of being disbelieved.

Cassie, if your credit report describes you as untrustworthy, you may feel untrustworthy. Casserole, if you are told by your society you are a criminal, you may feel like a criminal. Cassieopia, if you are told by your society that you are worthless, you will not value yourself. Cassandra, if you are told by a powerful male god in a patriarchal society that you are cursed, you may not be able to deliver prophecies in a way that anyone can trust.

Cassandra was erased from history. No sculptures, no images, no t-shirts, no memes. Most people working at souvenir shops near her burial site do not know who she is. But the way we do history is honestly pretty cheap and dumb. Her legacy is in some way saved from the way that most mythological history is made into something consumable, with cheap morals and gold leaf on plastic. What if the legacy of Cassandra is found in her absence? What if "this" is her boycott.