Did Humans Dream of Winged Sphinxes; or, Vice Versa?

“Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”: this is the playful title of a Science Fiction novel, by the North American writer Philip K. Dick. First published in 1968, it inspired the successful film “Blade Runner” directed by Ridley Scott, in 1982. Paraphrasing such a provocative question, we might wonder: “Did humans dream of winged Sphinxes?”

Quite obviously, once upon a time they did. Just per absurdum though, because of their hybrid nature, even Sphinxes may have dreamt about human beings. Both of them could have dreamt of each other in a reciprocal, nearly specular way. Especially in this case, a production of the mind worked as a mirror of the mind itself. Some cultural feedback is sure, even if we can hardly know how much of such a mirroring is deformation or reflection: “Who of us is Oedipus here? Who the Sphinx? It is a rendezvous, it seems...” (Friedrich Nietzsche, in “Beyond Good and Evil: On the Prejudices of Philosophers”, 1886).

Flying through a mythic space, somehow a projection like that concurred to create what can return to visit our dreams or nightmares, from an archeological underground or underwater, as well as from a collective subconscious; from a remote past, as much as from an uncertain future. Above, on the left: ancient Greek bronze artifact (5th-4th cent. BCE); on the right: “The Dream of the Sphinx”, painted by the Russian Olga Zelinskaya in 2015. Although between these artworks there are far more than two thousand years, the represented archetype has not changed too much, except for a few details.

In antiquity, the myth of the hero Oedipus and the Theban Sphinx was narratively presupposed and consequently dramatized by the Athenian Sophocles, and – later – by the Latin Lucius Annaeus Seneca, respectively in their tragedies “Oedipus the King” and “Oedipus.” In English literatures, the figure of the Sphinx has been turned into verse by the American Ralph W. Emerson, the Irish Oscar Wilde and William B. Yeats...

In these cases, the main model sounds to have been the older – mostly male, and wingless – Egyptian Sphinx, rather than the “younger” – usually, female – Greek one. Instead, in the 1896 poem “Oedipus” translated and reported below, the Greek legend is summed up and interpreted in a modern manner by Constantine P. Cavafy. Above, an image of the painting “Oedipus and the Sphinx” by the French Symbolist Gustave Moreau, which is known to have been a source of inspiration for the Neo-Hellenic poet (detail: MET, New York; 1864).

?The Sphinx has fallen on him/ with her teeth and nails outstretched,/ and all the savagery of life./ Oedipus collapsed beneath her first assault,/ her first appearance terrifying him -/ he'd never dreamt of such a form or/ such a voice 'til then./ But though the monster rests/ her paws upon his chest,/ he quickly pulls himself together - and he/ isn't frightened any more, because he's got/ the answer ready, and will triumph./ Yet he takes no joy in victory./ His melancholy-laden gaze is not/ upon the Sphinx, but far away, upon/ the narrow road which leads to Thebes,/ and which will finish at Colonus./ And in his mind a clear foreboding/ that the Sphinx will speak to him again/ with riddles that are vaster, and more/ difficult, and answerless?: from “Artificial Flowers” (translation by P. J. King & A. Christofidou).

According to the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, actually the Sphinx is “the symbol of the symbolic itself”, within the various horizon of human cultures and civilization. In particular, “The works of Egyptian art in their mysterious symbolism are therefore riddles... As a symbol for this proper meaning of the Egyptian spirit we may mention the Sphinx. It is, as it were, the symbol of the symbolic itself... Out of the dull strength and power of the animal the human spirit tries to push itself forward, without coming to a perfect portrayal of its own freedom and animated shape, because it must still remain confused and associated with what is other than itself” (in Hegel’s “Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art”, 1835).

Nevertheless, there are differences between an Egyptian fashioned symbolism, and a Greek based reception. Mainly, the gaze of the former seems turned at an external world; that of the latter, inward the human psyche, after the precept “Know yourself.” For instance, let's compare the interpretations by Cavafy and by Emerson, in this 1841 poem: ?Uprose the merry Sphinx,/ And crouched no more in stone;/ She melted into purple cloud;/ She silvered in the moon;/ She spired into a yellow flame;/ She flowered in blossoms red;/ She flowed into a foaming wave;/ She stood Monadnoc's head.// Thorough a thousand voices/ Spoke the universal dame:/ “Who telleth one of my meanings/ Is master of all I am.”?

R. W. Emerson himself so commented his verse, in 1859: ?I have often been asked the meaning of “The Sphinx.” It is this: the perception of identity unites all things and explains one by another, and the most rare and strange is equally facile as the most common. But if the mind live only in particulars, and see only differences (wanting the power to see the whole – all in each), then the world addresses to this mind a question it cannot answer, and each new fact tears it in pieces, and it is vanquished by the distracting variety.?

However, his Romantic pantheism makes the author identify the Sphinx as an allegory of Nature itself: an enigmatic if not a riddling one, such as in the ancient Greek tradition. Above, 1863 painting by the American artist Elihu Vedder, “The Questioner of the Sphinx” (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). Although inspired by the Great Sphinx of Giza, in Egypt, the scene there depicted recalls the Hellenic myth of the Sphinx and Oedipus, as well.

“Half woman and half animal”, “The Sphinx” – protagonist of a1894 poem by Oscar Wilde – has no longer a lion body and a male head like the Sphinx of Giza. Nor does she look a “singing bitch” and a “winged maiden” at once, like that of the Greek Sophocles in his tragedy “Oedipus the King.” More familiarly, she resembles a “curious cat.” Nonetheless, she has not lost her archetypal hibridity or ambiguity at all. Nay, despite some erotic sensuality, she has assumed a sort of neurotic ambivalence. Not by chance, Wilde's verse is coeval with the dawn of Freudian psychoanalysis, where notoriously the symbolism of the Theban Sphinx and the so called “Oedipal conflict” both play a central role.

No doubt, Wilde's Sphinx is a reflection or splitting of personality of the author himself. If his long poem has a melancholy beginning, its conclusion grows even a rhetorical invective: “In a dim corner of my room/ For longer than my fancy thinks,/ A beautiful and silent Sphinx/ Has watched me through the shifting gloom. […] False Sphinx! False Sphinx! By reedy Styx,/ Old Charon, leaning on his oar,/ Waits for my coin. Go thou before/ And leave me to my crucifix,// Whose pallid burden, sick with pain,/ Watches the world with wearied eyes./ And weeps for every soul that dies,/ And weeps for every soul in vain.”

If we like to associate a work of art with the literary one by O. Wilde, we should focus on the morbid element, anyway. That is the case of the Symbolist paintings above: “The Kiss of the Sphinx”, by the German Franz von Stuck (Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest; 1895); and “The Sphinx, or the Caress”, by the Belgian Fernand Khnopff (detail, Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Brussels; 1896). Especially this partly exotic and cheetah-like Sphinx looks no longer an antagonist, like in the Greek legend, but rather in love with a young Oedipus: a fatal love. We cannot forget, as dramatized in “Oedipus the King” by Sophocles, the myth of the Theban Sphinx meant not only hybridity and ambiguity but even incestuosity. In the age of psychoanalysis, actually such was an interpretation privileged by Sigmund Freud.

Indeed, in the poetry of William B. Yeats the archetype of the Sphinx recurs either in the Egyptian or in the Hellenic version, in an almost syncretic way. The first modality appears in the 1919 poem “The Second Coming”: “When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi/ Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert/ A shape with lion body and the head of a man,/ A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,/ Is moving its slow thighs, while all around it/ Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds./ The darkness drops again; but now I know/ That twenty centuries of stony sleep/ Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,/ And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Apart from its problematic messianic context, what is evident here is that the projection of the Sphinx is perceived as an expression of the “Spiritus Mundi”, of an alleged spirit of the world, in an emblematic and enigmatic sense not so differing from how we have read it perceived by R. W. Emerson, even if the emphasis of the latter is put on Nature, whereas that of the former seems rather allusive to culture, and to its dialectic relation with nature.

In Yeats' “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes”, in 1919 as well, the Sphinx recovers some features typical of the Greek pattern: “On the grey rock of Cashel I suddenly saw/ A Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw,/ A Buddha, hand at rest,/ Hand lifted up that blest;// And right between these two a girl at play/ That, it may be, had danced her life away,/ For now being dead it seemed/ That she of dancing dreamed.// Although I saw it all in the mind’s eye/ There can be nothing solider till I die;/ I saw it by the moon’s light/ Now at its fifteenth night.// One lashed her tail; her eyes lit by the moon/ Gazed upon all things known, all things unknown,/ In triumph of intellect/ With motionless head erect.”

This poem shares with the verse by Oscar Wilde a surreal dimension, a dreamlike and visionary atmosphere, even though its visual angle and perspective are less private and individualistic; the effort to convert particular meanings into an universal, albeit vague, sense is stronger. Moreover, some affinity with contemporary, vanguard fine arts, may be easier to discern. For example, with Giorgio de Chirico's 1968 painting “Oedipus and the Sphinx” (Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico, Rome; see above, on the left); or, with Francis Bacon's lithograph “Oedipus and the Sphinx after Ingres” (1983-84; on the right).

This quick survey over modern poetical sources would be more incomplete than what it is, without mentioning another poet at least: the German Rainer M. Rilke. In the tenth of his 1923 “Duino Elegies”, his mystic but silent Sphinx is Egyptian fashioned and male gendered, “Twin-brother to that on the Nile, the lofty Sphinx” (transl. by A. E. Flemming). Yet, shortly at last, we had better return to classical tragedies, and these are Greek or Latin. Rather than in “Oedipus the King” by Sophocles, where the Sphinx is never named directly, it is in “Oedipus” by Seneca that she is referred to as a troubled reflection of human being.

In the “Oedipus”, he is so described by the character of Creon: “and to his own origin he returned and brought his mother impious progeny, and (a thing the beasts scarce do) himself begot brothers to himself – entanglement of evil, a monster more confused than his own Sphinx.” And, in Seneca's “Phoenissae” or “The Phoenician Women”, an old and blind Oedipus himself thus addresses his young daughter-sister Antigone: “If thou art my guide, thither would I go to die where on a high cliff the Sphinx once sat and wove crafty speech with her half-bestial lips. Guide my feet thither, there set thy father. Let not that dreadful seat be empty, but place thereon a greater monster. On that dark rock will I sit and propound the dark riddle of my fate which none may answer” (translations by F. J. Miller).

Above, on the left: meeting of Oedipus and the Sphinx, marble relief on a Greco-Roman sarcophagus (National Archaeological Museum, Athens); on the right, a 1909 photo of “Oedipus and Antigone, with the Sphinx”, modern sculpture by the Italian Stefano Zuech, presumably now lost. This is a rare example of artwork, reliably inspired by the afore-reported passage from Seneca's “Phoenissae”, or else by Sophocles' whole trilogy, including also “Oedipus at Colonus” and “Antigone”, where the long shadow of the Sphinx is cast anyhow. Below, two French pictorial masterworks, reflecting different interpretations, in a rationalistic or in some mystic sense: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, “Oedipus Explaining the Enigma of the Sphinx” (Louvre Museum, Paris; 1808-27); and Odilon Redon, “Mystical Knight: Oedipus and the Sphinx” (Museum of Fine Arts, Bordeaux; 1894).