Incredible Prophecies, Sick Truths

Oedipal iterations, from Sophocles to Arundhati Roy.

By Ankhi MukherjeeFebruary 6, 2026

• History

• Literary Criticism

“I LEFT MY MOTHER not because I didn’t love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her,” Arundhati Roy writes in her wrenching, “heart-smashed” memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me (2025), published three years after the titular mother’s death. Roy is pacing around and fitfully circumscribing a singularly neglectful and abusive yet character-building relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, but in a general sense, these words could well describe the itinerary of separation and individuation we consider normal. While adolescents don’t necessarily stop seeing their mother at 18, as Roy did for a period of years, the legal age of majority is typically the time to leave the nest, break free, spread wings. Love, leave, then love again at arm’s length and not without some agency.

Sigmund Freud, speaking of (and as native informant for) the boy child, proposed that the Oedipus complex, that tragedy of not leaving the mother in order to love her hygienically, was as relevant to the modern audience as it would have been to an ancient Greek one: “[M]ore fortunate than [Oedipus], we have meanwhile succeeded, in so far as we have not become psychoneurotics, in detaching our sexual impulses from our mothers and in forgetting our jealousy of our fathers.” To not leave the mother might be “repugnant to morality,” he writes in The Interpretation of Dreams—the 1899 publication Freud deemed so epochal that it bears the date 1900 on its title page—but it is nevertheless a powerful primeval wish.

Sophocles’s retelling of the myth of Oedipus, about a queen of Thebes, Jocasta, unwittingly marrying her own son, turns time backward to the past, as if to underscore the protagonist’s lack of full maturation in a viable future. “Nearly every crucial event in the action has already happened,” making all action in the present retroactive, as Charles Segal observes. In Oedipus Tyrannus (as the play is known in the original Greek), Oedipus, the king of Thebes, tries to cure his land of plague—attributed by the Delphic Oracle to the killer of the previous king Laius—only to discover that he himself is that source of pollution. Not only has Oedipus killed his father unknowingly in an act of self-defense, but he has also married the widowed queen, his own mother. The tragedy hinges on the rigged game between preordained destiny and the obdurate human effort to subvert it: it is in trying to undo his prophesied fate of patricide and incest that Oedipus has brought it to fruition.

The Oedipus story, as it unfurls in Freudian theory, is a reaction to two “typical dreams” in the first stirrings of sexuality: dreams of sexual relations with the mother and dreams of the death of the father, which are associated with the former. The oneiric dimension is, of course, crucial for Freud, and he quotes Jocasta’s attempt to assuage Oedipus when he is feeling uneasy recollecting the oracle’s prophecy in Oedipus Tyrannus (in the Lewis Campbell translation of the play used in the standard edition volume of Interpretation of Dreams): “Many a man ere now in dreams hath lain / With her who bare him. He hath least annoy / Who with such omens troubleth not his mind.” Jocasta uses “dreams” and “omens” interchangeably here, conflating dredged-up material from the past with fearful premonitions of a future in the making. He has “least annoy,” she states matter-of-factly, who does not let such phenomena, occurring in the penumbra of the rational mind, impinge on daytime logic and actions. The Oedipus complex is hardly a conscious desire for the mother that is forcibly overcome by the “thou shalt not” of the incest taboo and endogamous marriage: according to Freud, it is “the child’s wishful phantasy,” which in the tragedy of Oedipus is realized in life instead of playing out “in a dream.” Appreciating the role of unconscious motive and primordial desire is key to correcting lay understandings of Freud’s use of the Oedipus myth, which find objectionable his reading of a spectacularly tragic instance of incest as a wholly natural wish to possess the mother. The wish is unconscious, a complex rather than a tendency, as Cynthia Chase points out. The repulsion one feels at the actualization of a scenario that had the ontic integrity of a fleeting dream in a developmental phase of childhood is the very “horror and self-punishment,” as Freud put it, with which desire is disciplined by law, preempted, or cured in Freud’s office. Eugene Mahon reminds us that Freud would write his magnum opus on dreams, highlighting the impact of the psychic reality of fantasy and dreams on physical reality, soon after his discovery of the Oedipus complex.

Freud wrote to his close friend, the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Fliess, about his discovery of the Oedipus complex on October 15, 1897, almost exactly a year after his father, Jacob Freud, died. In this letter, he talks about “being totally honest with oneself,” which, in this instance, revealed “being in love with my mother and jealous of my father.” It is indeed dubious that Freud presents a personal confession—“being totally honest”—as a universal event in early childhood, implicitly claiming that his self-analysis, a tortured process he commenced after his father’s death in October 1896, had thrown up blinding truths about the human condition at large. In the crucible of self-analysis and daily treatment of neurotics, Freud’s mourning for his father transforms, in The Interpretation of Dreams, into a complex of guilt, fear, and helpless raging that is given the syndromic name “Oedipus.” Psychoanalysis itself becomes an Oedipal quest.

As Chase demonstrates in “Oedipal Textuality,” Freud’s Oedipus complex draws specifically on Sophoclean tragedy, not just the “semantic content of the Oedipus legend.” Various iterations of that old myth, traceable to mentions in Theban epics from 740 BC onward, have in common the themes of patricide and incestuous marriage. However, Sophocles is the first author of the Oedipus myth to mention the plague, a pathetic fallacy where human misdeeds find a dark double in a violated nature. The plague in Athens in 430 BC may have clinched this association, but the metonymic proliferation of pollution in Oedipus Tyrannus points to both the novelty of the figure of the individual (tragic) hero and Sophocles’s sense of the gravity and civic responsibility the man would command in his polis and beyond. Oedipus moves us, Freud says, because the exemplary fate of this Adamic personage is “the fate of all of us,” the curse before our birth that directs the first sexual impulse toward the mother and the first murderous wish against the father. Sophocles had also made the riddle of the Sphinx central to the myth of Oedipus, a plot element Freud appropriates to frame his solving the riddles of dreams (including an actual dream of solving the riddle of the Sphinx that he mentions in a letter to Fliess).

To avert the prophesied outcome, Oedipus’ father, King Laius, had pierced the infant’s feet before dispatching him to die of exposure to the elements on Mount Cithaeron. In Sophocles’s retelling, Oedipus, “the swellfoot” (oidein, “to swell,” and pous, “foot”), his locomotion impaired from the start, is the solver of the riddle of the feet posed by the Sphinx. The predatory Sphinx’s question challenged young men to identify a creature on earth that was two-footed, four-footed, and three-footed, and which had one name and voice. The winner would be rewarded with a royal bride, the loser asphyxiated by the Sphinx in an erotic embrace. Oedipus’ answer is “Man.” He takes pride in being the first to solve this riddle of the stages or shapes of humankind, serial and ever-changing yet ultimately collapsed in the same embodiment: “[I]t was I that came, Oedipus who knew nothing, and put a stop to her; I hit the mark by native wit.” He knows, yet doesn’t know, that a mess of roles was, or was soon going to be, his own synchronic life. By accidentally killing his father on the road between Delphi and Thebes, he assumes the father’s onward journey and subsequently acquires his father’s kingdom and wife. “Indeed his name, in one possible etymology, suggests the meaning ‘Know Foot’ (oida, ‘I know,’ and pous, ‘foot’),” Segal writes, “that is, ‘He who knows the riddle of the feet.’” Oedipus is the one uniquely positioned to know what it is to be both, or several, self-canceling entities; the tragedy is that he doesn’t quite know how to “attend to what lay before our feet,” to quote Oedipus’ uncle Creon, the very thing the Sphinx’s “riddling song” had enjoined. As generations of critics have concluded, Oedipus is the answer to the riddle; he is verily the riddle, a sign without a referent.

“[T]he Greek myth seizes on a compulsion which everyone recognizes because he has felt traces of it in himself,” Freud wrote in his letter to Fliess (emphasis mine). Jacques Lacan decoded Freud’s Oedipus as a constellation, an organization of signs without referents, much like the “complex” Freud attached to the name. The significance of this complex is not in its literal, and therefore sexualized, meaning but in the way it locates the child in relation to carers, the socio-symbolic order, and what Lacan calls “the discourse of the Other.” The Oedipus complex situates the child in what Lacan terms an “Imaginary” relationship with the mother, an illusion of unrent physical attachment and narcissistic love, triangulating this dyad eventually with a “Symbolic” relationship with the father. The father’s law stands for incest prohibition and the child’s induction into language as citizen-subject, submitting to (sexual) difference by forsaking the comfort of the first Imaginary mirroring relationship with the mother or primary carer. Lacan thus moves the Oedipal emblem from a torturous scenario involving the use and outgrowing of the maternal body in the standoff between father and son, big and small packages. Shoshana Felman, in her reading of Lacan, implies that the triangularity ushered by the Oedipus complex is the curious triangularity of psychoanalytic dialogue itself, a scene of narration between two agents that involves three terms: the analyst’s unconscious, the analysand’s unconscious, and a third, the Other, which is transindividual yet not a sum of these parts. If Freud had seen the structure of psychoanalysis in the delays and deferrals of meaning in the Oedipal quest, Lacan pinpoints as Oedipal the unconscious Other, a site of misrecognition and repeated returns.

In this sense, Mother Mary Comes to Me seems Oedipal, despite the traditionally masculine-gendered rendition of Freud’s Oedipus story. A saga of predestination and baffled human agency, of history and its misapprehensions and misrecognitions, it is an Oedipal quest, the tireless analysis and self-analysis and eventual integration of the lost, mistaken, and deferred signatures of the subject. In a bruising encounter with her mother, when Arundhati Roy renews sporadic contact after the earlier leave-taking, her mother dismisses offhand the adult daughter’s relationship with her widowed lover, Pradip, and her shaky sense of belonging in the home she now shares with him, his parents, and his two young daughters. Roy recognizes in her mother’s churlishness a characteristic disavowal of “any kind of love between a man and a woman”:

I didn’t need my mother’s advice because my life with her (Get out of my house! Get out of my car!) had already taught me to live like a bird on a wire. […]

Government jobs, medical insurance, owning houses—these were the last things on my mind.

I was on an altogether different kind of hunt.

It is, Roy says, a “language-animal” that she is on the hunt for. She describes the writing of her 1997 novel The God of Small Things as this radical solitude in the midst of daily familial intensities and banalities, a longing to write alone and think alone in the home in Delhi she shares with Pradip. The hunter becomes the hunted in this interregnum: “Everything I had run away from came running back to me.” Roy describes this process of integration with her story in a tumult of metaphors: a germination, a gale-force wind rising, a disemboweling of the language-animal to drink its “inky blood.” As in Lacan’s rendition of the Oedipus complex in Seminar II (1954–55), it is not at all “recognizing something that would have already been there.” The Oedipal end is not a given, ready to be captured. “In naming it,” Lacan writes, “the subject creates, gives rise to something new, makes something new present in the world.”

¤

Speaking of inventing newness, “one of the hardest problems in approaching the Oedipus Tyrannus is trying to look at it freshly,” Segal writes by way of introducing his influential reinterpretation of the tragic heroism of the play. Classical Greek psychodrama in contemporary literary and theatrical adaptations displays a Beckettian “must go on”/“can’t go on” looping predicament. “[E]ven if you know the story, the point is you’ve watched it happen in real time,” Mark Strong says of Robert Icke’s Olivier-winning Oedipus (2024), in which he played the title role, trying to make sense of the endless fascination with the tragic unraveling of Oedipus. Strong captures well the desiring drive in restaging this crisis: not uncovering hidden information or imagining a different ending but feeding a compulsion to see the sequence of events unfold yet again. In regard to the enduring hold that Attic tragedy exerts on literary and cultural production, the term “canon” seems to be a performative contradiction: standard and universal in theory yet evolving, fluid, and dynamic in practice, as generations strive to keep it sharp, slick, and modern always. In the returns to and repetitions of Sophoclean tragedy, we are confronted with the enigma of a renewable canon, which exceeds both the obsession with canonicity and its opposite, the dismissal of the canon as an elite instrument of cultural consecration and prestige-building. This excess generates inconvenient questions: What, if any, is the pleasure principle of restaging a story with a foregone conclusion? Is it a pleasure principle at all or a death drive, this love of the dead? Finally, what claims to progress, modernity, and futurity might we articulate if, as these contemporary adaptations would have us believe, the structures and parameters of kinship, family dynamics, and love laws in a postcolonial, globalized world are answerable to Theban plays?

The subtitle of Alexander Zeldin’s 2024 play, The Other Place, is After Antigone. It revisits not just Sophocles’s Antigone but also Oedipus Tyrannus. Antigone had chosen death over the bridal chamber and the tomb over the home in the original, forsaking her heteronormative and generative future for a brother. By swapping brother for father in The Other Place, Zeldin plays on the devastating conflation of brother and father in the figure of Oedipus. Annie and her sister Issy reunite a year after their father’s suicide. The meeting place is the family home, which their uncle Chris has remodeled, seeking a fresh start for the accursed property where his brother hanged himself from a tree in the garden. Issy, who can’t afford London rents, is living there. Annie, having disappeared after the tragedy, has returned for the ash-scattering ceremony planned by Chris, except she doesn’t want her father’s ashes to be scattered—she wants them stored in the house—and clashes with her uncle over this issue. Annie secrets away the ashes in a ziplock bag, and Chris, forced to fake the scattering from the now-empty urn before a gathering of friends and family, is apoplectic. Kicked out of the house, Annie sets up her father’s old tent in the garden under the very trees Chris had intended to cut down. She puts on her father’s old clothes from a pile destined for the charity shop. A spot of incest between Annie and uncle is followed by another meaningless death just outside the sliding doors of a half-finished home-improvement project we now recognize for the ruins of domesticity it had always stood for.

Sophocles’s Antigone had represented forces that upset the natural order of things in the polis as well as the homestead. The daughter of Oedipus, she braves a death sentence to perform funerary rites for her brother Polynices, slain while attacking Thebes and denied a burial by its new king, her uncle Creon. The public grieving for her brother and, indirectly, her father, unsexes, estranges, and eventually kills her. Her desire is not for the law but for “unwritten and unchanging laws.” Lacan saw her flouting the limits of several registers: law, kinship, nomenclature. Hers, he said, is not a phallic desire, a response to man’s fascination with the “object a,” the missing object, but one that is beyond, positing Antigone as a creature of radical solitude. In Lacanian vocabulary, the untranslatable term “jouissance” is not enjoyment, libido, or lust. It is pleasure beyond pleasure, a level of pain even, as Lacan said in his 1966 lecture “Psychoanalysis and Medicine.” If, in Lacanian theory, desire is a lack, jouissance is a fullness, “a whole dimension of the organism” experienced when pleasure stops being pleasure. Judith Butler’s interpretation in Antigone’s Claim (2000) is Lacanian in the way it sees Antigone’s desire bursting forth, overtaking symbolic norms, expending itself in death. Butler locates in Antigone’s inordinate grief for Polynices the traces of her unspoken mourning for Eteocles, the other brother, and for the abject deaths of her parents, Oedipus and Jocasta. Both Lacan and Butler posit Antigone as a limit case: with Lacan, she is the frontier where the criminality of the law is exposed; for Butler, Antigone is the melancholic’s language at the very limits of speakability.

The anthropologist Veena Das sees Antigone’s suspension between two deaths—her brother’s and her own suicide—as reclaiming a death world in which “you must live again.” The crucial question posed by Antigone, according to Das, is “how you make such a space of destruction your own not through an ascent into transcendence but through a descent into the everyday.” This can be seen as well in Oedipus Tyrannus, when Oedipus implores the prophet Tiresias to deliver the city of Thebes from pollution, using the word “save” three times: “[S]ave yourself and the city, save me, and save us from all the pollution coming from the dead man.” Both Oedipus and Antigone defiantly respond to the violence of their moment by attempting, to quote Das again, “to inhabit the world, or inhabit it again, in a gesture of mourning.” “Save me,” Oedipus says lustily. The single day that finally destroys Oedipus is also the one that will give birth to his true identity: “This day shall be your parent and your destroyer,” says Tiresias. Immanence, not transcendence, is Oedipus’ and Sophocles’s stake in the game of chance and mischance that is tragic nativity and mortality.

What does it mean when Antigone says “I have to please / The dead far longer than I need to please / The living” in response to her sister Ismene’s sane advice that she not defy the king’s prerogative, decree, and law and thus invite ignominious death? Is the key to Antigone’s incommunicable suffering to be found in this disavowal of rest and companionship in life for chimeras of rest and companionship in a wished-for afterlife? While Antigone evokes sacred laws—the ancestral and common laws of Greece safeguarding relationships within the family and forbidding, among other things, disrespect to the dead—to justify her actions, even a contemporary audience of Greek tragedy might have judged her “reckless” and “hopeless.” The chorus seem certain that “none are so foolish as to long for death,” and proceed to call her stubborn and foolhardy. The role of Haemon, Antigone’s betrothed, who kills himself after her death, adds to the sum of suffering in this drama and raises further questions about Antigone’s allegiance to the living. There is no hint of romantic love between the pair. Antigone names Haemon just once in the play—“O my dear Haemon! How your father wrongs you!”—and even that line is attributed to Ismene in most manuscripts. Introverted and melancholic, Antigone does not know that Ismene did eventually intervene on her behalf, or that warm-blooded Haemon had overcome his submissiveness to lecture his father, Creon, on the civic virtues of dialogue, deliberation, and amenability. It is Creon who comes closest to understanding Antigone’s love of the dead and concomitant choice of a buried life. When he consigns her to a subterranean cave as punishment for her transgression, imprisoning but not killing her outright, he says, “she may live / Or die, as she may choose” in this new home, which, like her old home, is a tomb. Like Annie, Antigone has given her life already to the service of the dead.

Sophocles’s Antigone names her father’s unconscious sin as “the source of all my anguish,” a grudging statement that casts doubt on what had seemed, at first, an unhealthy attachment to her natal family and legacy. A daughter paying for the sins of her father or a daughter irreparably damaged by a kind of genetic inheritance? “The daughter shows her father’s temper,” the Chorus sighs. In a play with scattered references to the wasting sickness of the plague, Antigone’s individual predicament—her vulnerability as well as culpability—is scrutinized in the frame of collective or inherited contamination. She ponders the harsh fate that befell the race of Labdacus, the paternal grandfather of Oedipus, reaching its apogee of “blind madness” in the marriage of her parents. The apostrophe that follows could refer to Oedipus or Polynices, and presents Antigone’s own life as pre-scripted by fateful necessity: “O brother, through an evil marriage you were slain; and I / Live—but your dead hand destroys me.”

In Ella Hickson’s Oedipus, an adaptation of Sophocles’s version of the tragedy, staged in 2025 at the Old Vic in London, the plague blighting Thebes is a devastating drought. “People need to struggle with nuance and difficulty,” maintains Oedipus, played by an increasingly automaton-like Rami Malek, but he is nevertheless coerced to find the definitive cause of the climate event, which, according to the Oracle, is to be uncovered only by solving the murder of the previous king, Laius. If Rosanna Vize’s set design in The Other Place had framed Greek tragedy as an unspectacular yet charged kitchen-sink drama, Oedipus, co-directed by Matthew Warchus and the choreographer Hofesh Shechter, is all Sturm und Drang, with dust storms, swelteringly hot suns, delirious chants, and a hysterical mass of dancers. “They’re mosh pit ecstatics—hands raised in plea or pleasure, lolloping, squirming. They scrabble, shuffle or form a serpentine scrawl of bodies,” David Jays wrote with bemusement in his Guardian review. What is gained in this translation by Hickson is Jocasta, played by Indira Varma, relentlessly rational, fiery, and passionate in stark contrast to Malek’s benumbed and muddled characterization. Here she is standing up to blind faith and accreted superstition, inseparable from the rigid figure of patriarchy that is her cassocked brother Creon, and to the idea of divinely ordained fate that staggers and defeats all human agency in the play. The other constituent in the Oedipus complex is finally given some emotional depth, rage, and defiance even in her preordained defeat.

“It is best to live anyhow, as one may: do not be afraid of marriage with your mother! Many have lain with their mothers in dreams too.” Again, this is Jocasta (or Iocaste, in the Hugh Lloyd-Jones translation used here), speaking those words quoted by Freud. She reprimands Oedipus when, even after learning that his “father” Polybus has died, he still frets over the other part of the terrible prophecy that had unseated him from Corinth, namely intercourse with his mother following patricide. “It is he to whom such things are nothing who puts up with life the best,” says Iocaste. The repeated shock of Oedipus Tyrannus, that tragedy of hapless unknowing and unseeing, for this reader at least, is that the mother who sends the child away, the very mother who’d had the son’s feet yoked or pierced, may have seen and known before she could admit it to herself that the foreigner with scarred feet was none other than her son. She stands in dead silence as the messenger from Corinth, bearing news of Oedipus’ adoptive father Polybus’ death, engages in the verbal exchange with Oedipus that goes snaking back to the child found in the wooded glens of Cithaeron. “Let these words go for nothing and not be remembered,” Iocaste cries out. Remembered, she says, not heeded. What good would it be to remember old history and old oracles? “I beg you, do not search this out, if you care for your own life!” Self-knowledge would spell nothing but doom, she implies, desperately trying to stem the tide of unease, disease, and “anguish.”

¤

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud describes a dream he had the night before his father’s funeral. In the dream, a poster or placard appears with the following printed notice: “You are requested to close the eyes” or “You are requested to close an eye.” Close the eye(s)? Wink? Freud sees in this message two versions and meanings of the dream, refusing to be unified or reconciled. (In a letter to Fliess dated April 28, 1897, Freud describes the dream in greater detail though he states that it had occurred the night after the funeral.) Freud had chosen a simple ritual for the funeral in accordance with his father’s wishes, something he suspected members of the family found too puritanical. In the dream described in the letter to Fliess, the relatives were additionally offended because Freud had arrived late to the ceremony. You must perform the rites of closing the eyes of the dead, one version implies; you, the son, are requested to overlook the simplest possible ritual for the funeral for the father, says the other. “You are requested to close the eyes,” in the moment of movement from one textual dream to another, implies yet another irreconcilable meaning: you are requested to self-blind. “For why did I have to see, when there was nothing I could see with pleasure?” Oedipus asks, his life of sighted unknowing violently exchanged for a blindness livid with knowledge.

In a different dream composite documented in Interpretation, an elderly gentleman, blind in one eye, is “micturating” in front of the adult Sigmund Freud. In the dream, Freud hands him a glass urinal: “So I was a sick-nurse and had to give him the urinal because he was blind.” It was as if, in the dream, Freud was overseeing a neat role reversal from a childhood episode, where he had “obeyed the calls of nature” in the parental bedroom, to be met with his father’s overly harsh reproach: “The boy will come to nothing.” In the dream, Freud was helping and succoring the elderly gentleman, very much like his dying father, blind in one eye from his unilateral glaucoma. He was also relishing the role reversal: “I was making fun of him; I had to hand him the urinal because he was blind, and I revelled in allusions to my discoveries in connection with the theory of hysteria, of which I felt so proud,” Freud writes. “You are requested to close an eye” perhaps also effects the necessary neutralizing of the father—Odin, the father-god, Freud reminds us in a footnote to the interpretation of this dream, is one-eyed—a salutary interchanging of roles with Oedipus, the father/son, in favor of the healthy reversal of roles between puissant father and powerless, bed-wetting son. “Do we have to kill our own mothers to exorcize this horror that lives inside us?” Arundhati Roy writes in Mother Mary. “Maybe she had always known that I would be the one to kill her,” she adds, skewing our perception of perpetrator and victim in this family saga. The death of the mother from natural causes lets the author have her cake and eat it too, much like the grief-stricken Freud. The parent finally died of what Roy calls the “twisted, matted anger” one had long harbored against them, except they also clearly didn’t die of that.

Freud called the Oedipus complex “the nuclear complex of every neurosis,” the ill-starred begetting of ill-starred begettings. It was a vital component of his self-analysis in the aftermath of his father’s death even though Sophocles’s luckless Oedipus is innocent of both a patricidal and an incestuous tendency. He is a tragic hero without a tragic flaw. As Cynthia Chase aptly observes, “Sophocles’ play portrays Oedipus as the one person in history without an Oedipus complex in the conventional sense: he has murdered his father and married his mother in an appreciation of expediency rather than in satisfaction of a desire.” Unlike Roy, whose toxic relationship is sublimated in the search for a shibboleth or vocation that is neither inherited nor imbibed but auto-generated in privation and pain, Oedipus is left babbling “unholy words” in his mother tongue, begging to be released from the house under a curse that is his own. The name Oedipus, “Swellfoot” or “Knowfoot,” is a found object, like the foundling in swaddling clothes, not a moniker given by a mother or a father to shape the son’s destiny but merely a banal descriptor of his disability (or special ability). Parents traumatize the feet as they cast him away; the Sphinx tries to further constrict and strangle the unwanted life. Yet the myth drags on. This text is the plague we turn to generation after generation for incredible prophecies that yield sick truths.

¤

Featured image: Frontispiece to Volume One of Oedipus Aegyptiacus, 1652, is in the public domain.