The Erinyes

Furious and Fearless Females in the Sagas

The Erinyes (Furies in English) are goddesses of vengeance in ancient Greek religion and mythology. Virgil, wrote of three: Alekto ("endless anger"), Megaera ("jealous rage"), and Tisiphone or Tilphousia ("vengeful destruction") in the Aeneid. Dante has the same three Erinyes in Canto IX of the Inferno they confront the poets at the gates of the city of Dis. 

The Ancient world had a place for furious and frightening women. There were shared sagas to channel the hells and horrors of feminine suffering, rage and revenge. The wrath of women is known in the pains and pages of history. It has been the reality of human experience since it was foretold in Eden. 

Genesis 3:14-15 “God told the serpent: “Because you’ve done this, you’re cursed, cursed beyond all cattle and wild animals, Cursed to slink on your belly and eat dirt all your life. I’m declaring war between you and the Woman, between your offspring and hers. He’ll wound your head, you’ll wound his heel.”

The Bible has numerous examples of righteous and wicked women who inspire and incite visceral emotions by their stories. Their words and actions are a witness to the highest pinnacles and deepest pits of humanity. 

Our movies today are struggling to tell these tales, some succeed and many don’t. It’s a complex skill to craft stories that tell the truth in the skin of a lie. Too often the “truth” is cultural prejudice or propaganda and fails to touch the fire of the human spirit because its artistic medium is bloated with overstuffed agendas. This has been true in all ages.

But when a true tale has been told it resonates with the heart and minds of its audience. It sets us aflame with wild wonder, cathartic encounters and meaningful messages. These bardic passages make us more alive to our own selves, others and the world we are traveling through and the one awaiting beyond. 

In the Bible warrior women are found in battlefront trenches and homefront tents. Its truth telling knows no boundaries in war. All of life is fight and fury from the smallest to the greatest activities of home or nation, soul or society. 

Chapter four of the book of Judges captures these different spheres of life all wrapped up in the battle between good and evil. 

Judges 4:4-5 “Now Deborah, a prophet, the wife of Lappidoth, was judging Israel at that time. She held court under the Palm of Deborah between Ramah and Bethel in the hill country of Ephraim, and the Israelites went up to her to have their disputes decided.” 

Judges 4:8 “Barak said to her, “If you go with me, I will go; but if you don’t go with me, I won’t go.” 

Judges 4:17, 21-22 “Sisera, meanwhile, fled on foot to the tent of Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, because there was an alliance between Jabin king of Hazor and the family of Heber the Kenite.” “But Jael, Heber’s wife, picked up a tent peg and a hammer and went quietly to him while he lay fast asleep, exhausted. She drove the peg through his temple into the ground, and he died. Just then Barak came by in pursuit of Sisera, and Jael went out to meet him. “Come,” she said, “I will show you the man you’re looking for.” So he went in with her, and there lay Sisera with the tent peg through his temple—dead.”

Women and men woven together in conflict, conquering and catastrophe. 

The actors on the stage shift moment to moment in the epic tragedies and comedies we are living and telling. The story fits when the truth is told rightly, but when it’s a lie stuffed in the skin of truth…we know. 

Our emptying theaters, churches, voting booths, schools and bedrooms reveal the reality. We were created to tell the truth and when there’s no truth there is no light, only darkness. If at the heart of our speaking there’s no complementary sense of being in a universe of chaotic order we will instinctively know it is not real. 

We won’t buy it no matter how much it costs to make it, who's been bought to push it or how many people try to cram it down our throats saying we must take it, read it, eat it, listen to it or believe it. It doesn’t matter if such voices shout or whisper at us from Hollywood, Washington or Wall Street, Constantinople, Rome or Geneva.

Tell us the truth in its raw, naked, bloody, brutal and beautiful form and we will not care if it’s Deborah, Sisera, Barak or Jael who are in the spotlight…just tell it to us straight.