Tisiphone is one of the Erinnyes (Furies) in ancient Greece, sister of Alecto and Megaera. Her purview was to punish murderers, including those who killed parents or siblings. But as Ovid tells the story (Metamorphosis 4), Tisiphone brings about murder at the behest of Juno/Hera. She drives king Athamas mad and causes him to kill his children. He sees his wife Ino and their children as a lioness and her cubs, and smashes his son’s head on a rock. Ino grabs her daughter, runs away to the top of a cliff, and jumps into the sea.
This is the base story, which was resurrected in medieval Europe during the revival of Greek and Roman literature, and remythologized according to western European witch archetypes. Here is the first image that I came across, which had no visible connection to Greco-Roman mythology, since everyone is dressed in 15th century French garb. Tisiphone is no longer a goddess, but a witch holding two winged dragons (mischievous and adorable). She is shown causing Athamas to slay his family (wife as well as both children, thus diverging from the ancient story).
The full article is available at The Suppressed Histories Archive.
Suppressed Histories Archive : The Suppressed Histories Archives uncovers the realities of women’s lives, internationally and across time, asking questions about patriarchy and slavery, conquest and aboriginality. About mother-right, female spheres of power, indigenous philosophies of spirit– and the historical chemistry of their repression. Even more important, their role in resisting oppression. A global perspective on women’s history offers fresh and diverse conceptions of women’s power, as well as of men and gender borders. It overturns stereotypes of race and class, and the structures of domination that enforce them. It digs under the usual story of lords and rulers, looking for hidden strands, and reweaves knowledge from the divided fields of history, archaeology, linguistics and folk tradition. So we cast a wide arc, looking for patterns and gaps and contradictions which, where vested power interests are at stake, are trigger points for controversy. Some of the flashpoints are women’s power; neolithic female figurines; gender-egalitarian mother-right cultures; patriarchy; witch-hunts; “heresies” such as goddess veneration or shamans; and the rise and fall of empires, including the doctrines of supremacy and inferiority that prop up all systems of domination.
“Valancy had lived spiritually in the Blue Castle ever since she could remember. She had been a very tiny child when she found herself possessed of it. Always, when she shut her eyes, she could see it plainly, with its turrets and banners on the pine-clad mountain height, wrapped in its faint, blue loveliness, against the sunset skies of a fair and unknown land. Everything wonderful and beautiful was in that castle. Jewels that queens might have worn; robes of moonlight and fire; couches of roses and gold; long flights of shallow marble steps, with great, white urns, and with slender, mist-clad maidens going up and down them; courts, marble-pillared, where shimmering fountains fell and nightingales sang among the myrtles; halls of mirrors that reflected only handsome knights and lovely women–herself the loveliest of all, for whose glance men died. All that supported her through the boredom of her days was the hope of going on a dream spree at night. Most, if not all, of the Stirlings would have died of horror if they had known half the things Valancy did in her Blue Castle.”- Lucy Maud Montgomery, The Blue Castle
