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Ajax the Great

BIBLIOGRAPHY 2

Metis in Greek thought goes beyond simply being the idea of cunning; it is a much broader idea encompassing everything from transformation of the self, to the power to change the metaphorical shape of oneself in order to fit the current environment and thrive in it.  It includes both the usage of deception for one’s own goals, deception itself, and the ability to conceive of deception.  It can symbolize both a plot and the aptitude of the plotter.  Interestingly it also appears to have a strong connection with weaving.  Interestingly, the words metis, cloth, and poetry all share the same verb ‘to weave’ or ‘to sew’ showing some interconnection.  The same can be seen in the divine personification of metis, Athena, who is the Goddess of weaving in addition to the daughter of the Titaness Metis.  So, does this mean that metis is a feminine concept? After all, weaving is traditionally a female art and both Metis and Athena are women.  Here we see the importance of the third shared object, poetry.  Unlike the previous two concepts, poetry is a male thing, with the Greek god Apollo being the god of poetry.  Just as poetry is masculine, metis also has the same possibility.  This might seem at first to be weak conjecture, but metis has even clearer cases of being androgynous.  The very Titaness who bares its name, Metis, is fooled into believing Zeus, who then consumes her in order to take her scheming and turn it in to his own.  Odysseus too is described as weaving metis beyond that that Athena weaves around him.  These are clearly very masculine men, Zeus being the ultimate stand-in for manhood, that have this idea of metis.  Metis itself is similar to its meaning, like a person who has it, the word can mold itself to take whatever shape it needs to, be it masculine or feminine, a noun or an adjective, whatever it needs to be it becomes.

  • Bracke, Evelien. Of Metis and Magic – Maynooth University. Sept. 2009, eprints.maynoothuniversity.ie/2255/1/e_bracke_thesis.pdf.

Metis is widely known to be cunning or scheming, but what if it were something greater?  Interestingly, two women known more for being witches than anything else, Circe and Medea, were originally more associated with metis instead, it was only later, around 500 BCE that they were instead associated with pure magic.  It may be that metis is not as mundane as it first appears.  The ancient Greeks had many words for magic, each with differences in connotation, could it be that at one-point metis was one of them?  While most magic in Greek mythology is of the physical kind, both these women specialized in mental manipulations, much as metis is understood to be the manipulation of others in order to achieve one’s own goals.  Metis, as it was originally understood in the archaic period had a certain aspect of ‘otherness,’ the people associated with it usually came from the periphery of society and could thus be dangerous.  Odysseus came from a small island, Metis was a titan, Circe was on an island.  As time went on, there was a literary drive to differentiate between bad metis, practiced by the likes of Circe, and the good metis of Athena and Odysseus.  This drove the wedge between metis and magic as metis became more mundane and less mystical and magic took over metis’s former role.  Though metis was originally strongly female, much like its name bearer, and ambiguous in whether it was good or evil, with time it became more masculine and good, with outsiders and dangerous individuals instead becoming associated with magic and robbing metis of its magical powers.  While we still see peaks of metis being greater than just street smarts in Odysseus and his ability to change his appearance, it is no longer the ever-changing shape shifting thing it once was and instead becomes a much simpler concept than it was perhaps originally intended to be.

  • Detienne, Marcel, and Jean Pierre. Vernant. Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society. University of Chicago Press, 1991.

The idea of metis took on a more and more negative connotation as history progressed, even with the division between magic and metis.  With the rise of thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle, who searched for absolute truths, metis took on the sinister connotation of falsehood.  These philosophers saw metis’s ability to bend the truth, to change the reality that people see, as a pernicious thing that stood in the face of their metaphysical system.  As opposed to the positive connotation that metis had taken on with the distinction between it and magic, it again gained the negative connotation it had avoided.  Metis changed with the times, as it should.  Metis is an amorphous term, it follows that since both the definition and usage of the word are hard to pin down, the connotation would behave in a similar way.  Interestingly metis’s changes go beyond this, with the move to disparage metis, to disparage wordsmithing and move towards more objective facts, overall damages the concept of intelligence.  We see that Athena is both the goddess most attuned to the idea of metis, and the goddess of intelligence; but as the views of metis dimmed, intelligence became separated from metis, it became the knowledge of facts and figures rather than the ability to convey and convince.  But this very change and the philosophical arguments over metis’s worth point towards its true nature.  Metis is not simple to wrap one’s mind around it is intelligence, but not knowledge, it is a form of street smarts that can be looked down upon in civilized society.  In early Greek society it held an important place for people living on the edge of survival and looking for every advantage they could scrounge up, but as time progressed and Greek society became more ‘civilized’ this primitive, survival-based intelligence lost its luster.  Because in its most basic form, that it was metis is; the ability to survive no matter what situation you are thrust in using your wits and your wits alone.  Manipulate whoever you must, trick whoever you can, and ensure that in the end you are the one who comes out victorious.

  • Fraser, Benjamin. “Why the Spatial Epistemology of the Videogame Matters: Mētis, Video Game Space and Interdisciplinary Theory.” Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds, vol. 3, no. 2, 2011, pp. 93–106.
  • Jacobs, Amber. “The Life of Metis: Cunning Maternal Interventions.” Birkbeck Institutional Research Online, Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck University, 1 Jan. 1970, eprints.bbk.ac.uk/6701/.
  • Rigoglioso, M. Virgin Mother Goddesses of Antiquity. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.