metamorphosis

metamorphosis is a feature of myth, whereby social, cultural, and species boundaries that are usually fixed are able to become flexible. In particular, it refers to the process of changing bodily shape, sometimes permanently, but more commonly as a temporary shift by a god, another divine being, or someone using magical powers. For instance, in Hindu myth, Ganesha acquired his elephant head after being decapitated by his father Shiva and therefore needing a replacement. In many cultures, divine figures share human and animal attributes; for example, the Celtic horse goddess Epona and the horned god Cernunnos.

Stories of such transformations were very popular in the Hellensitic period; several authors are known to have complied collections of them, although all such collections are now lost, with the exception of some excerpts which have survived under the name of a writer of the early Roman empire, Antoninus Liberalis. However, the Roman poet Ovid collected about 250 transformation stories, which survive as the Metamorphoses. In Apuleius' book of the same title, more commonly known as the Golden Ass, the hero Lucius tries to uncover the secrets of witchcraft but is transformed into an ass. After a series of adventures, he is restored to human form by the goddess lsis. In all these stories the theme of metamorphosis is used to question the established boundaries between human and beast, god and mortal, animate and inanimate, thus becoming a way of exploring the limits of what humanity can do.

The following accounts of metamorphosis are best known from Ovid, and are also common in Renaissance as well as classical art. Daphne was a river nymph who was chased by the god Apollo; she asked her mother, the earth goddess, to change her form, and became a laurel tree, thus escaping the god's advances. Callisto was a princess or a nymph, who was seduced by Zeus. In some versions of her myth, she was transformed into a bear so that this could take place, but in others her metamorphosis is a punishment for her pregnancy, and she gives birth to a human son while she is a still a bear. Her son later kills her by mistake when hunting. In a particularly violent myth of transformation, Tereus leaves his wife Procne and rapes her sister, Philomela, telling Philomela that her sister is dead. To ensure Philomela's silence, he cuts out her tongue. Philomela discovers the truth and sends her sister a message woven into a tapestry; Procne then kills her son by Tereus and serves his flesh to his father. When Tereus pursues the sisters threatening to murder them, they ask the gods for help; all three are transformed into birds, Tereus becoming a hoopoe, Philomela a nightingale, and Pronce a swallow. The order of the last two is reversed by some ancient writers, because an alternative version has Procne as the victim of Tereus' silencing, and the bird forms are significant; the hoopoe, being a crested bird, is ‘royal’, while whichever sister loses her tongue must be the one who becomes the bird with the power of song who, in the words of T. S. Eliot, ‘Filled all the desert with inviolable voice’ (The Waste Land).

In all these stories, violent attempts to transgress the boundaries of the female body by rape act as the catalyst for the dissolution of the boundaries between humans and the rest of the natural world. It is, however, not only women who are the subjects of metamorphosis in a sexual context. A myth concerned with the preservation of the boundary between gods and mortals tells how, when the hunter Actaeon accidentally came upon the goddess Artemis bathing, she turned him into a stag and he was then torn apart by his own hunting dogs. In some artistic representations of his metamorphosis, seen as a particularly cruel one because he did not intend to disturb the virgin goddess, the still-human Actaeon is shown in the process of sprouting horns. Some versions of the myth take his violation of Artemis' chosen isolation further by suggesting that he wanted to marry her. In a further story of metamorphosis in the context of sexual transgression, the mortals Atalanta and Melanion make love in the sanctuary of a god, and are then punished by being turned into lions.

As well as the human/animal boundary, that between male and female is also vulnerable; in classical myth, Caenis was a girl who was loved by the god Poseidon, who changed her into the boy Caenus at her request as a gift. Myths that describe transgression do not, however, serve to sanction it in real life. The Oedipus myth, with its central character unwittingly killing his father, then marrying his mother, only to blind himself when the truth comes out, acts as a warning of what can happen if social boundaries are crossed. The fact that Oedipus puts out his own eyes when he ‘sees’ the truth is only one example of the connection in ancient myth between physical blindness and moral vision; other expressions of this are the tradition that the poet Homer was blind, and the myths of the blind seer Teiresias.

In Greek mythology, several gods had the power to change shape. For example, Dionysos was able to do this, while when the deities Poseidon and Demeter slept together they took the respective forms of a stallion and a mare. But most frequently it was the supreme god, Zeus, who used metamorphosis in the course of finding ways of disguising himself when seducing mortal women; he took Leda in the form of a swan, Europa in the form of a bull, and Danae in the form of a shower of gold. As well as confusing the objects of his sexual interest, Zeus' power of metamorphosis was supposed to protect them. One of Zeus' mortal lovers, Semele, was tricked by Zeus' jealous wife Hera into testing him by demanding that he should appear to her in his true shape; this immediately killed her, since Zeus appeared as a thunderbolt.

Some mortals have also been thought to possess the power to change shape by witchcraft or by other methods, sometimes deliberately, sometimes against their will.

Helen King

See also Greeks; mythology and the body; werewolves; witchcraft.