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Metis and Her Unborn Children: Notes on an Epistemology of the Gut
"Zeus lusted after Metis the Titaness, who turned into many shapes to escape him until she was caught and got with child. An oracle of Mother Earth declared that this would be a girl child and, if Metis conceived again, she would bear a son who was fated to depose Zeus just as Zeus had deposed his father Cronus and as Cronus had deposed Uranus. Therefore, having coaxed Metis to a couch with honeyed words Zeus suddenly opened his mouth and swallowed her, and that was the end of Metis, though he claimed afterward that she gave him counsel from inside his belly."(1)
Zeus, the victorious usurping son, triumphant patriarch, and overarching sky god at the dawn of Western civilization, swallows Metis, a Titaness. Yet another rapacious episode for Zeus, complete with the usual bizarre aftermath. What is it with this guy? Europa, Mnemosyne, Leda, Semele, etc. -- the list of seductions, coercions, and rapes is interminable, and the outcome is never good. These episodes in the history of the King of the Olympian Gods have been understood in a number of ways, most commonly as portrayals of historical conquests, in which the Greek God overcomes the patron Goddess of a people who have been conquered by the Greeks.(2) But Metis, first of Zeus's illicit conquests, is not the patroness of a vanquished state. She has a meaning of her own.
What exactly has Zeus swallowed? Metis is metis, a Greek word that is interpreted in a number of ways, ranging from the mundane to the more curious. Metis may be translated as counsel,(3) advice, or wisdom,(4) and in that guise seems unintimidating. But metis also means cunning intelligence,(5) Cunning, as in artful or sly, intelligence is not wisdom in its usual form. For one thing it is deceptive: "metis is both the strategy of deception...and the mental ability to devise (such a strategy)."(6) It was Metis the Titan who devised the cunning strategy that Zeus used to force his father Cronus to disgorge Zeus's siblings, Cronus's children, whom he had swallowed when they were babies. Metis concocted the emetic herself. Through her intervention vomit was transformed into a pantheon of Gods....