Grove Koger

If you look up the meaning of “sphinx,” you’ll learn that (according to Britannica) it’s a “mythological creature with a lion’s body and a human head,” and that it’s “an important image in Egyptian and Greek art and legend.” Britannica adds that the Muses had taught the legendary “winged sphinx of Boeotian Thebes” a riddle, and that the creature, in turn, demanded to know of everyone it encountered, on pain of death, What creature begins four-footed, becomes two-footed, and ends up three-footed?

After who knows how many deaths, Oedipus provided the answer, and the sphinx killed herself.

Writing (with margarita Guerrero) in his 1967 Book of Imaginary Beings, the great Jorge Luis Borges noted that Greek historian Herodotus referred to the Egyptian sphinx as androsphinx (“man sphinx”), thus distinguishing it from the Greek sphinx, which is female. He adds that the Greek sphinx is in the form of a lion, with wings and a woman’s breasts. (For a time, I considered calling today’s post “Sexing the Sphinx.”)

Most sphinxes in Western art do seem to be feminine, although various features come and go if you look for visual representations, as I have recently. Nevertheless, they add up to a disquietingly bizarre creature that looks right. The parts really do seem to fit together.

The world’s most famous sphinx is undoubtedly the Great Sphinx of Giza in Egypt, which was created about four-and-a-half millennia ago by altering an enormous limestone outcropping. Egyptologists believe that it represents either the pharaoh Khufu (r. 26th century BCE), who built the Great Pyramid of Giza, or one of his sons, Djedefre or Khafre. It’s been the subject of numerous paintings, almost all of which pay tribute to its size and power. Elihu Vedder’s painting at the top of today’s post manages both of those aspects, while suggesting its mystery as well.

There are very few appearances of the sphinx in literature. As far as Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex goes, the creature’s encounter with Oedipus has already occurred before the play begins. More interesting to me, in any case, is an 1895 story by M(atthew) P(hipps) Shiel, “Huguenin’s Wife.” In this work, the narrator has traveled to the Greek island of Delos to meet his old friend Huguenin, who appears to have gone mad. The man had been married to a woman named Andromeda, a woman who had spoken of the “eternal mutations prepared for the spirit of man” and of the “limitations of animal forms in the actual world.” She had insisted, instead, “that the spirit of an extraordinary and original man, disembodied, should and must re-embody itself in a correspondingly extraordinary and original form.” And, she insists, “‘such forms do really exist on the earth, but the God, willing to save the race from frenzy, hides them from the eyes of common men.’”

Having struck his wife at the bizarre remark, Huguenin has inadvertently killed her, and yet something has taken her place, and Huguenin is certain that his own life is “intimately bound up with the life of the being he [has] stayed to maintain.” Then, finally, we see that being. “For if I say,” says our narrator, “that it was a cheetah—of very large size … its fat and boneless body swathed in a thick panoply of dark grey feathers, vermilion-tipped—with a similitude of miniature wings on its back—with a wide, vast, downward-sweeping tail like the tail of a bird of paradise,—how by such words can I image forth all the retching nausea, all the bottomless hate and fear, with which I looked?”

Has Huguenin’s wife become a sphinx? Or has she become something more like a griffin, that mythological creature with the body and tail of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle? Something between the two? It’s hard to say, but I think it fits well enough in our discussion. Shiel’s prose is as frenzied as Huguenin himself is, and it’s not to everyone’s taste, but it matches the many visual representations of sphinxes, several of which I’ve included in today’s post.

In Jean Cocteau’s 1934 play La Machine Infernale (The Infernal Machine), the Sphinx actually tells Oedipus the answer to the riddle before formally asking it. When Oedipus replies with the correct answer, she can then be allowed to die. In other words, she has chosen to commit suicide, an act that she has longed for. Cocteau’s vision of the sphinx is as rational as Shiel’s is irrational, and the two neatly bookend the range of what might be said about the creature.

Maggie and I have actually admired four statues of sphinxes in Palma de Majorca, although these are far more restrained than the painted representations I’ve run across. I believe that all of the latter qualify as symbolist works. Unlike realism, symbolism dealt with dreams and obsessions, and, based on the evidence that I’ve found, the movement was an ideal vehicle for representations of sphinxes.

And, by the way, the answer to the sphinx’s famous riddle is man, who crawls on four limbs as an infant, walks on two legs as a mature individual, and must use a cane or stick in his or her old age.

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