The Lover's Path: Fortune - Danae and Zeus

Sophie-David

As if I don't already find the Wheel of Fortune a challenging enough card, in The Lover's Path Kris Waldherr has imaged Fortune as the story of Danae and Zeus. ;) This significant Major is also the key to the suit of Coins or Pentacles, which implies a strong connection between material prosperity, physical well-being and the vagaries of the Wheel.

There is a strong underlying current of feminist protest in this card. Afraid of her creative potential, Danae's father attempts to seal her from the world in the ultimate patriarchal harem, walling her within a bronze tower. Fear of the power of the dynamic feminine causes the King to isolate this danger within an impotent phallic projection.

And who is her "rescuer" but Zeus, the amoral King of a mysognistic pantheon of Greek reprobates? Renown as a serial rapist and murderer, this god was an apt mirror of a society based on wholesale slavery, tribal violence, masculine hegemony, and the oppression of women and children. Brutally controlled by one aspect of the static masculine, she is now purchased by another, "Danae is the girl, who in spite of being imprisoned, became pregnant with almighty god or, as some say, with almighty gold," as our mythological reference puts it so well. As it has been throughout much of recorded history, it would seem that Danae had precious little choice.

Unable to successfully wall off the fertility of the feminine, her father now consigns her to the sea, the ultimate symbol of feminine creativity. But in the context of the fear and contempt that rules her father, the sea seems an appropriate place to take out the garbage. Although Danae never seems to find an honouring and equal love match, if her creative work is represented in her son Perseus, this was successful within the violent and limited context of her times.

Looking at the card itself we see Danae fittingly imprisoned in luxury, impotently plucking at a lute-like instrument, her creativity safely insulated from where is might disturb dysfunctional masculine authority. Her patriarchy has cushioned her within fine furniture and pillows, sealing her in narrowly ornate walls away from the supposed dangers of a world which she might otherwise engage and transform. Her creativity lies dormant within, represented in the green fields of the background, carefully circumscribed by the golden arches of the phallus that confines her. She looks up, mesmerized by artificially inflated masculine power, about to be seduced by its emphemeral dazzle.

Cut off from her instinctual power, she seems a helpless innocent or puella, complicit to the attentions of the archetype of Zeus, himself the ultimate man-child or puer, who knows how to relate to the feminine only by materializing it, buying it as an object or simply seizing it, then physically, socially and sexually subjugating it. This is the symbolic union of two incomplete and unintegrated selves, vainly searching in the world for what will never complete or satisfy the dysfunction which lies within. Emerging following the violent suppression of the prehistoric partnership cultures, the curse of external and internal sexual imbalance continues to be a significant part of the inheritance of both genders.

As an expression of how circumstance and established social and economic structures can inexorably limit human potential - particularly female potential, as it still does throughout most of the planet - Fortune is an apt expression. It is an unfortunate truth that the world can be quite a negative Wheel. :)
 

Jaelle

Wow! This is an amazing analysis of Danae's myth. You actually offered me a new perspective on this card. I've had this deck for over a year but (i don't know why) only now i'm suddenly falling in love with it. I guess everything comes at the right time :) Thank you again for your words.
 

Cerulean

There's something about the playing of the lute

http://www.essentialvermeer.com/catalogue/woman_with_a_lute.html

I've been attracted to stories of women playing lutes. One thing I found in European tales is women who do play lutes for someone in a story usually does so almost right before the man falls in love with her. The man who plays a lute for a woman does so in a guise to 'tell' her of his love in a way that others do not hear.

I was thinking Danae managed to transcend her walls and send her beautiful voice and self out into the world with her music....

Music is powerful and alluring and seductive...and the association of the pear-shaped lute with love lyrics or romantic scenes...I've found it in a few Eastern-style art paintings and tales as well. There's almost an underlying musical score implied in such tales...

From one lute-mad lady...

Cerulean