we actually touched on this in my humanities class last semester.....there's a mythological story about a guy who pissed off a god, got turned into a woman, got turned back into a man at some point, and later on got called to settle this dispute since he had experienced it from both spectrums......he said it was more enjoyable as a woman, so the female god blinded him, while the male god gave him inner site (thus turning him into a prophet) because he felt bad.....if i'm not mistaken, that was the back story behind the blind prophet in oedipus the king
Tiresias was a prophet of
Apollo. According to the mythographic compendium
Bibliotheke,
[3] different stories were told of the cause of his blindness, the most direct being that he was simply blinded by the gods for revealing their secrets. An alternate story told by the poet
Pherecydes was followed in
Callimachus' poem "The Bathing of Pallas"; in it, Tiresias was blinded by
Athena after he stumbled onto her bathing naked.
[4] His mother, Chariclo, a nymph of Athena, begged Athena to undo her curse, but the goddess could not; instead, she cleaned his ears,
[3] giving him the ability to understand birdsong, thus the gift of
augury.
On
Mount Cyllene in the
Peloponnese,
[5] as Tiresias came upon a pair of copulating snakes, he hit the pair a smart blow with his stick.
Hera was not pleased, and she punished Tiresias by transforming him into a woman. As a woman, Tiresias became a priestess of Hera, married and had children, including
Manto, who also possessed the gift of prophecy. According to some versions of the tale, Lady Tiresias was a
prostitute of great renown. After seven years as a woman, Tiresias again found mating snakes; depending on the myth, either she made sure to leave the snakes alone this time, or, according to Hyginus, trampled on them. As a result, Tiresias was released from his sentence and permitted to regain his masculinity. This ancient story is recorded in lost lines of
Hesiod.
[6]
In a separate episode,
[7] Tiresias was drawn into an argument between Hera and her husband
Zeus on the theme of who has more pleasure in sex, as he had experienced both conditions: Was it the man, as Hera held firm; or, as Zeus claimed, the woman? Tiresias replied, "Of ten parts a man enjoys one only."
[8] Hera instantly struck him blind for his
impiety. Zeus could do nothing to stop her, but he did give Tiresias the gift of
foresight[9] and a lifespan of seven lives.
Stripped of its narrative, anecdotal and causal connections, the mythic figure of Tiresias combines several archaic elements: the blind seer; the impious interruption of a natural rite (whether of a bathing goddess or coupling
serpents); serpents and staff (
Caduceus); a holy man's double gender (
shaman); and competition between deities.
Tiresias's background, fully male and then fully female, was important, both for his prophecy and his experiences. Also, prophecy was a gift given only to the priests and priestesses. Therefore, Tiresias offered Zeus and Hera evidence and gained the gift of male and female priestly prophecy. How he obtained his information varied: sometimes, like the
oracles, he would receive visions; other times he would listen for the songs of birds, or ask for a description of visions and pictures appearing within the smoke of burnt offerings, and so interpret them.
Tiresias makes a dramatic appearance in the
Odyssey, book XI, in which Odysseus calls up the spirits of the dead (the
nekyia). "So sentient is Tiresias, even in death," observes Marina Warner "that he comes up to Odysseus and recognizes him and calls him by name before he has drunk the black blood of the sacrifice; even
Odysseus' own mother cannot accomplish this, but must drink deep before her ghost can see her son for himself."
[10]
As a seer, "Tiresias" was "a common title for soothsayers throughout Greek legendary history" (Graves 1960, 105.5). In
Greek literature, Tiresias's pronouncements are always
gnomic but never wrong. Often when his name is attached to a mythic prophecy, it is introduced simply to supply a personality to the generic example of a seer, not by any inherent connection of Tiresias with the myth: thus it is Tiresias who tells Amphytrion of Zeus and Alcmena and warns the mother of
Narcissus that the boy will thrive as long as he never
knows himself. This is his emblematic role in
tragedy (
see below). Like most
oracles, he is generally extremely reluctant to offer the whole of what he sees in his visions.
In
Hellenistic and Roman times Tiresias' sex-change was embroidered upon and expanded into seven episodes, with appropriate amours in each, probably written by the Alexandrian
Ptolemaeus Chennus, but attributed by
Eustathius to
Sostratus.
[11] Tiresias is presented as a complexly
liminal figure, with a foot in each of many oppositions, mediating between the gods and mankind, male and female, blind and seeing, present and future, and this world and the
Underworld.
[12]