Teiresias The She-Male Prophet

Teiresias is a man I “know” when I read the text of “Oedipus Rex”. He was known as a man who was blind physically but had a great spiritual or moral insight, as opposed to Oedipus in that particular text. At first I had absolutely no interest in knowing more in-depth about this man, since he was just a character in one of my must-read plays, until my lecturer had assigned us to do a research on him.

It was an eye-opening again after I had went through the introduction of plays earlier these days. I was amazed by Teiresias’s background and what he had been through. My knowledge in Greek history was all this while rather limited, until the research of Teiresias had made me gain more insight on Greek’s mythical world. The experience that Teiresias had gone through was incomparable to any other man in this world. Imagine a man that can experienced both sex in his lifetime, had children and had live for approximately seven generations, I could never had imagined that would ever happened in our time and space.

In the research of Teiresias, the thing that attracted my interest the most would definitely be the reason why he got blind and how he get his ability to foresee the future. There are quite a number of versions but the two most popular versions would be, either he got punished by the Goddess of Athena because he had accidentally saw her bathing naked, or Hera, the wife of Zeus, who had cursed him for answering honestly that women enjoyed ten times more than men in bed. I remained skeptical for the first theory and chose to applaud for the later; judging from the experience that Teiresias had went through as both men and women, and also the limited power of Athena as only the goddess of wisdom and war compared to Zeus as the King of all Gods to give him the ability to foresee.

Teiresias ability to foresee the future had casted some impacts on me. Firstly, never judge a book by its cover that although a man may be physically impaired but he may have some ability that is greater than any other normal beings in the society. Secondly, believe in the greater power of God as mankind has no strong grip on their own destiny where they can only decide on their own actions, but never their fates. Lastly, never be too confident on ourselves as we may not know what will happen next to our future; this moment we may be at the height, but the next thing that we may find out is that we are falling to the lowest point of our lives.

Thanks to Teiresias, I had become more interested to continue reading the text of “Oedipus Rex” and also gained greater knowledge on the mythical side of Greek history.