Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
With the exception of the Trojan Horse, the most honoured chapter from the works of Homer is that of the cyclops Polyphemus. The image of his terror, rage, and pain is one so powerful it has stayed afloat in the cultural cauldron for nigh on three millennia, retaining all of its graphic viscerality even for those of us with a prolonged exposure to the paprika-cavalcade of "action-distraction" that modern storytelling dragoons us into. As a child I was terrified of the creature, described to me as it was through the digital crackle of the, now unfortunately lost, audiobook casettetape we had in our house. The Greek myths are, of course, full of horrifying visions of monsters, many of which should by rights be scarier than a big man with one eye. But for me, which I think is supported by his cultural prominence, no chimaeric vulture-harlot nor seven-headed serpent could root "Deimos" so deep into my mind and into the collective psyche of a continent.
As well as his encounter with Odysseus in Homer (c.800BC) which I will assume you know for the purpose of this article (summary here), Polyphemus also makes an appearance in the poem by Philoxenus of Cythera (c.400BC) in a jealous romance with the nereid Galatea, in which he spies on the seanymph with her lover Acis while he is tending his flock. Falling in jealous love with her, he sneaks up to the couple as they lie together in a orchard and cracks poor Acis' skull open with a boulder, carrying Galatea back to his cave to be his wife. According to Ovid Acis' blood became a river, and his body becomes the "horned god of Sicily". The story is clearly from the more "romantic" era of Greek myths rather than the rustic archaic tale found in Homer (but which is reckoned to be incalculably older, there are in fact traces of a cyclops-like monster in all branches of Indoeuropean). The symbol of the cyclops as the monocular wildman as depicted in the Odyssey is his most powerful image, but I think the true totality of his fearsomeness is incomplete without other aspects of his nature, and of the nature of his narratives. These are, which I will go through in order: Polyphemus as a creature, Polyphemus as a human, Polyphemus as a demon, & Polyphemus as a person.
First is Polyphemus as a creature. The biology of the cyclops is surprisingly static for a mythical beast. While the shape of such creatures like "dragons" or "gnomes" are subject to a wide range of depictions, the Hellenic monsters were quite literally set in stone by the mastermasons of the Mediterranean and thus retain a quite unique uniformity in depiction across the ages. The cylops is human-shaped in all aspects with the glaring (excuse the pun) exception of his one big eye. There seem to be two variations on how the eye is portrayed: one is atop the nasal cavity, set across where a human eyes are (see fig 1); and the second is over the brow, positioned like the common depiction of a "third eye", with the hollows where the two normal eyes would be smoothed over with skin or sealed eyelids (see fig 2). It seems that the former is more common when depicting Polyphemus' encounter with Odysseus (most common in classical depictions), but the latter more common for his encounter with Galatea (most common in post-renaissance depictions). The second component of a cyclops' biology is its size, this ranges enormously (as is common with "giant" type monsters) from a modest 10ft up to the size of a mountain, with the median depiction putting Polyphemus at maybe 3 man-heights tall. But the physiognomic differences from us seem to finish there, which is strange for a humanoid monster. Most monsters of this type can be categorised as "chimaeric", that is, a mix of human and some other creature. The minotaur is half-bull-half-man, the mermaid is half-fish-half-woman; but the cyclops is just a warped man.
^Fig 1: The Blinding of Polyphemus in plaster (c.20AD)
^Fig 2: Cyclops bust of the Colosseum (c.80AD)
Second is Polyphemus as a human. Polyphemus is, despite his obvious optical deficiencies, very humanlike. From the scant information we gain from Homer (with supplements from Euripides), it seems there are several cyclops which live in a loose polity together on Cyclops-Island. The species seem to all be shepherds, with a special breed of huge sheep which they keep both for mutton and milk, with which they make cheese in the caves that litter their land. They also take those caves as their abodes, which is of course the source of Odysseus' predicament. Altogether cyclops society seems mundane and rather human, just scaled up a few times. But it is different, and it falls into what the modern psychologist may dub the "uncanny valley". Cyclopes aren't wild beasts or unintelligible aliens, they are semi-human, living like we do but... "wrong". They have the faculties of speech and trade, but prefer to live alone, only speaking with other cyclops when completely necessary in a self-imposed lonesomeness. They have all the faculties of intelligence but choose to live instead like an animal, in naked monotony without hobbies nor dreams nor ambitions. A sad reflection of humans stripped of the vitality and "normalness" which is so impossible to define but is required to be human. I had a little vision not-so-long-ago whilst wandering the hills of Tuscany of a cyclops. I imagined watching him from the hilltop as he pottered about his daily life, dully plodding from shady spot to shady spot minding his sheep; his entire life consisting just of napping, snacking, and staring thoughtlessly into the middle distance. Blending perfectly into the yellowed shrubbery, scattered rocks and blazing sun in a way we humans could never achieve: we don't "belong" in nature like that, no matter how hard we try we will always be in some way "apart", and so seeing a person at one with nature so effortlessly is downright eerie. Like the dark figure of a man blending in with the shadows, or a child staring off into the distance at nothing at all for slightly too long. We don't like it when a person merges with the environment, the separation of man and nature is vital for our sense of ease.
^Fig 3: A photo from my walk in the Tuscan hills, I imagine this is what the geography of Cyclops-Island is like.
Third is Polyphemus as a demon. These aforementioned "weirds" accumulate into an intense sense of unease yes, but let us not forget that Polyphemus is also a man-eater. He devours several of Odysseus' crew while he has them captive in his cave, and after he brutally murdered him he probably would have eaten Acis too if he hadn't been turned into a horned god (I still don't really understand what this means). Genealogically he is the son of the god Neptune and Thoosa (a nymph); other cyclopes of legend have differing parentage, but the throughline seems to be they are the "failed" sons of gods. It seems if there is some perversion to the normal method of divine procreation, instead of a new god being born a deformed monster is produced instead, much like their brothers the Hecatoncheires, or even the nephilim of the antediluvian Pentateuch. They are mistakes of creation, monstrosities begotten by sin whose bodies and minds are twisted into abominations. They are perversions against the good order of the world, and are therefore the enemies of it. When Odysseus is entrapped by Polyphemus he first tries to reason with him. After all, the cyclops have all the mental capacity of a human (or indeed a demigod), so why shouldn't it be reasoned with? But the monster ignores him, it hardly even recognises that he is talking to him. To an beast like Polyphemus without the "soul" of a human, he simply sees the men in his cave as new livestock: a snack for a rainy day. This total lack of empathy is the quality of an evil mind. A psychopathy so absolute that even when the Achaeans drive the stake into his eye, he lashes out at them as if they were wild dogs. Never pleading with them or striking a deal to let them go, but instead swatting at them in rage like we would a wasp who had just stung us. The other side to this is the vices we see from his encounter with Galatea. Within him are disturbingly human emotions. He lusts, he feels jealousy, he feels anger. Like a psychopath he stalks his sweetheart, unable to approach her and unable to talk to her. Just watching with that one enormous eye. Odilon Redon's famous artwork "Le Cyclope" shows this creeping voyeurism in disturbing lucidity. That one great eye leering over the hazy hilltops, both disgustingly bestial and somehow childlike. I think this mix is common in serial killers of the real world too; the emotions of a child but the lusts and strength of a man. He doesn't mean to do anything wrong, he doesn't know any better.
^Fig 4: Le Cyclope, Odilon Redon (c.1900).
This brings me onto number four: Polyphemus as a person, or more plainly speaking Polyphemus as a sympathetic character. I think this part of what makes Polyphemus so gnawingly disturbing is best shown in the scene where Odysseus, having escaped his entrapment, watches as the raging monster throws rocks towards him in vain as he sails away from the accursed island to safety. The pale skin wrinkled in the heat, the unkempt hair, the bloody wound in the centre of his face where his defining feature once was. For just a moment Homer has us to feel sorry for the man-eating murderer. As the figure gets smaller and the sense of danger passes, the diminishing blind beast wailing in anguish from a lifetime of unfulfilling boredom punctuated with moments of emotional and physical torment, pathetically throwing stones into the darkness as his fellow cyclopes ignore his screams for help becomes unbearably sad. A sadder personage I can imagine not. And the thing is that these sympathies are indeed, for the first time since meeting Polyphemus, deeply human. We too lose our drive, we are unfulfilled in life and unrequited in love. We blend into our surroundings, we disturb others, we fail to understand. But we can escape from these cycles, Polyphemus is a wretched creature who was born in moral poverty, born to be a monster without hope of salvation. And he doesn't even understand why it's all happened to him. Why did Galatea hate him after he killed Acis? Why did little Nemo lie to him and blind him so? Why did Neptune send him to live on this dusty island rather than with him on Olympus? That generational fear we have for Polyphemus is as much about him as an "other" as it is about him as "one of us". That slight shift from normalcy which pulls him into that uncanny valley, but not so far that we can feel at rest about categorising him as an "animal". We fear what is just outside our view far more than that which is along way off. Just imagine the untold story of what happens next. Polyphemus returns to his pastures, now in total darkness having been spurned by every person he has ever met, to nap and snack and sit in silence for an eternity in that valley with a niggle in his heart that he could have been something more and it all could have been different.
