The Myth of Theseus (Part V): The Wrestling King
The Art and Necessity of Embodiment
Greetings, Dear Reader,
Thank you so much for taking a moment to look at what I’ve been working on. This offering is a slightly revised and expanded transcript of Episode 7 of The Inward Sea podcast. It’s longer than my usual fare (it has more pictures, too).
If you’re reading this because it’s landed in your email inbox, please be aware that you’re probably not going to be able to see it all. For the best possible experience, open this message in your browser, and if you’ve got a Substack account, you can even click a little play button at the top of the article and have it read to you!
Although I’ve presented this topic a number of times over the years, collecting my scattered notes into a single piece has been both challenging and deeply rewarding. What with this being January and all—how are you doing with your New Year’s resolutions?—I hope you will get as much out of this piece as I got in making it.
As always, I’d love to hear from you—whether it’s about this post, a story that springs to mind as you read through it, or anything else! Please feel free to drop me a line any time.
If you have arrived here looking for the text version of the reflection prompts for this instalment, you’ll find them here (if you’re on mobile, you may have to scroll. These links don’t seem to work for phones or tablets).
Okay. Enough chit-chat. Let’s get on with the show!
Click this image to listen to the episode on Spotify
You can also listen to the audio version of this post on YouTube by pressing play on the video and continuing to read on Substack (though, there are a few differences)
Opening
Most of us can name the things we want to change—the parts of life that just… don’t feel right.
Maybe we want to the change the way we relate to food or money. Maybe it’s the way we keep showing up in relationships. Maybe it’s the promises we keep breaking to our own souls: the skill, the hobby, the creative life we keep pushing to the edge of the map as other “more important” things crowd our days.
Naming what we want to change is easy. Starting feels heroic.
But a few days—or a few weeks—later, life collects its usual debts. Time shrinks. Energy thins out and willpower goes with it. And the rulers of the old order—the habits and behaviours we tried to depose—show up again.
Maybe you’ve met them. They arrive with the pressure of a world that doesn’t know—or care—who you’re trying to become.
“You can try to change,” they say. “But you’ll still do what you’ve always done. You’ll still be what you’ve always been.” Maybe you’ve heard their voices before. Maybe you can hear them now.
On the road to Athens (Αθηνά), Theseus reaches Eleusis (Ελευσίνα). There, he meets a cruel king who rules through custom—through “how things are done.” This is no ambush. It’s a public test from a reigning pattern that refuses to step aside.
And the stakes—for Theseus, and for us—could not be higher.
Theseus isn’t alone in this struggle. Three other stories—of Gilgamesh, Jacob, and Herakles—show us the same structure from different angles. Together, they teach us two things:
First: you don’t win this kind of fight by trying to shove the opponent down and away. And second: the path of initiation is not completed just because someone offers you a crown.
Acorn Theory: an Introduction
Before we move on, I want to share one idea I’ll return to later—after Theseus’ encounter in Eleusis—when a victory could easily become a premature ending.
In his book, The Soul’s Code, James Hillman introduces what he calls the Acorn Theory. The image is simple: an acorn doesn’t contain a vague “potential.” It carries a pattern. It carries a blueprint—an image—of an oak. Plant it, and it won’t grow into just anything. It grows in a particular direction, with a particular shape.
Hillman suggests something like this lives in us too. Each of us carries an image—whether we can name it or not—of what we’re here to become. Sometimes we sense that shape early. Sometimes we recognise it only in hindsight. Sometimes other people see it in us before we do.
Hillman also insists this isn’t some modern invention. He places it in a much older stream of human imagination—and he’s blunt about what we’ve lost:
The concept of this individualised soul-image has a long, complicated history; its appearance in cultures is diverse and widespread and the names for it are legion. Only our contemporary psychology and psychiatry omit it from their textbooks. The study and therapy of the psyche in our society ignore this factor, which other cultures regard as the kernel of character and the repository of individual fate.(Hillman, The Soul’s Code, 2017 ed., Ch. 1)
Plato had an older word for this: the daimon (δαίμων)—an intermediary presence between the human and the divine. Not a “demon” in the modern sense. More like a guiding force you feel as a pull, a calling, a pressure toward the life that’s actually yours. This calling can be delayed, but it doesn’t disappear. When we ignore it for too long, it returns as symptoms—or as a dull sense that life has lost its meaning. “This image,” Hillman notes, “does not tolerate too much straying.”
While Hillman calls it the acorn, other Jungians could call it the Self—with a capital S. Religious language might call it God, or the Holy Spirit. We’re not debating philosophical vocabulary or theology here. I’m pointing out that different cultures keep returning us to the same shared experience. All these words are our efforts to name it. Hillman puts it like this:
These many words and names do not tell us what ‘it’ is, but they do confirm that it is. They also point to its mysteriousness. We cannot know what exactly we are referring to because its nature remains shadowy, revealing itself mainly in hints, intuitions, whispers, and the sudden urges and oddities that disturb your life and that we continue to call symptoms. (Hillman, 2017 ed., Ch. 1)
Whatever name you give it, the key idea for today’s discussion is this: not every win is aligned with the growth and shape of our own acorn. Some “successes” arrive like offers—clean, official, even deserved—and they still pull you off-course.
In Eleusis, Theseus is about to win something that looks like a perfect ending: a crown. But is that crown—deserved though it may be—aligned with the shape of his acorn, the inner impulse that sent him out from Troezen in the first place? And what does that mean for you and I?
Theseus’ Acorn and the Path of Growth
I love time-lapse videos of plants growing. They always show the same strange fact: before a seed reaches for the light, it commits to the dark. It has to grow down before it can grow up.
And that’s also the shape of Theseus’ road.
Zoom out and his journey runs from the “little city of Troezen”1 toward Athens—the centre of power, recognition, and public life in ancient Greece. This follows the same pattern we see in those time-lapse videos.
First comes the descent: the under-road of growth, where what’s hidden has to be met. Periphetes, Sínis, and the Crommyonian Sow are illustrations of what it means to honestly face the limiting beliefs, fears, and raw appetite within ourselves, and then to hold that tension—the tension of seeing ourselves honestly rather than in an overly flattering or overly condemning light.
NOTE: If you missed these pieces, you can check them out below, for free!
Periphetes:
Sínis & The Crommyonian Sow
Before we are able to make positive changes in our lives, we need to confront the things that need changing. Sometimes they are small things, and sometimes they are much bigger. Sometimes they are cyclopean thugs armed with divinely wrought bronze clubs. But having the courage to face them, acknowledge their presence within and as part of ourselves is how we begin temper their energy and redirect them, thus allowing them to become tools that benefit rather than harm us or our communities. This is a largely inwardly oriented process.2
In other stories, this initial part of the journey—the descending arc—is depicted as the hero’s descent into a cave where they face a dragon or some mortal danger, and win a treasure.
But, for a treasure won in the darkness of a cave to be of any worth, it must be brought out into the light. And a seed cannot stay underground forever.
After meeting the Crommyonian Sow, Theseus’ road turns upward. And this is the beginning of the ascent arc—of growing upwards. It is on this next leg of the journey that the depth and grounding achieved in the previous one become visible.
The forces that seem to oppose Theseus (and us) appearing on this arc change, too. Here, these threshold guardians wear the faces of authority figures and the struggle becomes social, public even, and involves action.
In Theseus’ story, Skíron marks that turn. His test is a social ritual, a demand for deference—the old authority asking you to kneel. But we encounter him outside the city. He may have the reputation of being a ruler, but he is still a force we encounter in the privacy of our own intimate meeting with the unconscious.
He is the test of whether we are really able to hold the tension between the unconscious energy of the insights we gain, or whether we will over-identify with them, become inflated. In the previous instalment, we spoke about that process in detail:
After publishing it I found a meme somebody3 shared on Substack that I find hillarious. It gives, in my opinion, a fantastic depiction of ego inflation and how it leads to dissolution—that is, more unconsciousness—rather than an expansion of conscious awareness and thus, growth. Put it in a textbook!
But, onward!
The next challenge Theseus faces doesn’t appear in the wilderness. It isn’t a beast or villain waiting to leap out from a ditch and ambush our hero. He is a king, sitting enthroned at the center of Eleusis.
This part of the myth tests Theseus—and us—twice. The first is obvious. The second is harder to spot—but it can end our journey just as surely. And that is where understanding the image of the acorn really matters.
So, with all that out of the way, we’re off to catch up with Theseus in the ancient city of Eleusis, where Demeter (Δήμητρα) is revered. In English, we know her as Demeter—Goddess of the ripened grain.
It’s a place of thresholds. A place of rites. A place where you bring an offering to Δήμητρα Μεγάλα Θεά—Demeter the Great Goddess—and receive her blessing. And that offering is not a bull, or a crown.
It’s a piglet.
A small, squealing, bristling scrap of appetite—the Crommyonian Sow, in miniature—an image that holds incredible symbolic weight. It is as if, in this place, the innocent offspring of that wild misaligned energy of the Sow is reunited with the image of the Great Mother archetype4. Here, in Eleusis, the bestial nature of instinct is redeemed.
Theseus’ confrontation with Cercyon is about to show us how that might happen in our own lives.
So—without further ado—let’s step into the story.
The Myth: The Wrestling King
Theseus followed the road from Mégara, away from the salt-spray and the vertical drop of cliffs, until he reached the fertile, heavy silence of the Thriasian Plain. In the late afternoon light, the world felt different. The Grey Road of the Isthmus had been a place of blurred edges and shifting meaning—but as he descended the jagged line of the mountain path, he saw grey walls ahead: ancient, immovable, certain. This, he knew, was the earthly home of the Great Goddess Demeter (Δήμητρα). This was Eleusis (Ελευσίνα).
Inside these walls, the air didn’t move with the freedom of the coast. It was thick with the smells of cooking fires and human life—the stagnant weight of a city that had forgotten how to exhale.
He threaded through narrow streets—stalls, awnings, smoke-blackened doorways. A vendor’s shout died mid-syllable. Another voice lowered. Eyes met his, held for a heartbeat, then turned away. He’d never walked these lanes, but he knew the story of this place: where the Great Goddess came grieving, searching for her daughter taken by the Underworld. And now the city rehearsed that old motion. A woman yanked her child close. A young man turned away, suddenly more interested in the nearby stone wall that in whatever he’d been doing. With each step, a fissure of silence opened in front of him. As he passed, it sealed behind him—bodies and sounds closing over the gap, settling back into their old rhythm, as though nothing had happened. He’d never walked these lanes—but Theseus didn’t need directions. The city itself provided them. He followed.
The lanes widened and delivered him into a town square washed in late light. At its centre was a ring of hard earth—packed smooth by a thousand impacts. The place didn’t look like a market anymore. It looked like a court.
A man waited on the far side of the circle. He sat so still, so heavy in himself, that for a moment Theseus mistook him for one of the temple statues—until the figure shifted. Of course, it had to be a man. Statues didn’t move.
He seemed too large for the city scene: shoulders like quarried stone, a neck like a tree stump. Forearms thick as old roots, hands as wide and rough as river-rock. This, Theseus knew, was Cercyon—the infamous king of Eleusis. Even seated, he looked less like a ruler than a landmark.
Rumours hung around him like his deep purple robes. Some swore Poseidon’s blood ran through his veins. Others named Hephaistos. Others still—in lowered tones—murmured Arcadia.
Looking at him now, Theseus wasn’t sure there was any blood there at all. Maybe those muscles were fed by the pulsing flow of gravel and fire.
For a moment, Cercyon only looked at him—slowly, like a man reading an inscription he already knows by heart.
“Traveller,” he said at last. His voice was not loud. It didn’t need to be.
Theseus bowed his head. “Your Majesty.”
Something like recognition—cool, almost indifferent—passed across Cercyon’s face.
“You know where you are.”
“Yes, Sire. I know what they call this city.”
“And what do they call me?”
Theseus raised his eyes and held the king’s gaze. “Cercyon.”
Around the circle of packed earth, a small group of onlookers had gathered. The corners of Cercyon’s mouth lifted. “Good” he said. “Then we can spare ourselves the long version.”
He lifted one hand—two fingers, barely a gesture. A boy at the edge of the square moved quickly, as if grateful to have something to do. He brought a clay cup and a small jug.
Cercyon nodded toward it. “Water.”
Theseus looked at the cup in the boy’s trembling hand, then back at the king.
“You offer it?” he asked.
“I do.” Cercyon’s eyes stayed on him. “In Eleusis, we honour custom.”
A pause—so deep it seemed the crowd had forgotten how to breathe. Theseus stepped forward, took the cup, and drank. Cercyon watched him swallow.
“Now,” he said, “your name.”
“Theseus, sire.”
A murmur rippled around the circle—fast, suppressed. Cercyon’s smile widened a fraction. “Theseus of Troezen. Grandson of Pittheus.”
Theseus said nothing.
“You’ve been busy on the road,” Cercyon went on, almost conversationally. “It seems the stories have travelled faster than you.” “I didn’t expect a man like you to come all the way to my…humble city.”
The crowd shifted. Someone whispered a prayer not meant for ears. Theseus kept his voice level. “If there are stories, they aren’t for me to tell, sire.” Cercyon made a soft sound that might have been laughter. “A modest hero! That’s new.” He nodded to the cleared circle. “In Eleusis,” he said, “a traveller receives a gift.” Theseus glanced at the hard-packed earth. Cercyon’s tone stayed almost courteous. “A contest. No weapons. Only wrestling.”
Somewhere in the city, a dog barked once. “And if I refuse?” Theseus asked. Cercyon’s eyes didn’t change, but the air did. “To refuse,” he said, “is to insult…the gods who guard custom.” “And…you? Your Majesty?” Theseus wondered if that title was as bitter in the ears of the crowd as it was on his lips. Cercyon’s gaze swept the crowd, then returned. “To the city. To custom.” His fist dropped onto his knee. Theseus nodded once.
“And if I accept?”
Cercyon leaned forward. The purple folds shifted over his knees like something living. “If you win,” he said, “everything that is mine becomes yours. House. Kingdom. Crown.”
A whisper moved through the ring: the kingdom!
“And if I lose?”
There was no warmth in Cercyon’s smile—only teeth. “Then you’ll pay the toll, like the rest. Your spirit can go where it likes. Your body stays here—feeding the soil and birds of my kingdom.”
Theseus looked at the circle. Looked at the king’s hands—wide as stones—resting easy on his thighs. Looked at the faces that would not meet his eyes. He handed the cup back to the boy and wiped his mouth.
“So this is your hospitality,” he said. Cercyon’s head tilted, almost amused. “You drank, didn’t you?”
Theseus breathed out once, as if making space inside himself. He laid his belongs—the club, his sword, the sandals, and his tunic at the edge of the arena. And then he stepped into the ring. “Then I accept your gift, O king,” he said.
Cercyon rose. No sword. No guards. He let his heavy cloak fall into the dust and stepped into the circle. The square went quiet the way animals go quiet when something larger enters the clearing. “Good,” Cercyon said, rolling his shoulders as if waking a familiar habit. “Show me what kind of man you are.”
Theseus widened his stance and lifted his hands—open, steady. “Show me,” he said, “what kind of king you are,” he said.
The two men circled one another—sizing up every movement..
Cercyon was a wall of muscle, and worse: experienced. He moved with the confidence of a man who had never been defeated. He expected Theseus to strain against him, to push back, to play the game by the old, brutal rules that pitted strength against strength.
But Theseus didn’t.
He was no longer the boy who’d swung at Herakles’ lion-skin with an axe. The road had trained him—taught him the purpose of strength, and when it’s a mistake to trust in it alone.
He settled his weight and listened. He could feel the bronze club in his stance now—no longer a weapon, but a way of standing. He didn’t rush forward. He didn’t push back.
Theseus feigned a lunge, then retreated a few paces, giving way, creating the space that would soon be filled with Cercyon’s bulk. He could feel his blood rushing like wind through the tall pines of the Isthmus, and his breath came in with the steady patience of the creature waiting below insatiable swell of the Bad Bay. He waited for Cercyon to decide—like tyrants always do—that the smaller man would break. He would use the bigger man’s certainty as Sínis had used the pines—to bind his opponent to the choice he’d made, then shred his chance of victory with its opposite.
When the king lunged, Theseus allowed him to believe it. He yielded the space—just a breath, just a half-step—like a man stepping back from the edge of a cliff. Cercyon’s power surged forward, unstoppable, and for an instant, uncontrollable—even for himself.
That was the opening. Theseus twisted, turned, and pivoted into it—hard and decisive—the savage appetite of that bristled Crommyonian beast stampeding through his veins.
Cercyon tried to recover by doing what he always did—by closing in, by crushing. And as that weight came down on him, Theseus didn’t resist it head-on. He moved with it, like a pine in the wind. Then, at precisely the right moment, in a motion that looked more like a dance than a fight, he reached deep, hooked beneath the king’s centre of gravity, and lifted.
For the first time in his long, brutal reign, Cercyon’s feet left the earth.
The king flailed, as he came ungrounded. He was no longer the Arcadian oak; he was just a man suspended in the empty air. Theseus held him there for a heartbeat—an embrace that was both a death sentence and a revelation—and then drove him down, hard, into the very dust he used to rule.
An ugly snapping sound echoed around the arena.
Cercyon, the son of Poseidon, Hephaistos, of some Arcadian line—or whoever—lay in a crumpled heap on the packed dirt.
The circle went silent.
Finally, the elders of Eleusis began to stir, their faces like wet candles sputtered between expressions of terror and a sudden, desperate relief.
But before they could speak, a young man broke through the crowd.
He was ragged, his eyes wide and bright with a hope that looked like a wound. This was Hippothoon (Ἱπποθόων)—the son of the murdered Alope5.
Theseus looked at the boy and felt a sudden, cold jolt of recognition. He saw it in the set of the shoulders, the particular light in the eyes—the same salt-etched heritage his mother, Aethra, had spoken about when he was a child in Troezen.
“Maybe you’re the son of a god, Theseus—maybe you are the son of Poseidon!”
He saw a mirror of his own hidden history. Here was another son of Poseidon, the Earth-Shaker; a half-brother in spirit, standing in the wreckage of a family line that had turned inward and rotted.
One of the elders who had gathered up Cercyon’s royal robes stepped forward. In his hand, he held the crown of Eleusis. “The law is met,” he said “By king Cercyon’s own oath, the throne belongs now to you, Theseus of Troezen.”
Theseus looked at the crown. He looked at the faces of the gathered crowd. Maybe it was the light of the early evening, or maybe it was an inward light—the light of hope—that made their faces glow. Life could be comfortable here. It would be so easy to stop. To rule. To seat himself in the high place at the centre of this old city.
At the edge of the ring, the bronze club, and the bronze sword left for him by his father were cast in golden light. He remembered the rock in Troezen. Those tokens weren’t meant for an Eleusinian throne; they were meant for Athens. To stay here would be to build a kingdom around a detour.
Theseus reached out, not for the crown, but for Hippothoon’s hand. He pulled the young man forward, in front of the elder.
“Honorable elder, my path leads elsewhere. This is your king,” he said. “King Hippothoon, son of Cercyon’s murdered daughter, Alope, and of my father: Poseidon, the Earth-Shaker.”
All around the circle, the crowd broke cheering. Celebrations continued long into the night.
The next morning, Theseus gathered his belongings, shouldered his burden, and set out again. He followed the path walked by the initiates of the Mysteries out of Eleusis towards Athens.
Athens was closer now. He could almost smell the smoke of his father’s hearth.
Amplification
Cercyon (Κερκύων) – The Wrestling King
Until now, the forces on Theseus’ road—Periphetes, Sínis, the Crommyonian Sow—rise out of the spaces between towns and cities. Skíron marks a turning point. He is still situated outside a city, but he is elevated by the rising road, and as we saw last time, his implied nobility is part of the danger he represents.
Cities stand for conscious order6; beyond them is psychic life too vast to be fully brought inside. The task isn’t to conquer what can’t be tamed, but to learn its terms—so we can live with it without doing—or sustaining—harm. So when this story begins presenting forces of opposition that come packaged with social or hierarchical overtones—cultural cues that the Ancient Greek audience would certainly have picked up on but which get flattened by our modern views of heroes and villains—we can read it as a change in the nature of the work being done. As noted earlier, in this myth, that shift occurs with Skíron. In the previous instalment we met him standing on the cliffs of the Bad Bay. Like Theseus’ earlier encounters, he appears outside a city along the path through the wilderness, but he was not just a bandit. We learned how, despite the fact that we met him in the liminal space of —to the storytellers of Mégara, at least—Skíron bore a reputation of nobility, of authority, and of civic status.
The image of Cercyon continues in this direction. He sits enthroned at the centre of Eleusis (Ἐλευσίς / Ελευσίνα), charged—at least in the eyes of the city—with preserving order and custom.
Plutarch slips in a detail that’s easy to miss. He doesn’t just describe him as “Cercyon the king.” He says: Cercyon the Arcadian.7
Arcadia (Ἀρκαδία) is Pan-country—the landscape where shepherds, nymphs, and even the mountains move to the Saturnian rhythms of the Golden Age. Pan is that landscape given a body: hooves and horns, shaggy legs, appetite and music—more at home in groves than temples. In one famous tale, the nymph Syrinx flees him and escapes by becoming reeds; Pan cuts the reeds, binds them, and the panpipes enter the world.8 Every encounter with this god is marked by a feral throb beneath the skin of civility.
That’s the spirit Plutarch conjures in the throne room when he calls Cercyon “the Arcadian.” Robert Louis Stevenson catches the feeling perfectly: you can “…hear the goat-footed piper making the music which is itself the charm and terror of things.”9
So while Skíron shows us twisted nobility exercising authority beyond the city walls, Cercyon inverts it. He is repression embodied: cloven-hoofed Arcadia pressed down and disguised beneath royal robes. And if there’s one thing we know about repression, it’s this—what we pave over doesn’t just disappear. It gathers pressure beneath the surface until it breaks containment. And when that happens, what emerges is rarely pretty.
We see that clearly with Cercyon. The stories clustered around him are brutal. Hyginus and Pausanias both tell us that he puts his daughter Alope (Ἀλόπη) to death after she bears a child by Poseidon. After Theseus kills Cercyon, it is this child—Hippothoon— who steps forward to claim the kingdom.
If Cercyon were a character in a modern story, we’d expect some account of how the people respond to this brutality. But myth works differently: the king, the city, and its citizens form one psychic system. There is no public outcry because Cercyon’s cruelty is authorised by his station—woven into the fabric of the place.
And the same thing happens in us: when an unhealthy habit or maladaptive pattern has “a throne,” we rarely meet it with protest. We rationalise it, make excuses, and accept it as part of who we are—no matter what it costs us over time.
By all accounts, Cercyon is very strong—but the sources can’t quite agree on where that strength comes from. Some make him the son of Poseidon; others connect him to Hephaestus; still others offer different genealogies, each trying, in its own way, to account for his terrible force.
Regardless, Cercyon is not presented as a bandit on the road. He is a legitimate ruler—whose strength represents the weight of tradition, custom, and “this is how things are done.”
In our modern lives, kings don’t only live in palaces. They rule in our lives as patterns. The most powerful (and often tyranical) ones are those of whom we remain unaware. They can show up as reputation, or habit: a centre of psychic authority that once held things together, but which can grow stale—and eventually require renewal.
The Image of the King-in-Need-of-Renewal
Cercyon is not the first king we’ve discussed, and he won’t be the last. Back in Episode 2—The Bull and the Burnout—we spent time with King Minos of Crete: the ruler who tries to stabilise his world by clinging to a gift from Poseidon… and ends up building a labyrinth to hide the results of his insecurity. Cercyon belongs to that same family of images.
In amplifying these images, its important to remember that one image can carry several truths at once. The king isn’t only a political leader. He is the organising centre—the authority a whole system arranges itself around. In a tribe, that might be a chief. In a city, it’s the ruler, the laws, the customs. In a psyche, it’s the way we hold ourselves together—our identity, our sense of “this is who I am,” our “this is how life works,” or perhaps, “this is what I do in these situations.”
In her 1971 book, An Introduction to the Interpretation of Fairytales, Marie-Louise von Franz explains how in many traditional societies, the king matters less because he’s morally superior than because he contains the vitality of the group. If the king withers, the kingdom withers. If he becomes impotent, the land becomes barren. And when that potency fades, renewal is demanded—sometimes symbolically, sometimes literally, and often violently.
She goes on to describe what happens when such an ordering centre wears out. She points out, and I think it bears repeating here, that the king is a symbol of the Self. It is not the actual archetypal Self, but a symbolic image set up to act as an organising principle in the conscious psyche. Regarding the aging and wearing out of this symbol she writes:
If you study the comparative history of religions, you will note the tendency for any religious ritual or dogma that has become conscious to wear out after a time, to lose its original emotional impact and become a dead formula. Although it also acquires the positive qualities of consciousness such as continuity, it loses the irrational contact with the flow of life and tends to become mechanical. This is true not only of religious doctrines and political systems but for everything else as well, because when something has long been conscious, the wine goes out of the bottle. It becomes a dead world. Therefore, if our conscious life is to avoid petrifaction there is a necessity for constant renewal by contact with the flow of psychic events in the unconscious and the king, being the dominant and most central symbol in the contents of the collective unconscious, is naturally subject to this need to an even greater extent. (von Franz, 1971, Ch. 4 p. 6)
Although it is a bit of a mouthful, that’s a beautiful to describe what people mean when they say: I don’t feel like myself anymore. I feel stuck. I don’t know why I keep doing this.
When that happens, it’s not the deepest centre—the actual Self, or daimon, or acorn, to use Hillman’s language—that is suffering depletion. It’s the rule-set—the image or symbol of who we think we are—that has run out of power. That old king can no longer hold the life-force in a healthy way. And then renewal isn’t optional. Something must shift—or the inner kingdom petrifies.
And notice where that renewal comes from in von Franz’s line: “…by contact with the flow of psychic events in the unconscious.” In myth, that contact often arrives from outside the walls of the city. Theseus approaches Eleusis as an outsider, carrying precisely that disruptive power of renewal within him.
Up to now, the work we’ve been doing in this series has mostly been inward: a matter of recognition, naming, reframing, defusing shame, seeing what’s going on underneath. Insight is important in this kind of work—but insight alone doesn’t dethrone a king. A king is replaced when a new centre proves it can actually hold the kingdom together.
Cercyon invites travellers to wrestle. The offer is enticing: his kingdom if they win—and he kills them when they lose. No appeals. No second chances.
I know that offer. I’m sure you know it, too. Some of our habits rule us like that. As soon as we we make any attempt to change, they clamp down. We may set out feeling heroically charged to to grow, and then, suddenly we’re tired, distracted, ashamed, craving relief—anything that gets us to drop our guard—and then you blink and you’re back where you started.
This may be a story about wrestling, but it isn’t really a story about muscles or strength. It’s a story about what you do when the old pattern gets its hands on you. And I have some good news for you: there are more ways to win in this wrestling match than simply being strong.
Wrestling
Growing up, I avoided sports. Partly because music is a very important part of my life, and a finger injury could shut down flute or piano for weeks. Mostly because of social anxiety. But also because, after several rounds of corrective eye surgery when I was very young, I never developed good depth perception.
When I played that child-friendly version of tennis with the big spongy orange ball, my teacher always said: keep your eyes on the ball. I tried. I missed. The only chance I had was watching the shadow of the ball on the ground—but even then, my attempts at connecting racket to ball did little more than circulate air.
I’ve read that chaos theory suggests a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon may set off storms in Europe. On behalf of Little Dim, I offer my sincere apologies to anyone affected by my early attempts at racket or bat-based ball sports. Of course, it’s equally possible my wild swings prevented a few tornadoes. For that, you’re welcome. I’ll wear that cap with pride.
All of this is to say: I don’t know much about wrestling as a sport. I am, however, intimately acquainted with its metaphor.
If you’ve ever tried to shake a habit, change the way you respond under pressure, or commit to something that matters—practice, study, creation—while a thousand other things compete for your attention, then perhaps you are, too.
Wrestling is ancient. It shows up in early literature and early visual records of organised combat. Some sport sociologists point at the cave paintings at Lascaux in France—dated to roughly 15,000–17,000 years ago—and suggest wrestling may be the oldest “sport” (Delaney & Madigan, 2021, Ch. 3). This claim is disputed, however and I have, since recording this episode, discovered more claims stating that the earliest depictions of wrestling occur in the rock art Tassili n’Ajjer, in Algeria. Or perhaps in Mongolia. Graphic sources for these images seem few and far between, and so, for our purposes, it is enough to recognize that what think of as wrestling today is ancient.
Whether or not the a specific site (looking at you, Lascaux) contains depictions of wrestling, sociologists wisely point out that these ancient depictions of wrestling or any “sport-like” activity isn’t the same thing as the modern sport with which we are acquainted. In many cultures—human and animal—wrestling-like behaviour is a way of establishing order, settling questions of dominance and submission.
And it’s that older, more primal sense of wrestling that matters here, when we’re talking about Theseus’ road.
Wrestling the Wild: The Epic of Gilgamesh
Wrestling is a central image of pivotal importance in The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest surviving works of literature we have. The story comes down through a long chain of Mesopotamian tablets and versions, reaching back into the early second millennium BCE and beyond. It follows Gilgamesh, king of Uruk—two-thirds divine, one-third mortal—and, at the start of the tale at least, an absolute menace. He is quite possibly the first literary portrait of a tyrant whose legitimacy is founded on building a wall (Foster, 2019, I: 11–14).
Gilgamesh mistreats the people of his city—men and women alike—until the outcry reaches the gods (Foster, 2019, I: 53–102). And so Aruru—Goddess who creates life—fashions a counter-force: Enkidu, a wild man, formed from clay, living on the steppes—undoing traps, disrupting the machinery of civilisation at its edge (Foster, 2019, I: 53–102).
A hunter sees Enkidu, panics, and the story kicks into a mythic civilising sequence involving a lot of sex, food, clothing, a haircut—until Enkidu arrives in Uruk to challenge the king. He meets Gilgamesh at the gates of a wedding feast and they grapple (Foster, 2019, II: 90–114).
There are no weapons. We can read it as wrestling. And the match doesn’t end in a clean victory. Despite this, Gilgamesh kneels and claims it anyway, even though they seem evenly matched—but then something startling happens: the two opponents become inseparable.
From there they go on to have many adventures together, hunting and defeating demons. But that is another story for another time.
For now, notice the structure. Two incomplete forces meet: Gilgamesh, the corrupted king-in-need-of-renewal; and Enkidu, the counter-force raised from beyond the city’s order. Through that grappling both Gilgamesh and Enkidu are changed. They find wholeness and completion.
And that’s why this matters for Theseus. Whether it’s Cercyon meeting Theseus, or Gilgamesh meeting Enkidu, the pattern is the same: something from beyond the walls arrives to challenge the ruling centre. And that change occurs when they come into close contact with one another.
Myth chooses the image of wrestling for this. Not a duel at distance, but a contest close enough to feel breath and body heat. A contest of leverage, balance, will. In Theseus’ story, it ends in death and succession: Cercyon falls and the crown passes—through Theseus—to Hippothoon. In Gilgamesh, it ends in a different kind of renewal: the desire for dominance turns into a deep and loving bond. The king isn’t changed by advice or even the protests of his people. He’s changed by contact with his opposite.
That’s the point I want to carry from Uruk to Eleusis.
Because the king is to the city what our habitual patterns are to us: the organising centre that sets the rules, decides what gets expressed, and keeps the system running—healthy or not. Myth shows renewal as one ruler falling and another taking his place; lived experience is messier. The old pattern doesn’t vanish on cue. Change arrives when we meet its force, stay present, and redirect the energy into a new channel.
And wrestling is an apt image for that. It asks for the same skill: recognition, contact, balance, responsiveness—the ability to yield without collapse, and resist without rigidity.
How to win when wrestling
From the story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, we can see that victory in this grappling struggle for renewal can take many forms. Gilgamesh kneels and claims victory, even without a clean win. And yet, the king who rises after that isn’t the king who entered the fight.
Before we return to Eleusis, there are two more wrestling stories worth bringing into this circle. Each turns the lens and shows a different facet of what “winning” can mean in story—and in our own lives.
Jacob and the Angel
The first is borrowed from the tradition of the Hebrew Bible: the story of Jacob wrestling an angel. I’ll retell it, but you’ll find it in Genesis 32:22–31.
Jacob is on the move with his family. After many years, he is finally headed back to make things right with his brother, Esau. He reaches the edge of a river and sets up camp. Rivers are borders, thresholds that can be difficult to cross, but they’re also channels. They both divide and irrigate the land. They flow and carry the current forward. We use the language of water, rain, and rivers to talk about our experience of life. We talk about going through “dry spells,” or inspiration that has “run dry.” We describe certain seasons in life as times when things finally “start flowing” again. This is river-talk. It is also language that helps us identify a threshold and what we need to cross, or perhaps have already crossed.
In the story, Jacob sends everyone across the river first—wives, servants, children, I imagine them picking their way across the shallow river as the sun sets and the first stars in the purple sky reflect on the fast-flowing water. Jacob, however, stays behind at the camp.
He’s left alone on the near side.
And then the text says a Man—printed with a capital M—comes to him in the dark and wrestles with him.
This goes on all night, and as dawn approaches, the Man finds that he cannot force Jacob into submission. So he touches Jacob’s hip and dislocates it. Even when he is injured, Jacob refuses to release the Man. And there, in the spreading of the pre-dawn light, Jacob says something almost shocking in its stubborn insistence: I won’t let you go unless you bless me.
The Man asks Jacob his name, and then renames him—“Israel; for you have struggled with God and with men, and have prevailed.”
When Jacob asks the Man His name, the Man replies, “Why do you ask me my name?” And blesses him.
That is the last we see of that Man. Having received a new name himself, Jacob renames that place on the bank of the river Peniel, saying, ““For I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.”
And then the story ends with a beautiful line:
Just as he crossed over Penuel the sun rose on him, and he limped on his hip. (Genesis 32:31)
In this story, Jacob is the one in need of renewal. He needs to mend the rift between him and his brother caused by his deception years earlier. And here, through this wrestling match that takes places on the verge of a threshold, he is changed.
But here again, we see a different definition of victory in this story. He eventually crosses that threshold with a limp. It is a victory won, not by besting his opponent, but by refusing to be subdued by Him. And as a result, he also receives a new name.
Renaming is one of those recurring renewal-images in myth: the old name can’t contain the new live, so the story gives a new one. I wrote more about that in another Substack essay:
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Now, If we stay with the image, without getting lost in doctrinal debates, two things stand out.
First: the opponent isn’t framed as a villain. The force Jacob wrestles is aligned with the ordering power of the sacred—call it God, call it the Self, call it the daimon, call it the acorn. Jacob doesn’t “defeat” that power in the usual sense. He endures contact with it. He holds on through the night and refuses to be overpowered.
Second: prevailing doesn’t mean walking away unscarred. Prevailing means the struggle doesn’t end before the blessing is won—before the light of dawn returns order to the darkness of night and the new name arrives.
So if we ask what “winning” can mean, Jacob answers: sometimes victory is persistence. Sometimes victory is crossing the threshold, even if you cross it limping. Sometimes the new identity is simply this: I am the one who wrestled and I did not give up.
I did not give way.
I did not give in.
And now—hold that image, because the next wrestling story turns the lens another way.
Herakles and Antaeus
For this story, we’re going to take a look at Theseus’ role model: Herakles. Everyone knows that Herakles is strong. But in this story—as with Theseus’ own—strength is secondary.
On his way through Libya for the eleventh labour, Herakles meets Antaeus (. The sources describe him as the ruler of Libya: a king like Cercyon. He doesn’t ambush. He waits—planted in his own territory—demanding a contest from anyone who passes. And like Cercyon, he wrestles to kill. Pindar says he used the skulls of his victims to roof a temple of his father, Poseidon.10
Antaeus’ mother is Gaia (Γαῖα), the Earth. Because of that, each time he touches the ground, he grows stronger. He draws power from the earth itself.
Oblivious to this, Herakles grapples. He throws. He drives Antaeus into dust. And each time Antaeus springs back stronger—recharged—while Herakles begins to tire.
So Herakles changes the move. He lifts him—disconnecting him from the ground, cutting him off from the source. Suspended, Antaeus weakens. Only then can Herakles finish the struggle. He crushes him in a bear hug.
That’s the whole image in one motion: Herakles wins by ungrounding the opponent and drawing him in close… hugging him.
I think there is medicine in that.
Returning to Eleusis
Armed with these images, we return to Eleusis to look again at the match taking place there.
In his Descriptions of Greece Pausanias pauses while describing the area surrounding Eleusis to mention the fight between Theseus and Cercyon because the fight mattered. He says Theseus defeats Cercyon not by physical size or sheer force, but by skill—a revolutionary act in wrestling.11 Theseus refuses to wrestle by Cercyon’s rules. He refuses to let tradition set the limits of what’s possible, and he changes the terms of the contest.
What are the traditions you have held in your own wrestling matches in the past? What has dictated how your wrestled with old behavior patterns that no longer serve you?
Apollodorus preserves a variation. He tells us that Theseus wins in Heraklean fashion—by lifting Cercyon high and driving him down.12
Put the two versions together and something clearer emerges: the victory isn’t in brute strength. It’s in the refusal to act according to the old terms and then, skill or tenacity to embody that refusal.
And that brings us back to our own wrestling matches.
It’s rarely people we wrestle, at least not in the straightforward sense. Yes—sometimes there’s external conflict. But what hooks us, drains us, and repeats is often an inner pattern old and established enough to feel like a natural reflex. Trying to change something like that can feel like wrestling Antaeus: you push it down, swear it off, pin it to the ground—only to find it rising again, stronger than ever.
In a physical fight, you don’t keep driving into your opponent’s strongest point. You look for the angle that yields. The gap in the defence. The place where the pattern can’t keep doing what it always does.
That is also where our opponents target us. So what is that gap for you?
Is it the wish to escape stress? The hunger for comfort? The craving for a quick reward? Or is it that persuasive voice that says: just one more time. Change can wait.
That voice is dangerous because it doesn’t argue against your goal. It doesn’t try to prove you incapable. It simply makes the goal feel optional right now. It promises you’ll return to the road after one last detour.
It lies.
Those are the moments in which we find ourselves wrestling on the dark bank of the river like Jacob.
Those are the moments in which winning means holding to the opponent, not giving in to its attempts to overthrow us, drawing it in, close, until the light of dawn brings with it clarity.
Some patterns grow stronger each time they “touch down.” Each time we give in or let go, they drop back into automaticity—into that place where “it just happens,” and we can’t quite say why. This is why, after doing the inward work of recognising and confronting the inward bandits that hijack us as we’re trying to grow, we have to bring that work into our physical lives. This is where the wrestling happens for us.
The task isn’t to crush the pattern—or to put as much distance between it and us as possible. Sometimes it’s to draw it close, lift it into consciousness, and hold it there—steady, without flinching, and without collapsing into shame—until the light of dawn brings clarity.
And when it does, we may walk away limping—but we walk away changed: renamed, redefined, and no longer ruled by what once held power over us.
This is one reason good therapy can be so effective, and I’ll say this carefully: not because the therapist “fixes” you, but because a skilled therapist can help you keep contact long enough for clarity to arrive. I’ve come to recognise this through my own experience in the client’s chair—my wonderful counsellor called it the Therapy Fairy. The “fairy” isn’t magic. It’s what happens when something that used to rule from below is held up to the light long enough for its shape to be seen.
Once the shape is seen, a new move becomes possible.
This is the move we’ve been circling since Periphetes and the bronze club, since Sínis and the balancing of opposites: not repression—pushing the unwanted down and away—but the closer work of staying in contact and redirecting energy rather than denying it.
Gilgamesh gives the same structure in another key. The tyrant-king meets an equal raised from the wild. They grapple. And the shift arrives when the quest for dominance resolves into wholeness and renewal.
That’s what Theseus accomplishes in Eleusis.
But after victory comes the second test: removing the tyrant clears the seat, but it doesn’t tell you what to do with it.
So ask yourself: if the throne were offered to you, would you take it?
Would you settle in that seat—rule in your own Eleusis—and forget the sandals and the sword, the signs you once trusted as your destiny?
Or would you heed the acorn’s pull—the same tide that carried you onto the open road in the first place?
Are you strong enough to refuse a throne when your road isn’t yet finished?
The Passing of the Crown & Acorn Theory
Some victories expand the road. Others try to end it early.
There’s a particular temptation that can follow progress: the temptation to stop where you are and build a kingdom around the ground you’ve just claimed. We’ve already brushed against that on Skíron’s cliff—where the hero is tested, not by brute force, but by the lure of a false authority that demands submission.
Eleusis offers Theseus a version of the same test, but this time wearing the robes of legitimacy. When he defeats Cercyon, he wins—by Cercyon’s own terms—the right to rule. He stands in the centre of a city that could recognise him as king, and it would all look clean. Official. Even deserved.
But notice what would happen if he stayed.
Theseus overthrows Cercyon by rejecting the rules of the corrupt ruler—by refusing to let Cercyon’s authority over “how things are done” dictate how he responds in the wrestling match. If, after that, he accepts the throne, he would—after his victory—be accepting and playing by Cercyon’s rules again. His victory would dissolve, and with it, his purpose—and the sword and sandals that mark it—would be erased. His journey would end here, in what might look like a victory but ultimately be a betrayal of the calling—the acorn—of his own soul.
In Theseus’ story, the hero-image isn’t only modelling courage. It’s modelling discernment—how to tell the difference between a true step forward and a beautiful-looking detour. Because life offers us “crowns” all the time: early praise, a promotion, an opportunity, a role that fits well enough to feel like fate. Sometimes those offers are good. Sometimes they’re earned. Sometimes they even arrive with a sense of relief—finally, a place to stop.
But relief isn’t the same as alignment. If, on our road, we are chasing goal defined by others—by what we feel society, or our friends and family expect of us—there is a very good chance that we eventually end up taking up this crown and waking up years later wondering why everything feels so meaningless to us.
So many of us settle without ever meaning to. We drift into careers—or relationships, identities, reputations—that reward us quickly, or satisfy someone else’s idea of who we should become. We accept the crown because it’s there, because it’s legible, because it looks like success from the outside. And then, one day, we wake up with that quiet, unnerving feeling von Franz gestures at when she says: the wine has gone out of the bottle. Nothing is wrong, exactly. And yet something essential has thinned. The life-force is gone flat. The acorn hasn’t died—but it has been asked to grow into a shape that isn’t its own.
That’s the payoff this story offers here: Theseus doesn’t confuse “I can” with “I must.” He doesn’t turn a local victory into a final identity.
After Cercyon falls, another figure steps forward: Hippothoon—Alope’s son, the one who, in the Eleusinian strand of the tradition, holds rightful claim to the place Theseus has just freed. Theseus does something that matters precisely because it is so unglamorous: he yields the crown.
This isn’t a performance of virtue.
Theseus is aligning himself with the deeper trajectory of his soul—showing that he knows where he stands in relation to his calling.He doesn’t confuse “I can” with “I must.” He doesn’t turn victory into identity. He lets the kingship go where it belongs—and then he returns to the road, still a traveller, still unfinished, still answerable to the larger pattern that called him out of Troezen in the first place.
May we all be that wise.
Reflection Prompts
Before I leave you with some reflection prompts, let’s take a look at the pattern we’ve uncovered in today’s stories.
We’ve seen it again and again—at the gates of Uruk, on the riverbank with Jacob, in the dust of Libya, and in the wrestling ground at Eleusis.
Each story is supported by the same bones:
First, a threshold is reached.
Second, an old ruling pattern is confronted.
Third, the victory comes not through brute force, but through drawing closer, through lifting, through balance.
And finally, the renewal of a burned out, corrupted, or depleted pattern occurs through contact with a psychic energy arriving from outside of normal consciousness.
The archetypal images in these myths are precisely that type of energy. That is why story has been used as a kind of medicine for as long as our species has been able to tell them.
But here’s where we need to slow down.
Because in real life, not every opponent yields. Not every pattern breaks open when we ask it to. There are things about ourselves—and about the world—we may not be able to change.
And there are things we can. Knowing the difference… that’s another, very real kind of wrestling match.
I’m not here to answer the question of what you can change about yourself and what you cannot. During classes and workshops, I’ve been asked this type of question over and over, and each time, the only answer I can give is: I can’t tell you what you can change about yourself. No one can.
That’s soul-work. That’s the acorn work.
And answering those questions takes courage—because it asks us to be honest with ourselves about what’s ours to carry, and what isn’t.
But there’s something else we can do, even when change feels out of reach.
We can learn to redirect the energy into more beneficial channels.
The story of Jacob shows us this: not every struggle ends with victory or conquest. Sometimes we limp away from the threshold, wounded—but changed nonetheless.
And Gilgamesh reminds us that even when the wild one cannot be conquered, he can be embraced—and that embrace begins the real transformation, even if it isn’t the transformation we initially expected.
So maybe the questions aren’t always: Can I win this fight? Can I change this or that about myself?
Maybe the deeper question is: Can I stay close to what I would rather avoid, long enough to understand what it needs and why it is appearing in my life?
Victory isn’t always dominance.
Sometimes, victory is contact.
Sometimes, it’s the embrace.
Reflection Prompt 1: The Nature of the Struggle
What am I wrestling with right now—and am I trying to overpower it, avoid it, or stay in contact with it?
This is one of those questions that doesn’t ask for a quick answer—it asks for a pause. Take a moment to name what you’re struggling with right now. Not what you think you should be wrestling with, but what’s actually pulling on you, draining you, showing up again and again. And then ask yourself: How am I meeting this thing? Am I trying to crush it? Ignore it? Or am I staying in conscious contact with it, even when it’s hard?
This is Jacob’s wisdom. He doesn’t win by striking down his opponent—he wins by not letting go. He stays through the night. Sometimes that’s what real strength looks like: not pushing harder, but staying present without yielding to the parts of ourselves we’d rather avoid.
Reflection Prompt 2: The Script of Identity
What pain or pattern have I mistaken for “just the way I am”?
We all carry stories about ourselves—some given to us, some we wrote to survive. Over time, those stories can solidify into identities. “I’m just like this.” “That’s just how I am.” But what if that pain, or that reflex, isn’t the truth of who you are—just something you’ve carried for a long time?
Before Enkidu, Gilgamesh mistook his domination for strength. It took a wild mirror to show him something different. Sometimes the traits we think are fixed are really just strategies we’ve outgrown. This isn’t about blame—it’s about compassion. Is there something in you that’s been waiting to be seen differently?
Reflection Prompt 3: The Paradox of the Embrace
What would it look like to “lift” my problematic pattern into an embrace—not to satisfy its demands, but to hear its hunger?
In the heat of the struggle, our instinct is to shove the rejected behavior away, to pin it down, or to flee from it. But Herakles won by drawing Antaeus in close and lifting him off the ground.
Think of a pattern you’ve been fighting—perhaps a compulsion, a specific type of reactivity, or a cycle of avoidance. What if, instead of trying to push it down, you “lifted” it up into the light of your awareness?
This isn’t about giving in to the behaviour or satisfying a damaging urge. It is about ungrounding the pattern from the place where it happens automatically. When you draw it close, you can begin to ask: What is the unmet need at the heart of this? What is the unrecognised hunger that this behaviour is trying—however clumsily or destructively—to feed? Compassion isn’t permission; it’s the skill of seeing clearly. It is the realisation that the wild thing you are wrestling might actually be a part of you that has been starved of a better way to survive. Can you hold it long enough to find out what it’s actually looking for?
Reflection Prompt 4: Growing Downward
Where in my life do I feel stunted—and what would it mean to grow downward there, to put down deeper roots, so I can rise again with greater strength?
Inspired by Hillman’s Acorn Theory, this question invites a shift in perspective: instead of striving harder or reaching higher, what if what’s needed is a descent? A rooting? When growth feels blocked, we often assume something is wrong with us—or that we need to just try harder. But sometimes, the call is not to grow up but to grow down—to return to the soil of our lives, to reconnect with what nourishes and grounds us.
This kind of downward growth isn’t glamorous, and it rarely comes with applause. But it’s what allows real transformation to take place—not just the appearance of progress, but the slow, steady unfolding of purpose from the inside out.
THE END
But…
If something in this episode stirred a “king” in you—if a part of your own pattern stepped forward to challenge you today—I hope you’ll give yourself the grace to hold it just a little longer. Don’t try to force it to change yet. Just let it speak. Let it tell you what need its been trying to fill or what it has been protecting all this time.
As always, if you enjoyed this instalment or want to reach out and chat, please leave a comment on this post or send me a message. I love hearing how my work connects with my readers and listeners.
Perhaps you know a story that fits in with the idea of wrestling our old ruling patterns in order to bring the change we understand into reality by embodying it through action. If you do, please drop it in a comment here—even if its just a name that I can go dig up online!
Thank you so much for spending time with me.
See you next time.
~ Dimitri
Sources
Apollodorus, & Hyginus. (2007). Apollodorus’ library and Hyginus’ Fabulae: Two handbooks of Greek mythology (R. S. Smith & S. M. Trzaskoma, Trans.). Hackett Publishing Company.
Delaney, T., & Madigan, T. (2021). The sociology of sports: An introduction (3rd ed., Vol. 3). McFarland.
Foster, B. R. (Trans. & Ed.). (2019). The epic of Gilgamesh: A new translation, analogues, criticism and response (2nd ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.
Gilgamesh. (2025, December 20). In Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gilgamesh
Hillman, J. (2017). The soul’s code: In search of character and calling. Ballantine Books.
Nagy, G. (2018, December 12). Homeric hymn to Demeter. The Center for Hellenic Studies. https://chs.harvard.edu/primary-source/homeric-hymn-to-demeter-sb/
Ovid. (2025). Metamorphoses (A. S. Kline, Trans.). University of Virginia E-Text Center. https://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/Metamorph.htm (Original work published ca. 8 CE)
Pausanias. (1918). Description of Greece (W. H. S. Jones & H. A. Ormerod, Trans.). Perseus Digital Library. http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0525.tlg001.perseus-eng1:1.39.3
Plutarch. (1914). Theseus (B. Perrin, Trans.). In Plutarch’s lives (Vol. 1). Harvard University Press; Perseus Digital Library. http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0007.tlg001.perseus-eng2:11.1
Pryke, L. M. (2019). Gilgamesh. Routledge.
Stevenson, R. L. (1881). Pan’s pipes. In Virginibus puerisque, and other papers (Project Gutenberg eBook No. 386). Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/386
von Franz, M.-L. (1971). An introduction to the interpretation of fairytales (J. Hillman, Ed.). Spring Publications. (Original work published 1970)
Although, it is my experience that if you look hard enough, you will always find people around you who are ready and willing—enthusiatically so!— to point out any and all of your personal weaknesses—whether those weaknesses are real or not.
My deepest apologies, dear reader. I don’t remember which awesome person shared this meme and I’m not yet tech-savvy enough to figure out how to find it again on substack, so I tried to track down it’s origin. I found comic strips, ancient Reddit posts, and eventually this relatively large version of it. When I figure out who posted in on Substack, I will update this footnote to link you to their page!
In the Homeric Hymn, Demeter, grieving the loss of her daughter, Kore–Persephone (Κόρη-Περσεφόνη)—threatens a famine that would swallow the world. That would be Demeter in her aspect of the Devouring or Terrible Mother. See The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, line 310–314 —https://chs.harvard.edu/primary-source/homeric-hymn-to-demeter-sb/
See Hyginus Fabulae 187 in Apollodorus & Hyginus (2007) and Pausanias 1.39.3.
For more on this, see the amplification of Crete and the Kingdom in my essay, The Bull and the Burnout.
Stevenson, R. L. (1881). “Pan’s Pipes,” in Virginibus puerisque, and other papers—The entire essay is lovely, but if you want to see this quote in context, scroll down to paragraph 5.
Cercyon might have been a tyrant, but he played fair. Today's oppressors know that they don't have a leg to stand upon, but they never yield. It might be because they're not actually sustained by regenerative forces like love for their country or even primordial life forces -it's just pure greed. Instead they rely upon resources like fossil fuels and rare minerals. Tribalism has become more entrenched- I'm not sure they can be uprooted through discernment or compassion. Still, rebellion is possible by thinking outside the box- the critical part is ensuring that the embrace doesn't become a mindless assimilation of the old patterns.
Beating Cercyon was never really the hard part; walking away from a kingdom he'd already legitimately won was. That's a precise description of the actual trap most people fall into: not failing to achieve anything, but achieving something real and mistaking it for the destination because it arrived wearing the right paperwork.
The acorn framing gets at why that mistake is so easy to make, too. The goal was never generic success, it was a specific shape only this particular life was ever going to fit, and a crown that looks identical to the real prize from the outside can still be the wrong prize entirely.