The Truth of Sysiphus

Posted on October 13, 2004 in Human Rights Myths & Mysticism

We should be writing letters, sending telegrams and emails to Hades about the treatment of Sysiphus. Most literate netizens know the story of the king who offended the gods by not wanting to die. As presented to most of us, it is truncated at the top — beheaded — so that we don’t know the real reason why Sysiphus found himself pushing that stone up the hill, ever to have it roll back over him at the top, ever to repeat the task.

Sysiphus was a whistle blower. He caught Zeus raping the nymph Aegina. The chief of the Greek gods was the spoiled rich boy of his day. No matter what he did or who he “seduced” or kidnapped, he always got let off to do something worse. He was the George W. Bush of his day except that he murdered his anthrophagus father, a good deed he milked to extort ultimate power from his brother and sister deities. When Sysiphus threatened to tell Aegina’s father what the monster in silver had done, Zeus sent out his death squad — Thanatos — for a little black op.

Trouble was that Sysiphus was clever. He captured Thanatos –put Death in ropes. When the sick and the old stopped perishing — outlining in vivid reds the cruelty of the gods who inflicted these things as a curb against human power — Zeus launched a military expedition — the god Ares — to free Thanatos. For his pains, Sysiphus was killed. But he found a technicality: his wife did not conduct funeral rites. So Hades released him to the overworld where he lingered until his own superannuation made him too weak to press on in his fight against the Olympians.

In Hades for good, Zeus pressed to have Sysiphus enslaved to his eternal punishment. The Greeks had a healthy contempt for the morals of their gods. Power corrupted them as surely as it corrupted weaker mortal kings. They raped, they stole, they started wars for the pleasure of seeing finely toned heros slaughter one another in battle. They cheated and they wreaked vengeance not only on the foul, but also on the skilled and the just. Men like Sysiphus who sought to impose a check of conscience against their unbounded freedom.

Modern interpretations of Greek religion focus on the goodness of the gods. This is why the uncomfortable story of Sysiphus must be cut so that we don’t know the reason why Zeus took ire. In the full myth, Sysiphus is a whistleblower, an activist, a champion of the rights of thralls over the whims of plutocrats. Camus suggests that Sysiphus has a choice, that he keeps rolling the rock because he likes it. I counter-suggest that whatever pleasure Sysiphus derives from the thankless task comes from the same place that sustains prisoners of conscience throughout the world: that in the repetition of the myth, he demonstrates the cruelty and the absurdity of our faith in the larger myth of gods and goddesses.

The Greeks may have been sick of these capricious deities when Paul first showed up in Athens, pointed to an altar in the Agora, and started talking about the Unknown God. A god who loved them, who saw them as a shepherd sees his sheep, who rewards the just in the afterlife and does not torment them in the present? How much easier is it to place injustice on the shoulders of men like oneself than on the Universe! Sysiphus, pushing his rock up the hill, may have smiled.

In the medieval Christian myth of the Harrowing of Hell, Christ enters the underworld and frees those who were unjustly bound by Satan. The Biblical Patriarchs and pagan Prometheus are mentioned. But no one spoke of rescuing Sysiphus, the most decent one of the lot, the one who expected that the powerful be held to the same standard as the weak. If omission is to be taken as proof, then Sysiphus was forgotten by Christ.

He deserves better. In our prayers and our relating of the myth, it is time to recognize Sysiphus for the good he does. He stands with the maligned of our society, with the consumer activists, the union organizers, the lawyers who take on the big corporations for the sake of the average man, the humanitarians who help the poor, the sick and the incarcerated. We must liberate Sysiphus, release him from Hell, and restore him to his rightful place in the Heaven of the Just and the Concerned.

Tell the gods: Free Sysiphus Now.