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├── AxS:2
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└── AxS:3
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├── AxS:32
└── AxS:33
13. “Near the edge of the plateau and due east of the Second Pyramid, with a face probably altered toform a colossal portrait of Khephren, its royal restorer, stands the monstrous Sphinx – mute, sardonicand wise beyond mankind and memory” (Lovecraft, 241). Lovecraft puts the question that seems toplague the authors of Flatlines: “... what huge and loathsome abnormality was the Sphinx originallycarven to represent?” (258). Needless to say, there have been countless speculations on the nature andorigin of the Sphinx, but these are inconclusive and contradictory, no doubt because its “huge andloathsome abnormality” will have always exceeded any attempt to represent it. Many scholars (seefor instance, Lowell Edmunds, The Sphinx in the Oedipus Legend) now believe that the Sphinxelement in the Oedipus narrative was actually a later addition to an already existing mythic system,even though the Egyptian Sphinx is evidently much older than the Greek culture that has given us theOedipus myth with which we are familiar. (It should be remembered that the encounter with theSphinx is not dramatised in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex; it is referred to as something that has alreadyhappened.) The attempt to date the Sphinx has produced widely different speculations; with certain –controversial – estimations claiming that the Sphinx is “even older than 15,000 BC” (Hancock 448).With Deleuze and Guattari, though, we might want to suggest that (in at least one sense) Oedipus is asold as humanity, and that the Sphinx – as that which must be destroyed in order that humanity mayexist – would inevitably always have to be narrated as something preceding the human.
Levi-Strauss links the Sphinx to other “cthonian beings”, such as the dragon. Like the dragon, “the Sphinx is a monster unwilling to permit men to live” (215). While some, such as Carlo Ginzburg,connect the Sphinx with death (“the Sphinx is undoubtedly a mortuary animal” [228]), Levi-Straussargues that Sphinx-myths concern “the autocthonous origin of man”, the idea that human individualsare born direct from the Earth (rather than through meiotic reproduction). (Ginzburg notes thatOedipus is “a cthonic hero”.) The Sphinx would then correspond to what Deleuze and Guattari call“biocosmic memory”. “Man must constitute himself through the repression of the intense germinalinflux, the great biocosmic memory” (AO 190) = Oedipus must riddle the sphinx. In a sense, then thisbiocosmic memory ‘precedes’ the organism (which emerges simultaneously with death andsexuation). But, as both ‘Weismannism’ and the Dogon myths attest, this germinal time persists,coterminously, alongside that of the organism (see AO 158). This may explain a puzzling feature ofthe Oedipus myth as it has reached us; to wit, why does a creature of such incredible power as theSphinx allow itself to be riddled so easily? As Velikovsky puts it: “It has been observed that theanswer Oedipus gave was on the level of a schoolboy and that the monster must have been feeble-minded to leap from the precipice upon hearing it. And why should a winged sphinx die in a jump?”(207). The answer would be that the Sphinx doesn't die (it cannot, since it does not live), and that ittakes advantage of Oedipus’ unwarranted Self-belief only in order to invade Civilization, hidden.Which would also imply that the answer Oedipus gives to the riddle is inadequate. Or partial. (L.T.)