Some of you may know about Lyssa, the demigod of rage, insanity, and rabies. Her father was Ouranos, and her mother was said to be either Gaia (Euripedes) or Nyx (Hygenis), depending on which story you read. Gaia was goddess of the earth and Nyx goddess of night. Ouranus, also known as Uranus, is considered the premordial god of the sky. He got there before Zeus, so you can be sure this is a very old story. I’m interested in Lyssa today, because I am thinking about the bad rap anger gets, and I now realize its source is even older than I thought. Lyssa would be sent to inflict fury and madness on her victims, sometimes making dogs rabid so they would kill their masters. In Greek mythology the connection between fury and violence is unmistakable. It is seen as a weapon, a punishment for poor behavior.
I’ve felt from as far back as I can remember that my anger was unacceptable. I was reminded regularly to calm down, to not express my outrage and displeasure at life’s unfairness. As early as second grade my mother was getting calls from the teacher at the Little Red School House in Greenwich Village, that my anger was out of control and needed to be managed. I changed schools after that year. Was I born angry? Is that possible? Some schools of Enneagram study would say yes, that some or all of our core motivations and fears which drive emotions and behaviors are present at birth. In Greece last summer, Lynn Roulo and I discussed this, as we walked down a dark road in Paros after dinner one night. She talked about how she and her brother grew up together but had such incredibly different experiences of their family, which indicated to her that there is an aspect of the Enneagram type which is baked in at birth. I don’t disagree, but also think that the relationships between parents and their children differ, even when two kids grow up together. Each child’s experiences can vary vastly.
Children absorb and react to their environments. Early on children develop coping mechanisms to deal with conflict, reflecting back what they see, hear, and feel. Neither of my parents were particularly angry, at least not outwardly. I don’t remember a lot of yelling at home, in fact I remember a lot of quiet. My father got up early to write (and feed me and make my school lunch), while my mother slept in after working on her art late into the night, television always on in the background. There was definitely subterranean resentment going on, and I’m sure as an only child, and one prone to picking up on others’ emotional states, I felt a little confused at times. And yes, often angry.
My best friend Amy Greenstadt and I would walk the streets of Murray Hill, also called Little India, looking in the windows of sari shops and stopping in the deli between our two buildings to get sour pickles from Sal, the friendly owner, a small man with a booming voice and big smile. My mother was mostly home after school, but Amy’s parents both worked nine to five jobs so we would go to her house and rummage through her mother’s multitudinous handbags scrounging for change. I learned much later that Amy’s mother Inez was a hoarder, but as a child I just thought she had a lot of stuff, crammed into their apartment on East 30th Street. We would take the money we found and go to the shop where you could get everything Hello Kitty, little pencils and pads, and purses and pens. We were allowed to roam the neighborhood by the ages of nine or ten, and we felt powerful and safe.
But as we got a little older men would make comments to us on the street, construction workers, some of the men who owned the sari stores, others too. Everything from loud catcalls, to surreptitious murmers, to outright rubbing up against us. We were eleven. Amy was more nervous during these daily interactions, but I found myself yelling back at them, telling them to fuck off (yes this was part of my vocabulary), and leave us alone, even yelling our ages and that they should be ashamed. Somehow within me I had a sense of outrage and anger that men thought they could intimidate us and view us as sexual objects and it was my job to set them straight, and to protect Amy. Why our reactions were so different I’m not entirely sure, but this sense of compromised safety and the need to be strong and protective remains with me today.
Seven of Wands
I’ve been pretty angry lately, and I turned to the tarot to help me work through how I’ve been feeling. Interestingly there is no tarot card which depicts anger in its pure state—there is no ANGER card. But the Seven of Wands comes close, and reminds me of being that little girl in the City, defending herself from bad elements, bad men, always men.
This card reminds me of what it means to protect myself and those I love, the need for safety and the wands’ fiery spirit necessary to stay stable on what our figure is most certainly standing on, unstable ground. While the Greeks make me feel like my anger
is unacceptable, that it is close to being “mad,” like a rabid dog, out of control and terrifying, this tarot card reinforces that there are times we need to defend, to get damn angry and outraged at what is happening in our lives. Anger has its place, though I’m sure the Buddhists would disagree. Anger is a mechanism which helped protect me from unsafe situations, in later situations may have saved my life. But it has also caused a lot of pain in my life as well, as there have been times my anger has been impulsively deployed and unfairly targeted at those undeserving of it.
As an Enneagram 8, anger is my asset and my challenge. I look at it from both sides and it has served me well.