The Missing Hymn of Metis: an Origin of Loss

It is simply no longer acceptable to speak of the goddess Athena from the fifth generation of Olympian/Orphic Greece without reference to her mother Metis. Hesiod ( 1959 ), among others, tells us Metis appears as a reincarnation of her first-generation self in the Olympian dynasty as wife of Zeus. She was originally the cosmic egg of all creation in the Orphic Theogony , as recounted by Apollodorus ( 1921 ), and Taylor ( 1896 ), from whose mucosity, the entire genealogy of the Olympian/Orphic heaven (and theology), is spawned. However, from the moment Zeus murdered Metis as she was about to give birth to Athena their daughter, she has lapsed into the fissures of forgetfulness in philosophy, theology, mythology and early psychoanalysis. Indeed, in each field of inquiry, Athena is overwhelmingly deemed ‘unmothered’ and produced as Harrison tells us as a desperate ploy ‘from the brain of Zeus’ through his cunning intellect, for Athena to serve as his ‘mouthpiece’ (Harrison 1922 , 648). This paper seeks to do more than simply restore Metis as mother to Athena. It explores the tragedy inherited by her violent removal, for mother/daughter relations, grievability and sustained disavowal of maternal divinity in dominant discourse.