The Sisyphean task

Sisyphus, for his sly sins against the divine order, had to be punished by the gods. He had founded Corinth, the stronghold that had a stranglehold on trade by land and sea; he violated the law of hospitality by robbing visitors; he cheated traders.  He even managed to cheat Death, by trapping that god in his own handcuffs, so that for a while no one could die.

He was a trickster (reminiscent of the mischievous Coyote god of American Indian cultures). Stories have him stealing his neighbors’ flocks and seducing their wives. A rumor was that he, rather than Laertes, was the real father of Odysseus “of many wiles.”

Sisyphus was condemned to roll a rock up a hill – for ever. Every time he gets it to the top, it slips from him and rolls back down.

And perhaps, to make the sweating wretch’s struggle even harder, this boulder, or asteroid, is not only massive but non-spherical, like the “elliptical billiard balls” that fit the crime of the cheating billiard-player in the song in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado.

The modern Sisyphus is the blogger, who, every time January almost reaches February, is self-condemned to try to find something fresh to say about Janus, or fever, or the lengths of the months, or groundhogs, or woodchucks, or the prospect for spring weather or for those who emerge (come out of burrows, like the groundhog, or are born – happy birthday, Tor!) on the second day of February.

Ah, but now we see there’s something else that could be relevant to this time: Sisyphus. The hill up which he rolled his rock was in dark Tartarus, the underworld, but it could be the slope of the ecliptic, up which he pushes the Sun from the pit of winter through spring toward the summit of summer, where perpetually it slips from him and tumbles away down the other side.

Here is the whole upslope of the Sun’s journey, from December to June.

The Sun disk, shown at the start of each month, is exaggerated 12 times in size. We’d like to make it much larger, but then the crawling figure would have to be much smaller.

Sisyphus fits nicely over the constellation form of Aquarius the water-jar carrier, across which the Sun travels in February – as shown in our book for children, To Know the Stars.

The boulder and the hill probably did symbolize the Sun and the seasons. Though Greek writers tried to derive Sisyphus’s name from sophos, “wise,” he may have been Teshub, a sky god of one of the ancient peoples in the Asiab lands to the east, the Hittites or the Hurrians. He may have been one of the mythic figures borrowed from, or representing, the pre-Greek population, like the Titans who opposed the new Olympian gods, and the Giants who did likewise and were sent down to live under the volcanoes. The name of Corinth, founded by Sisyphus, is pre-Greek, like other cities with namess in -nth- and -nd-

The beneficent Titan Prometheus, who brought gifts of civilization to mankind, was rescued from his punishment of eternal torture on Mount Caucasus by Hercules. We wish that hero would go to the rescue of Sisyphus also and balance his Sun rock on the summit of summer.

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