SWALLOWING CASSANDRA

Outsourcing the oracle & homogenization of the dreamspace

(Image: a color photo looking downwards along a chain as it disappears into the dark bottom of a well. Photo by Gunerpics from Getty Images)

Cassandra: the oracle who was cursed to always be right, and never be believed. What an additionally twisted layer of her fate that she should be so widely remembered as to become a rhetorical device to describe the painfully common experience that truth sayers share with her. Today, we have consumed her, shrunk her, merged her with our “inner child,” our “internal family system,” and our “jungian archetypes,” and thus we have taken over the role of denier.

Cassandra no longer needs strangers to stand in disbelief, because we have made her so small within ourselves that we only believe the dreams and visions we are given are evidence of unhealed trauma, or else we turn to the great and powerful googly woogly to tell us what they mean.