THE SEX LIFE OF THE SPHINX
By Ugo Bardi, October 2005
This page is part of the Chimaera site kept by Ugo Bardi.
There are two versions
of the Sphinx: male and female. The male (Egyptian) one is stately and solemn,
not very sexy. The female (Greek) one, instead, has a sex appeal that you can't
ignore. Which other half-human creature in mythology is so often associated
with naked breasts? Mermaids, Harpies, Medusas, Chimaeras, Sirens-- they are
all females and, occasionally, they are shown sporting human breasts (and, in
the case of Hollywood mermaids, bras as well). But the image that we normally have
in mind of the Sphinx is clear and consistent: she has these prominent female
breasts and, almost always, no bra.
Where does
this busty image of the Sphinx come from? For an answer, we must examine the
origins of a myth that has been with us for a long time; millennia. Ancient
images of winged lions are common all over the Mediterranean and, sometimes,
the lion is associated with a Goddess riding it. When the lion’s head is human,
we call the creature a sphinx. Sometimes we can recognize the creature as a
male sphinx, and sometimes as a female one. But, even in the latter case, we
don’t normally see human breasts. From Minoan times, back to the 2nd
millennium BC, all the way to classic Greece, we have plenty of paintings or sculptures
of sphinxes of all shapes and sizes. Breasts, however, just aren’t there. As
examples, on the left we have a Minoan Sphinx from the Milla palace in Crete
(ca. 2000-1500 BC) and, on the right, a Greek sphinx from the Delphi museum (6th
century BC). Both creatures may have a certain feminine air, but they have no
visible breasts; we can only see the lion's mane on the chest. The same we can
say for ancient text sources; we have several mentions of the Sphinx, from Hesiod,
(probably 9th century BC) to Sophocles (5th century BC)
and onwards. It is often said that the creature is female but breasts are never
mentioned.
Apparently, however,
the image of the Sphinx evolved in time. During the classical Greek, and later Roman,
period, breasts started to appear associated with sphinxes. In some images, we
see rows of breasts under the belly, as proper for a lioness. The image on the
left is an example. It is a curious image, almost a comic book one. As befits a
Sphinx, this one is literate, she is reading something. She has several breasts
a row, but they go all the way to the front of the chest, in a position where
no four-legged creature has 
breasts. And
these breasts are plumpy and nearly spherical, not like animal breasts; more
like human female breasts.
These multi-teated creatures have an almost “baroque” character, something that hardly fits with the canons of formal beauty that we see as customary of classical art. But Greek art is varied and often surprising. In some images of the Sphinx, the underbelly breasts have disappeared, leaving only the couple of frontal ones, now arranged as in a human female bust. Here, on the right, an image from a Hellenistic sarcophagus. Further right, a Sphinx (ca. 400 BC) said to have belonged to the private collection of Sigmund Freud himself. If a row of underbelly tits can hardly be seen as sensual (unless you are true pervert or, perhaps, a male lion) these frontal breasts start to acquire a certain value of sensuality also from a human viewpoint. No wonder Dr. Freud kept such a specimen.
With the decline of the classical world, the Sphinx theme
declined, too, from the visual arts. Medieval artists loved fantastic
beasts, but they didn't seem to be especially interested in sphinxes. However,
with the late Renaissance, the classical world burst out again on the art scene
and, with it, breasted sphinxes came back with a vengeance. This image of the
Italian mannerist painter Perino del Vaga (ca. 1500-1547) gives some idea of
how things had changed. This sphinx is almost aerodynamic; it reminds one of those
Detroit cars of the 1960s, (maybe those prominent car bumpers of the time had a
sexual meaning!) And, considering the frontal weight, one wonders whether this
creature would be able to walk without falling on her… er… face.
With the late Renaissance and early post-Renaissance, there also came a wave of erotic interest in female breasts that had been unknown before. In 17th century, women started wearing corsets, to sport deep décolletages, and to flaunt their cleavages to men. Nobody seems to know for sure what caused this change in fashion and in attitudes, but sphinxes seem to have been affected by this evolution, too. From now on, no artist would think to draw or paint a breastless Sphinx.
During what we call the “Neoclassical period”, from late 17th century onwards, sphinxes became a commonplace decorative element in gardens all over Europe and were referred to as the “French Sphinx”. Sometimes, these creatures don’t look very sensual, at least to our modern eyes. Their body is heavy, more like that of a cow than that of a beast of prey. Their posture is solemn and their hairdo often a funny mix of what may have been the fashion of the time and what the artist thought it should have been in ancient Greece or in Egypt. But their breasts carry a message: no more the virginal breasts of late Greek art, but full breasts of a mature woman. The piece from the Tivoli gardens is especially telling on this point.
Garden Sphinxes. From left: Tivoli Gardens, Roma. Belvedere Gardens, Vienna, Chickwick gardens, London.
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The eroticism of the Sphinx in art went a couple of
notches upwards with the 1800's. The first to start pushing things in this
direction was the French painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867). Ingres
painted three images of Oedipus and the Sphinx, the last one in 1864. The one
on the left was painted in 1825. In all these images, the Sphinx is half-hidden
in shadows, but her human breasts are in full light. Note Oedipus’s posture,
the height of his face, the position of his hand and finger. All elements
emphasizing the Sphinx’s breasts as one of the central elements of the whole
painting. We can’t miss the erotic meaning of the whole composition.
The Sphinx, and specifically the human-breasted Sphinx, became a favorite theme of the Symbolist school that flourished in 19th century. The Symbolists tended to eroticize everything classical, and the sensual side of the Sphinx – her breasts – was something that they didn’t miss. Their attitude may have had something to do with the moral attitudes of the time. After all, many Symbolists were English and they lived in Victorian England. So, they tended to react as they could to the official prudery of their times. Gustave Moreau (1826-1898) was one of the Symbolists who explored the Sphinx theme in detail. His sphinxes are always shown as human-breasted and strongly sensual.
Some of Moreau’s Sphinxes
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In time, the sensuality
of the Sphinx became more and more prominent; eventually it seemed to explode on the
canvas of the artists. On the right is an interpretation of the Belgian
symbolist Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921) in a 1896 painting that he entitled
“Caresses”. Here, we see how sensual a Sphinx can be, even without naked
breasts. She is a leopardess, tenderly embracing an ephebic Oedipus. Note Oedipus’s
red lips and the Sphinx’s masculine face. Their expression, their posture, are
all details that convey the impression of a seductress, happy with her
conquest.
But it was Franz Von Stuck (1863-1928) who best
captured the Sphinx's sensuality with this 1895 painting. No trace of lions or
leopards, here, no wings and no serpent’s tail. Yet, Von Stuck had no need to
write “Sphinx” on the top of his painting; it is perfectly clear that what we
are seeing: it is the Sphinx, divine seductress. She has gone full cycle, from
lioness to woman. She has full breasts, well-rounded buttocks, large eyes, and
a sensual mouth. She is relaxed, dominant, self-assured, and in full flower.
Under the Sphinx, we see the parable of 
human life. In this composition, the Sphinx takes on her proper role of
Goddess, dominating the creatures of the Earth. The comparison of Von Stuck’s
painting with the conventional representation of the Egyptian goddess Nut is
striking. We can’t say whether Von Stuck consciously patterned his work after
these Egyptian images; it may well be that he caught this aspect of the Sphinx
divine nature by means of intuition alone.
The fascination of the symbolists with the Sphinx’s myth lasted for about a century and gave us many splendid images. In time, the theme was explored and re-interpreted over and over. In our times, the Sphinx even became a comic book character. The number of modern images of the Sphinx is prodigious and the number of variations is beyond all possible attempt of classification. One thing that didn't change, however, was the idea of the “lioness with human breasts.” Sometimes breasts are shown in full, sometimes just hinted at, but they are always there. Here are some examples.
From left: Mark Ellis, Salvador Dali, Selina Fenech, Darren Davy.
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At this point, we may ask ourselves what is the whole idea about. Why is the Sphinx being always endowed with these prominent frontal objects? Surely, they are not to be intended as overdeveloped flying muscles (as Roy D. Pounds suggested). Several generations of artists couldn’t just have been involved with a mere decorative element, a detail of no significance. Breasts must mean something and the artists who have shown them so often seem to have been able to catch an aspect of the myth that may difficult or impossible to express in words.
From the early studies of Desmond Morris
(“the naked ape”, 1967), anthropologists have noted that the shape of human
breasts is much different from that of four-legged animals. The idea that has
been proposed is 
that human breasts carry a visual meaning immediate
for creatures like us, who interact with each other by standing in front of one
another. It may be that prominent breasts signify the health of a woman, her
sexual status, her ability of raising children, or something else. In any case,
they are a sexual message aimed at males.
This attitude has genetic origins but it is surely mediated by cultural factors. We know that the modern Western erotic interest in female breasts is not necessarily shared by other cultures, ancient of contemporary. But our attitude is not unique in human history. For instance, in the sophisticated and complex Minoan art of the second millennium BC, women are shown with exposed, pear-shaped breasts. These well endowed Minoan ladies wouldn’t be out of place on the pages of the modern “Playboy” magazine. (Image on the right, from J. Campbell’s “The Masks of God”).
Now, to understand the
meaning of the Sphinx’s breast, we should examine the attitude towards female
breasts of the ancient Greeks, the culture that gave us most of the ancient
images of the Sphinx and the myth as we know it today. Obviously, attitudes
change with time and geographical locations; still, some patterns from the
ancient world seem to be constant. In Greek-Roman classical art, naked female breasts are
not uncommon, but they don’t seem to carry a strong sexual message. Breasts appear
mainly when there was a practical, logical reason for a woman to be shown naked.
That was the case of amazons and athletes, for instance. In other cases, a
woman could be caught fully undressed while bathing – that had an obvious
sexual meaning, but it wasn’t necessarily centered on breasts. Or, an exposed
breast could be a sign of distress. This seems to be the case of the piece of
statuary known as the “Barberini Suppliant,” that may represent the rape of
Cassandra after the fall of Troy.
A literary glimpse of ancient attitudes towards breasts comes from something that we can read in Pseudo-Lucian’s “Amores” (probably 2nd century AD). Here, two friends discuss the relative merits of straight and gay love as they pause to admire the statue of Venus in Cnidos. Many facets of human sexuality are explored in considerable detail in this ancient text, but women’s breasts are never mentioned as an object of erotic interest. Even the one of the two characters who expounds straight sex doesn’t seem to find the naked breasts of the goddess particularly exciting. When breasts are mentioned, the sense is much different. So, we are told (41) that women would wear
“.. thin veils that pass for clothes so as to excuse their apparent nakedness. But everything inside these can be distinguished more clearly than their faces except for their hideously prominent breasts, which they always carry about bound like prisoners.”
So, at that time, women went around wrapped only in transparent veils, but they took pains to bind their “hideously prominent” breasts in order to hide them. Hardly the way a modern woman would dress up for a date. We can only wonder about the depth of the different perception of female sexuality in modern and ancient times.
Yet, we can say that ancient Greeks were not indifferent to female breasts, just they saw them differently. We may find a hint of what was their attitude in one of the few surviving fragments of the “Little Iliad” (written a couple of centuries after Homer’s Iliad). Here we read that, after the fall of Troy, Menelaus was ready to kill his wife, Helen, but that he cast away his sword when he caught a glimpse of her breasts, unclad. In our modern view, we would see a woman unveiling herself as passing a sexual message. But we saw that breasts didn’t have a strong erotic meaning for ancient Greeks. So, in showing to Menelaus her breasts, Helen was sending him a quite different message; a message of intimacy. In Euripides (5th century BC), we hear Helen, captive in Egypt, fondly remembering Menelaus “caressing her breasts”. Breasts that a Greek woman would normally keep “bound like prisoners” but that she couldn’t keep hidden while in bed with her husband. So, what Helen was saying to Menelaus with her gesture was, “know who I am: I am your wife.”
In the Iliad, Menelaus was arriving in front of Helen with his sword still dirty of the blood of Deiphobos, Helen’s second Trojan husband. In the myth of the Sphinx, Oedipus was arriving in front of the Sphinx with his sword still dirty of the blood of his father, Laius. These two scenes are eerily similar and, by showing her breasts, the Sphinx was passing to Oedipus the same message that Helen was passing to Menelaus, “know who I am”. When a woman unveils herself, it may not matter so much if she is a sophisticated Cretan lady with her stepped skirt, a Greek koré with her loose chiton, or a modern Playboy bunny. The message is always the same: she is revealing an intimate part of herself; she is showing herself for what she is.
The Sphinx was opening herself to Oedipus, showing him
her intimate essence. What this essence was, can be understood from 
the riddle she asked him, “what
is it that walks on four legs in the morning, on two legs during the day, and
on three legs in the evening?” We all know that the standard answer is “man”,
or – more in general “Antropos,”– “human being.” But this is a trivial answer for
a riddle which is not a silly one. Think of a different answer: why not “woman”?
This is not just a question of political correctness: think how the life of a
woman is naturally divided into three periods: virgin, mother, and crone. It is
a much more sharp subdivision than anything that we can relate to a man. And this
simple reversal of roles opens up a whole universe. If the riddle hints at the
ages of a woman, what the Sphinx was showing to Oedipus was a vision of the
triple essence of the Moon Goddess. The moon can be waxing, full, and waning.
The Sphinx herself, being of divine nature, had a triple shape: woman, bird and
lioness. These three shapes are the three elements of the female essence: the
lion (the strength of a virgin), breasts (motherhood of a mature woman) and
wings (the link with the sky: the wisdom of an old woman). (image on the right,
front cover of R. Graves’s “The White Goddess”)
So, Oedipus was presented with a vision of the Female Deity. The Sphinx was offering him nothing less than a sacred initiation to the Goddess’s mystery. As a characteristic of initiations, he would be symbolically “devoured” by the Sphinx, and he would experience death and rebirth. In being reborn, he would face the very essence of the universe. But Oedipus couldn’t understand. He gave a banal answer, refusing the Sphinx’s offer. Later in the drama, Oedipus’s curse was to be blindness, but he had started out blind. Blind to the beauty and the power of the triple goddess. Some say that Oedipus actually killed the Sphinx, some that he didn’t touch her, she killed herself. It doesn’t matter; Oedipus’s blindness gave him the power of destroying everything and everyone he came in contact with. When meeting the Sphinx, he had already killed his father and, later on, he would cause the death of Jocasta, his mother and bride. Later still, the death of his daughter Antigone and of his sons was, again indirectly, caused by Oedipus’s actions.
Men are cursed with the power of giving death. Women, instead, have all the power of giving life. This is the ultimate meaning of the Sphinx’s breasts. It doesn’t matter if they are seen as erotic objects (as they are for us) or as tokens of intimacy between husband and wife (as they were for ancients Greeks). Breasts remain the source of life’s nourishment, the awesome power of the Goddess: Inanna the giver of life, Tiamat the dragoness, Eurynome, who created the whole universe with her dance.
In our times, the myth of the Sphinx is emerging from the depth of the past millennia to confront us again with Oedipus’s dilemma. The Sphinx is bringing to us a message that goes to the heart of what means to be human, to our relation with everything which is alive around us on this planet. As a Goddess she is carrying with herself the power of creation and of destruction at the same time. Creation and destruction are the laws of the universe, which will eventually devour us all, no matter what silly answers, in our blindness, we think we can give to its riddles.
Franz Von Stuck (1863-1928) 1895
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The author is grateful to ms. Alison Frank for her comments on this manuscript. All the images in this page are believed by the author to be in the public domain or to be usable according to the “fair use” clause of current copyright laws. If you own one of these images, write me to have it removed or to receive proper credit. This text may be freely cited and reproduced, mentioning the source is appreciated! Thanks.