Entity
Tiresias
The blind prophet of Thebes in Greek myth — said to have lived as both man and woman, and to keep his prophetic mind even among the dead.
Tiresias is the blind seer of Thebes in Greek mythology: the prophet whose sight was taken and whose knowledge of hidden and future things was given in its place. He stands across the whole span of the tradition, from Homer to the Athenian tragedians to the later mythographers, as the type of the man who knows what others cannot — and is rarely thanked for saying it.
The myths give two stories for how he came by his gifts, and the sources do not agree on which. In one, he came upon two snakes coupling, struck them, and was turned into a woman; years later he found the snakes again, struck again, and was changed back. Because he had lived as both, Zeus and Hera called on him to settle their quarrel over which sex takes more pleasure in love; he answered for the woman, and Hera, displeased, blinded him — whereupon Zeus, unable to undo the act of another god, gave him long life and the power of prophecy in recompense. In the other account he was blinded for having seen Athena bathing, and the goddess, relenting at his mother’s plea, granted him understanding of the speech of birds in place of his eyes. The transformation between sexes is the detail that has drawn the most later attention; the fullest telling of it is Ovid’s, in the Metamorphoses.
In the literature he is above all the bearer of unwelcome truth. In Sophocles’ Oedipus the King it is Tiresias who knows from the start that the king is himself the murderer he hunts, and who is abused for saying so; in the Antigone and in Euripides’ Bacchae he is the old man whose warnings the proud ignore at their cost. The pattern is consistent enough that Greek audiences seem to have expected it: the seer sees, the powerful refuse to hear, and the refusal is the tragedy.
His strangest appearance is the earliest. In the eleventh book of the Odyssey, Odysseus is told that to find his way home he must first go down to the house of the dead and consult Tiresias — for the prophet alone, among all the shades, had been allowed by Persephone to keep his wits intact, while the rest drift mindless. The image is a precise one: prophecy here is not foresight added to a living mind but a knowing that survives the body, the one form of awareness the underworld does not dissolve.
Tiresias is a figure of myth, not a person scholarship can place in history; the question with him is never whether he lived but what the Greeks were thinking through in him. The recurring shape is suggestive — that the man who sees what others cannot is the one set apart, by blindness, by a doubled life, or by death itself. The fullest version of that is the one in the Odyssey: a mind that goes on knowing after the body is gone.
→ Related: Divination · Eurydice