Coming from a Protestant Christian background, I really don’t know what it means to be a priestess, as Cassandra was. After completing the first 50 pages of Christa Wolf’s novel “Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays”, I have a better understanding of what it takes to be a priestess of a Greek deity, in this case Apollo. There’s no better way to explain it than to take some of Cassandra’s own quotations, so that is what I’ve extracted here for you!
1. Ability to understand emotions with wisdom:
“I realized that a person’s attitude to pain reveals more about his future than almost any other sign I know.†(31)
“Yes, it’s true, fear too can be set free, and that shows that it belongs with everything and everyone who is oppressed…fear is weakness and weakness can be amended by iron discipline.†(35)
“Tears clouded one’s reasoning powers.†(37)
2. Ability to discern one’s own character and way in which others perceive you:
“It took me a long time and much labor to distinguish between qualities in ourselves that we know and those that are inborn and virtually unrecognizable. Affable, modest, unassuming—that was the image I had of myself, which survived every catastrophe virtually intact…Did I gravely wound the self-esteem of my family in order to preserve my own—because to be honest, proud, and truth-loving was a part of this image?†(11)
3. Ability to ask deep philosophical questions:
“What was happening? What kind of place did I live in? How many realities were there in Troy besides mine, which I had thought was the only one? Who fixed the boundary between visible and invisible? And who allowed the ground to be shaken where I had walked so securely?” (20)
At one point, she had “zeal to impart new questions to mankind†(29).
4. Ability to escape society and commune with the divine:
According to Panthous, Cassandra possessed the “ardent desire to be on familiar terms with the deity†and “aversion to the approaches of mortal man†(26).
“I did not want the world the way it was, but I wanted to serve devotedly the gods who ruled it.†(40)
5. Ability to influence people (well kind of…):
According to Panthous, Apollo’s priest, Cassandra was a good priestess because of her “desire to exercise influence over people†(26).
However, she is told that “you have the gift to predict the future. But no one will believe you.†(22).
So, how much influence can the priestess Cassandra actually have?
* Ability to foresee the future:
She declared that Troy would fall. She objected to bringing the Trojan horse into the city, which would doom Troy. She predicted that she would die along with Agamemnon at the hands of Clytemnestra. She foreshadowed that Clytemnestra would be blinded by power and that she too would fall.
