[...]... pair of twins — teenage twins, with wings on their shoulders and ostrich feathers in their headdresses She was one of the presiding deities at the weighing of the heart, the others being jackal-headed Anubis, who did the actual weighing, and ibis-headed Thoth, moon god and thus, in a society that used the lunar calendar, the god of time He was also the god of measurements and numbers and astronomy and. .. remain — a male-dominated court -of- law system The play is The Eumenides, third in the trilogy known as The Oresteia; the author was Aeschylus; the place was Athens; and the date of presentation was 458 B.C.E., during the period of Greek history we call “classical.” The subject matter of the play comes from the earlier legendary period — the Mycenaean / Minoan era — and concerns the aftermath of the Trojan... to them on Earth, that was the business of the Fates, against whom even the gods could not stand The Greek-speaking ancients were heavy on the tat side of tit-for-tat — evil begot evil — but not very keen on the good-for-good part: about the best you might expect as a reward for right action was being turned into a tree For something closer to the Egyptian weighing of the heart, and also closer to the. .. four-thousand-year-old Code of Hammurabi — reformulated as the Biblical eye-for-an-eye and tooth-for-a-tooth law — are blind indeed Lex talionis means, roughly, the law of retribution in kind or suitability.” Under the Punch-buggy rules, punches cancel each other out unless you can whip your magical protection into place first This kind of protection can be found throughout the world of contracts and. .. nothing less than the sum total of order in the universe We are usually given to understand that we are the philosophical heirs of the Greek-speakers and Romans and Israelites, not of the Ancient Egyptians, but in fact the Greek tradition of divine justice is somewhat more confusing and foreign to us than the Egyptian one The Greek-speakers had several goddesses of justice, the first being Themis, meaning... relation and certainly not her mother So Orestes has incurred another debt: his own blood is claimed in payment by the Erinyes, or “Raging Ones,” known to the Romans as the Furies They are older than the Olympian gods, being daughters of Earth and Night; they are horrible-looking, savage, and vindictive; and their task is to pursue kin-murderers and kinship-bond violators such as Orestes, and to drive them... them mad and force them to kill themselves In The Eumenides, Orestes has been pursued by them to the shrine of Apollo, who has purified him of blood guilt; but the Erinyes don’t accept this verdict Orestes then goes to Athens, where the goddess Athene — considering herself an insufficient judge in this complex case of father’s blood weighed against mother’s blood — puts together a jury of twelve Athenians... will be broken “I will pick the finest of my citizens,” says Athene, speaking of the court of justice she is about to establish “for all time to come.” “They shall swear to make no judgment that is not just, and make clear where the truth of this action lies.” The tribute paid to the above-board and the even-handed in The Eumenides is laudable But although the ancient sense of fairness is a necessary... also the history of balances, those two-sided devices for determining fairness by weighing one thing against another In the afterlife of Ancient Egypt, the heart was weighed against the concepts of justice and truth, which included the right order of the cosmos and the natural world; in the Christian system, Michael the Archangel weighs the soul against its deeds; and, going back to the bank book I... power only with their support This tendency is even more marked among the gelada monkeys of the Ethiopian highlands, where families consist of groups of tightly bonded females, their children, and the mate they’ve selected, who remains the in-house family male only as long as the females say so If we were anthropologists, we might point to the female elders in hunter-gatherer bands such as the Iroquois, . Tel. 41 6-3 6 3-4 343 Fax 41 6-3 6 3-1 017 www.anansi.ca LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION Atwood, Margaret, 1939– Payback : debt and the shadow side of wealth / Margaret Atwood. . the growth of the individual mirrors the developmental history of the species. Those who fail to discern in the Punch-buggy ritual the essential lex talionis form of the almost four-thousand-year-old. capable of doing the long- term buy-now, pay-later math, this ought to be considered child exploitation. At the other end of the scale, the financial world has recently been shaken as a result of the