The Myth of Marsyas - 2

    This week, I'll dig deeper into the myth's second part, the punishment of Marsyas, in which it was hung from a pine tree and flayed alive.

   The first mytheme that Anzieu underlines is verticality, which relates to the first function of the skin-ego: maintenance, which is the upright position that develops as the baby receives support and holding. Verticality is opposed to the horizontality of animals. According to Anzieu, the choice of the tree in the myth - a pine - emphasizes verticality. Marsyas's punishment consists of inflicting a negative verticality, it remains vertical but hanging in the air, painful and humiliating, reproducing the distress of an infant that is poorly held by the caregiver. 

   Both in Turkish and English, there is a connection between the verticality of the spine and integrity, as the word 'uprightness' literally refers to both.

   While still alive, Marsyas was flayed entirely. There are different versions for the following part of the myth; Apollo wears Marsyas' flayed skin, transforms it into an instrument, or the skin is left hanging on the pine tree. All of these versions imply 'preservation' of skin. Anzieu says that, "skin torn away from the body, if kept whole, represents the protective wrapping" (3rd function of the skin-ego: protection). A shield against stimuli, a fantasy one imagines taking from another for extra strength. Among the Aztecs, the skin of the prisoner sacrificed by the priest was worn for twenty days by his master.

   There it hung high on a tree, and the breeze often entered, swelling it out into a shape like him, as if the shepherd could not keep silence, but made his tune again.

   The preservation of Marsyas's skin on this version of Nonnos the Panopolis, relates to the fourth function of the skin-ego, which is individiation. ''A personal soul, a psychical self, will exist as long as there is a bodily wrapping to guarantee its individuality. ''