Human beings were not always as they appear to us today, he begins. Originally, humans were created in pairs: as a pair of conjoined males, a pair of conjoined females, and a pair composed of a male and a female. Each of these beings had four arms and four legs, two faces on one head, and all the other appropriate pieces we see today. They moved by walking or by cartwheeling around at terrific speeds. They were powerful, twice as strong as modern humans, so much so that they threatened to challenge even the gods.

Of course, the gods saw this coming and argued about what to do. The smart money was simply to destroy these beings but the gods figured out that, were they to do so, they’d no longer receive devotions and sacrifices and, obviously, gods need devotions and sacrifices. Pretty typical Greek god stuff. So Zeus comes up with an answer: cut them in half. 

He separated the male-male beings into two men, the female-female beings into two women, and the androgynous beings into a male and a female. A bit of surgery followed to stitch together the seams where they had been divided – and here we are, as we are, today.

You’ve probably figured out where this is going.

Aristophanes concludes that love attracts us to each other because we are missing our other half and, obviously, this is why love is so compelling: it begins with longing for what is lacking and ends in the ecstasy of recovering what was lost.

One of the subtler details in this story is that Aristophanes borrows heavily from Hippocrates’ medical terminology to describe the surgical techniques Zeus employed while sewing humans into their present form. While the function of the story is mythological, the semantics are scientific. In a sense, Aristophanes puts science in service to mythological narrative. Something to think about.

We could leave this here as another amusing and suggestive piece of Greek mythology, a relational narrative which metaphorically describes an experience common to most humans in love. This places Aristophanes’ story squarely into Campbell’s category of “creative” mythology – but, for our MythBlast-y purposes, there is a hidden gem in this story, obscured by the veils of translation.

Here it is. When Aristophanes comes to the climax of his account, the English translation can read: 

“Each of us, then, is but a tally of a man, since everyone shows like a flat-fish the traces of having been sliced in two; and each is ever searching for the tally that will fit him.”

Or sometimes this: 

“Each of us, separated from each other, is but the indenture of a man…”.

Huh? Tally? Indenture? What in the world does that mean? If I can stay within the metaphors of erotic love, we have to cast aside these veils to get at the … well, to the truth. 

The Greek word translated here as tally, or indenture, is the word σύμβολον, symbolon. A symbolon was a die or a coin cut in half, usually with a zigzag pattern (hence, indenture or tooth-like), between two friends – to show that one is completed by the other. We often see this today in pendants exchanged between friends and lovers – heart shaped, divided down the middle, with one name on each piece. The implication is that the heart is only, truly, completed by the joining of two into one.

And this is exactly what symbols do: they are one half of a coin that points beyond itself to the part that is missing; they express a truth that is only comprehended when both halves are matched and rejoined. This is a beautiful expression of relationships governed by Eros but doesn’t  it give us a deeper insight into the psychological functions of symbols in mythology? They express the longing for completeness, for reuniting the stories that frame our lives with the experience of living. 

Mark C.E. Peterson is Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies with the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, and former President of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture.  He began his work at the University of Toronto focused primarily on Hegel’s natural philosophy and its links to the history of science and technology. These interests evolved to constellate around the larger questions of how humans are related – scientifically, philosophically, and spiritually – to nature. A practitioner of both taijiquan and kundalini yoga for over 40 years his academic research is currently engaged in a semiotic analysis of the relationship between explanatory and narrative/mythological accounts of nature and an Aristotelian re-examination of environmental ethics.