SCHYLLA & CHARYBDIS
In Greek mythology, Charybdis, or Kharybdis (“sucker down”, Greek Χάρυβδις), was once a beautiful sea-nymph, daughter of Poseidon and Gaia. Charybdis was very loyal to her father in his endless feud with Zeus; it was she who rode the hungry tides after Poseidon had stirred up a storm, and led them onto the beaches, gobbling up whole villages, submerging fields, drowning forests, and claiming them for the sea. She won so much land for her father’s kingdom that Zeus became enraged and changed her into a monster. She takes form as a huge bladder of a creature whose face was all mouth and whose arms and legs were flippers and who swallows huge amounts of water three times a day before belching them back out again, creating whirlpools and destroying all the boats that sail around. In some variations of the tale, Charybdis is a huge vortex that lives on one side of a narrow channel of water.
In June 2012 I traveled to Sicily with the aim of encounter, explore, experience, and document Charybdis from inside. The purpose was to sail across the Strait of Messina searching for traces and patterns of Charybdis and to face the whirling currents myself getting as close as I could. The project emphasized the empirical experience as a personal way of confronting myth with reality.
Scylla & Charybdis formalize through video, photography, text, documents, and old maps.
The myth pictured Charybdis lying on one side of a narrow channel of water. On the other side, there was Scylla, another sea monster with six arms, six heads with four eyes each, and at the lower part of her body, six hideous dogs with mouths containing three rows of razor-sharp teeth. The two sides of the strait are within an arrow’s range of each other, so close that sailors attempting to avoid Charybdis will pass too close to Scylla and vice versa.
In Homer’s Odyssey, Book XII, Odysseus had to cross the strait in order to get back to Ithaca, so he was forced to choose between both dangers; he rather chose to risk Scylla at the cost of some of his crew rather than lose the whole ship to Charybdis. The phrase between Scylla and Charybdis then means being in a state where one is between two dangers and moving away from one will cause you to be in danger of the other. Between Scylla and Charybdis is the origin of the phrase “between the rock and the whirlpool” (the rock upon which Scylla dwelt and the whirlpool of Charybdis) and of the phrase “between a rock and a hard place”, “entre la espada y la pared”.
Traditionally, the location of Charybdis has been associated with the Strait of Messina off the coast of Sicily, opposite the rock called Scylla, where the meeting of two different currents causes permanent whirlpools.
