Konrad and Alexandra (pdf) - Rolf Gross

Dahl smiled. "As always, you have succeeded in disarming me. Ab initio you essentially
dispose of any analysis I could offer!" He laughed. "I admit to being seduced and all yours!"
Alexandra gracefully inclined her head accepting his surrender and went straight to the
heart of the matter. "You remember, in München I once told you the story of Dato and my
abduction. I did not tell you, that afterwards I went to see Persephone for advice. It was a
horrifying experience. In a half-drunk trance she accused me of having spared Dato. By the old
‘matriarchal’ rules, she said, I would have had to seduce and kill him in my arms at the height
of his ecstasy. Now he would have to live a miserable life, the weak man, and one day he
would come back to demand his death from me."
She paused a moment. "These are the ancient laws of matriarchy. Persephone’s
prophesy is still unfulfilled. So far Dato has not returned."
Dahl glanced at her with an incredulous smile but said nothing.
Alexandra, registering his smile, continued thoughtfully. "I was shocked. On that day I
decided to marry Konrad, to follow him into exile and learn how to become conscious of my
own actions in order to come back to Georgia and help other women to escape from these
millennia-old ways. But I am sure Persephone will be proven right. Dato will return one day with
such a request. I am terrified by the thought, but Georgian men go crazy or commit suicide
when they have to live in exile, separated from their women."
She briefly considered the efficacy of the old myths. "Do you recall the Greek myth of
Medea? She was a Georgian woman and the priestess of the Great Goddess in the Kolkhis.
Her story is a good illustration of the rules of matriarchy. She did not seduce but compromised
Jason by stealing the Golden Fleece from her brothers. She obliged him to take her home as
his wife. When Jason later left her for a woman of his own tribe, she did not kill him or herself,
but the children she had borne him."
Dahl nodded. "I am familiar with this archaic tale. You are not the only one who is using
it to illuminate our subconscious. But to my knowledge, nobody has seen Medea as an
exponent of matriarchy. Her pedicide already shocked the Greeks. It is still unexplained."
Encouraged, Alexandra boldly applied the myth to the present. "In less dramatic ways
this is how Georgian women still take revenge on their men. They don’t lay a hand on them,
they make their men feel so ashamed and guilty that they kill themselves or go stark raving
mad."
Dahl caught on. He raised his hand. "Alexandra, may I contribute to your myths? The
Greek example is the Oresteia. There the matriarchal content is quite explicit. Orestes
murdered his mother Klytemnestra. To avenge this matricide, the Erynnies, the executioners
for the Goddess, pursued Orestes all over Greece, until he went mad."
"Yes," said Alexandra. "And a thousand years later Sophocles, the New Greek,
undertook to recast the old matriarchal law to suit patriarchal logic. Sophocles’ Athene, the
Goddess not born of woman, absolved Orestes of his crime before the court of the elders of
Athens—I owe this insight to Konrad’s excellent familiarity with the Greek drama."
She smiled at Konrad. "The Georgians, unlike the Greeks, were never conquered by
Indo-Europeans. They still speak their six thousand-year-old language, and below the surface
the age-old ways of the women are much alive. What you perceive as patriarchal customs in
Georgian society today is a very thin veneer covering the unutterable ruminations of the
Goddess."
"And the men?" asked Mrs. Dahl. "What are the men like who suffer this kind of
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