Clytaemnestra: A Hero for Our Age

Leda, the legendary Queen of Sparta, was a powerful priestess and an even more powerful Queen.  As sign of her power, she held the sacred Labrys (double headed axe).  Once held by Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons.  From her, it passed briefly to Herakles, but it could not be held long by a man, and so he gave it over to his dominatrix, Omphale, the Queen of Lydia.  From Omphale, it passed to Leda and, as you will see by the end of this tale, thence to Clytaemnestra, and now I pass her power to you who read this.

In heiros gamos, Leda was wed to Zeus, while he possessed the body of her priest/consort Tyndareus.  Leda gave birth to four children from that rite.  Two were fathered by Zeus; Helen and Pollux are immortal.  Two were fathered by Tyndareus; Clytaemnestra and Castor were mortals, who live on among the Mighty Dead.  Everyone knows Helen's story, but you cannot really understand it without knowing also her sister's tale.

Stories differ as to the identity of Clytaemnestra's first husband, but most agree that, at some point, Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae, killed her true husband and their infant child and took Clytaemnestra by force as spoils of war, as his brother Menelaus took her sister Helen.

He got a daughter on her, whom she named Iphigenia.  While Iphigenia was still young, Helen escaped her "husband".  Since his claim to kingship was by virtue of his ownership of Helen, Menelaus gathered all the forces of Greece behind him to take her back by force.  But the winds would not blow.  The goddesses protected Helen.  Finally, to raise the winds, Agememnon slew his own daughter, Iphigenia, as sacrifice.  Some say, and I beleive, that Iphigenia was not killed, but rather transfigured, transported across the seas by She of the Wild Places.  In any case, the blood magic was potent, and Agememnon & Menelaus set forth to wage war in Troy.

Now, the story of that war you know, and I will not tell it again here.  While her captor was away at war, Clytaemnestra, the scent of her daughters hot blood still fresh in her nightmares, began to plot to assassination of Agememnon, with the help of her chosen lover Aegisthus.  When Agememnon returned, with the Trojan prophet-princess Cassandra as his captive rape-slave, Clytaemnestra knew the time for justice had come.  Gathering all her power about her, she plyed him with wine and a blow job, and drew for him a hot bubble bath.  And then, she waited.  As expected, he soon feel asleep.  She threw a net over him, entangling him in the bath, and then murdered him with her holy axe.

Sic semper tyrannus.