The House of Cadmus is a house of refraction and reflection, growth and change, a family that bends in on itself in puzzling ways that are at once grotesque and beautiful, violent and tender, mystical and entirely too real. The royal line of Thebes has been tangled up with divinity since its inception and that divinity pervades the generations and the landscape of the city itself like radiation. Very much like radiation, in fact: a force of insidious, generational change that originates from a release of unimaginable power. Gods have walked the same streets as Oedipus and his family; gods have fallen madly in love, been consumed by rage, been born in the same palace in which Oedipus and Jocasta unwittingly corrupted themselves, and so many things older and stranger than gods too. Sphinxes and serpents litter the mythic landscape of Thebes, monsters that are at once imminent physical threats and reminders of the primordial Other that, in Ancient Greece, is never out of sight.
The men and women of the House of Cadmus are touched by that divinity. Neither a blessing nor a curse, the strangeness that clings to the roots of the family tree simply causes change. Even in their deaths, violent and terrible though they are, the Cadmean generations are always somehow transformed through, during, or as an accessory to their deaths, in ways that bring them closer to the primordial natural world on which their city is built. We see this reflected in Oedipus Rex, in the way that Oedipus’ blinding does not undo him or destroy him; rather, it transforms him, integrating that which is bestial, that which is divine, and the meeting-place of the two that is the fallen tyrant’s humanity.
-Emma