Invisible Statues: Material Representations of Daimones in the Oedipus Cycle

Abstract

How does a religious tradition make contact with what it cannot see? Despite appearing hundreds of times in Archaic and Classical Greek literature, daimones left no trace in the material record: no statues, no temple friezes, no red-figure silhouettes. Walter Burkert concluded that there was simply no image and no cult. This paper takes that absence as its starting point. Using Sophocles’ Oedipus Cycle as a case study, I argue that the tragic stage functioned as an alternative medium of religious materiality, making perceptible what visual and cultic media could not. Where pottery and statuary failed to render daimones approachable, performance succeeded. Through an analysis of sense perception and deprivation in Oedipus Tyrannus and the hero cult apotheosis of Oedipus at Colonus, I argue that Sophocles explores daimonic indeterminacy. In this, he enables divine affectivity to become a collective and embodied theatrical experience, transforming the invisible into the ritually present.