Parallel Lives: Theseus | Rittenhouse
Origins of Vigilantism
Theseus, abridged
The story of Theseus and the Minotaur is among the classical gateway drugs to get children hooked on Greek Mythology.
Theseus, the valiant young prince of Athens, vies to end the sacrificial tributes imposed by the rival island-kingdom of Crete by volunteering to defeat the dreadful Minotaur; part-man, part-bull. Aided by princess Ariadne and the magical items she gives him, Theseus ventures into the labyrinth of Cnossos, slays the monster and escapes in the nick of time. A bittersweet ending with betrayal, abandonment and accidental parricide is enough to leave any reader craving for more.
The broader storyline, however, is even more cinematic. It includes a coming-of-age prequel where a teenage Theseus goes about murdering a roster of eccentric villains while en route to Athens; as well as a bromance sequel ―less Lethal Weapon and more Dude, Where’s My Car?― where he and his comrade-in-arms Pirithous massacre drunken centaurs, sequester a disturbingly underage Helen (not yet of Troy) and travel to the Underworld to politely kidnap the goddess Persephone.
Today, I’ll focus on Theseus’ first major story arc, spanning from the discovery of his identity as the prince heir of Athens, to the end of his journey, where he is recognized by his father, King Aegeus. I’ll briefly break down the myth into its structural components before connecting the dots between Theseus and current events; in this case, the Kyle Rittenhouse story.
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Theseus, analyzed
Before jumping in, new readers are encouraged to read Applied Mythology’s analysis methodology, abridged in this footnote: 1.
The Deed that gets Undone
This story’s overarching cycle of deeds being done, only to be undone, begins with the Athenian King Aegeus‘ inability to have children. After consulting the Delphic Oracle, he stops at the kingdom of Troezen where he is intoxicated and made to sleep with princess Aethra who, somehow being in on it, also sleeps with the god Poseidon that same night. Somewhere in that mix, Theseus is conceived.
1st story arc
The Deed: Theseus is conceived, but his existence is concealed.
ie. Aegeus ends his infertility but is unaware of it.
…brings about…
2nd story arc
The Deed Undone: The existence of Theseus is revealed.
ie. Aegeus recognizes his son and heir.
A Structural Breakdown
Upon finding out his true identity from his mother, a young Theseus has the Desire to meet his father in Athens (#Recognition); Plans to travel through a notoriously dangerous path to prove his valor (#PerilousRoad), and succeeds by Means of his natural prowess (#DivineStrength).
Once there, he Plans to present himself in court (#StrangerArrives) and be recognized by Means of his father’s sword and sandals (#Tokens), achieving the Deed of being accepted as King Aegeus’ son (#ReturnOfTheRightfulHeir).
Parallel Lives: Theseus and Kyle Rittenhouse
“With these thoughts, he set forward with a design to do injury to nobody, but to repel and revenge himself of all those that should offer any.”
Plutarch, Life of Theseus
On February 25, 2022, the Wisconsin State Crime Lab destroyed a certain Smith & Wesson M&P AR-15 by mechanical shredding. The destruction of the “Rittenhouse Rifle” ―as it was referred to in the evidence video― was reportedly carried out to keep it from being used in the celebration of the shootings that violently peaked the Kenosha riots of August, 2020. I would like to believe that the family of the rifle’s victims supported this attempt to destroy the weapon’s symbolism, while its owner may have concluded that the best way to raise it to mythic status was precisely to make it unattainable, elevating it through destruction so it no longer belonged to the realm of men.
A story of #Recognition (I)
Two months earlier, the shooter ―a young man named Kyle Rittenhouse― could hardly contain his excitement as he stepped onto the red, white and blue stage of the AmericaFest convention in Phoenix, Arizona. It would be his first public appearance following the acquittal of six criminal charges brought against him, including the first-degree homicide of two men and the attempted homicide of a third one, while visiting Kenosha ―his father’s city―, 20 miles away from his mother’s home.
Six criminal charges for killing on his travels to Kenosha―
―Six criminals killed on Theseus’ travels to Athens.
In Athens, a teenage Theseus is also being cheered by the public and hailed as their rightful prince. His rise to power had been decided the moment he left his mother’s home to seek the recognition of his father, the aging King Aegeus, whom he would eventually succeed after killing him of grief. Unlike all the criminals, beasts, and political rivals that Theseus would slay throughout his adventures, his father’s death was brought about by a faux pas: forgetting to change the color of his ships’ sails on his return from Crete. Believing his son to be dead, Aegeus would throw himself off the cliffs at Sounion into the sea that now bears his name.
A father that would end his life by drowning―
―A son whose job was to save others from drowning.
Rittenhouse’s father is absent from this story, and will not die of grief. Kyle would visit him often during his summers working as a junior lifeguard in Kenosha. The recognition Kyle seeks is not his father’s, but it is nonetheless paternal. After all, his life has been propelled by the men around him: Dominick Black, his sister’s boyfriend and host while in Kenosha, who would purchase his rifle. The eccentric Judge Bruce Schroeder, who presided over his trial. Republican Congressmen like Cawthorn, Gaetz and Gosar, who were quick to piggyback on his overnight popularity and offer him White House internships. Tucker Carlson, who would praise him on national television as “bright, decent, sincere, dutiful and hard-working; exactly the kind of person you’d want many more of in your country.” The President of the United States, who met with him personally and hailed him as a “nice young man”.
Rittenhouse, acquitted, is being called onto the stage at the AmericaFest convention amidst cheers and pyrotechnics unironically evocative of the shootings that made him famous. A boy who a year and a half ago barely had two dozen followers on a cringe TikTok account is now a legal adult with over 275,000 followers on Twitter.
Our two protagonists ―young, armed and lauded for their kills― were just tryna be famous when they left their mother’s homes one day. And now they are.
A story of #PerilousRoads
August 25, 2020. Arrested after turning himself in, public opinion channels its outrage against Kyle Rittenhouse: What compelled him to travel to Kenosha, Wisconsin, when his home was in Antioch, Illinois? Why would he go there in the first place, if not to participate in the ongoing civil unrest? Wasn’t he looking for trouble by parading his rifle among protesters?
Boys leave their motherland to become men in their fatherland.
Theseus’ mother, Aethra, and grandfather, King Pittheus of Troezen, had warned him that the road to Athens was dangerous and were adamant that he take a ship to avoid its perils; but Theseus —young, stubborn and willing to prove his mettle— deliberately chose to go by land, where he faced in succession six criminals, whom he slew with great symmetry, using their weapons of choice.
Periphetes was killed with his own bronze club. Sinis was ripped apart by the bent pines he used to tear others in two with. Sciron was pushed off the same cliff from which he would kick travelers after forcing them to wash his feet. Cercyon was killed in the same wrestling challenge he used to subjugate others. Procrustes was killed in the bed he used to mutilate his guests. The only exception to this mirroring took place at Crommyon, where Theseus stopped to kill a giant pig, which he swiftly gutted.
The Athenians rejoiced, because these were monsters and criminals. Merchants could resume their travels in and out of Athens, knowing that this boy, Theseus, had made their roads a bit safer.
Theseus’ last kill was Procrustes, who assaulted travelers in his bed―
―Rittenhouse’s first kill was Joseph Rosenbaum, who assaulted minors in his bed.
Back in Phoenix, Arizona, the conservative audience probably thought the same. “Thou shalt not kill”; yes, but also "an eye for an eye". Despite the Christian tenet to love thy neighbor, they were quick to point out that the two men who were now dead were no saints: Joseph Rosenbaum, a clearly troubled individual, had been convicted for molesting children. Anthony Huber, Rittenhouse’s second kill, had served time in prison for kicking his sister and putting a knife to his brother’s neck, threatening to gut him like a pig.
Rittenhouse’s perilous road is shorter and notably less symmetrical than the one Theseus took. Rosenbaum, the molester, was unarmed and was killed by four rifle shots. Huber, the potential fratricide, was armed with a skateboard and was killed with a single shot to the chest. However, the disparity between the killer and the killed narrows down and disappears with Rittenhouse’s third and final shot: Gaige Grosskreutz, who had only one criminal conviction that had been expunged. During their stand-off, both Rittenhouse and Grosskreutz saw each other carrying a firearm but were likely unaware that they both also carried medical kits, the latter being a certified paramedic and the former, someone who was planning to become a nurse. When their paths crossed that fateful night in Kenosha, both characters claimed they were there to restore order, and were equipped to kill, but also to save.
Rittenhouse’s rifle shoots first, but it does not kill Grosskreutz. Unlike Rosenbaum and Huber before him, this time Rittenhouse is unable to eliminate his double.
It would take several years for Theseus to find his own double in Pirithous, King of the Lapiths. But to get there, Theseus had spent years mimicking everyone and everything he defeated. He murdered the criminals on the road to Athens using their own weapons; he abandoned the Cretan princess Ariadne in Naxos, just as she had abandoned her father by siding with Theseus against her brother, the Minotaur. Even the accidental death of his father Aegeus replicated the death he had given the criminal Sciron, whom he had pushed off a cliff as a teenager. The mimicry would extend to his own, miserable death, where he would get pushed off a cliff into the Aegean sea by Lycomedes, after having lost his kingdom to the brothers of Helen, whom he had once kidnapped, and his friend Pirithous, to hubris in the darkness of the Underworld.
Theseus paves his path towards becoming a hero by assimilating and accumulating the personae of those he defeats, and this is how he ends his life: as an incongruous amalgam of a hero, a lecher, a parricide, a filicide, and a fool.
“[I am] not a racist, not a white supremacist, not a domestic terrorist, not a murderer”.
Rittenhouse does the opposite: he defines himself through negation, refusing to see himself in those he has killed. Each shot of his rifle purges the traits of those whom he does not want to become: the deranged anger of Rosenbaum, the molester; the reckless adolescence of Huber, the skateboarder. He violently sheds these layers but stops at the one victim his rifle won’t kill because he resembles its owner too much: Grosskreutz, the activist who, like him, had chosen to put himself at the center of a conflict, armed with a gun in one hand and a medical kit in the other.
“People are getting injured and our job is to protect this business,” Rittenhouse had told a reporter before the shootings. “And part of my job is to also help people. If there is somebody hurt, I’m running into harm’s way. That’s why I have my rifle.”
Although on opposite sides of his trial, Rittenhouse sees himself in Grosskreutz, the gun-wielding paramedic who could have well authored the words above, and in October 13, 2021, a few weeks before the beginning of his trial, he enrolls in prep classes to apply for nursing school at Arizona State University.
A story of #Tokens
It is February 25, 2022, and the Wisconsin State Crime Lab is destroying the Rittenhouse rifle by mechanical shredding. The sixth of Rittenhouse’s criminal charges was the easiest to dismiss: the illegal possession of this firearm. Although he wielded a weapon which he did not own and a medical kit he was not licensed to administer, none of this constituted a crime.
―like Theseus, wielding his father’s sword and wearing his father’s sandals.
Several years ago, King Aegeus awoke in Troezen to find himself in princess Aethra’s bed. Unsure of whether he had conceived a child, he left his sword and sandals under a heavy rock, with the instructions to have his son seek him some day if he was strong enough to lift it; and so Theseus did.
And yet his sword served no purpose other than being a presentation card: his feats on the road to Athens hardly involved any swordplay. The sword and sandals existed only to advance Theseus politically; and like them, the Rittenhouse rifle ―now destroyed― is left behind in the pursuit of new symbols that will advance him in the chapters to come.
A story of #Recognition (II)
These are stories of young men seeking paternal recognition through deliberate exposure to death. But aren’t they all?
Yes, but from the storyteller’s perspective, these are also stories of recognition, of the need to find order amidst the synchronicities of two worlds caught in similar tensions between black and white, with nothing in between.
At the heart of King Aegeus’ woes was a bull that was white as snow, the effigy of the founding myth of the Minoan kingdom that would subjugate Athens, and of the killer of the Cretan prince Androgeus, whose death would lead to the demand of tributes for the Minotaur. At the opposite end, is the despair at seeing black ship sails on the horizon, although they were meant to be white.
Kenosha is also a city trapped in monochrome. It had been in an uproar days before Rittenhouse’s travel due to a white policeman shooting a black man named Jacob Blake; another victim with a criminal record, and a precursor to Rosenbaum, Huber and Grosskreutz. The myth reproduces itself and a new photocopy in black and white emerges: Rittenhouse is now an avatar of the racist white cop; Rosenbaum, Huber and Grosskreutz, of the criminals who had it coming. Only there are glitches in the mimesis: Rittenhouse is accused of white supremacy but his victims are all white; the very victims that he shot with a rifle procured by a (white) man whose name is, suitably, (Dominick) Black.
Black. White. Blake. Black. One was shot while the other enabled the shooter.
Protagonist and deuteragonists converge and collapse between stories and within the same story. The script of the myth where the young hero gains worship by exposing himself to danger and bloodshed has been photocopied so many times to get from Theseus to Rittenhouse, that it has finally lost legibility.
―or maybe that illegibility was there all along?
While Athenians were celebrating the gruesome death of Sciron, the bandit who would kick travelers off a cliff after forcing them to wash his feet; the Megarians, emphatically disagreed. To them, Sciron was their virtuous prince who would be the grandfather of Achilles, and was killed years later after the capture of Eulesis. To atone for this death, Theseus would consecrate the Isthmian Games in his honor.
But didn’t Theseus consecrate the Isthman Games to Sinis ‘Pityocampes’, the pine-bender, the other bandit who would tie travelers to bent pines with his great strength, to see them get snapped in two?
Sinis. Sciron. Blake. Black. Rosenbaum. Rittenhouse. We are witnessing the birth of constellations. Reality becomes a network of dots drawn on a timeless canvas, where everyone projects the pictures they want to see, to illustrate the stories they want to hear, depending on the angle from which they stand.
A story of #Recognition (III)
This is a story of young men seeking recognition, but it is also an avid search for the dots and lines that, when connected, create the constellation that can render the story legible again. This is our third and final act of recognition: the unveiling of the origin point where mythology and reality intersect.
On the night of August 25, 2021, Kyle Rittenhouse would shoot four bullets into Joseph Rosenbaum, who had started chasing him after several aggressive run-ins earlier that day. Although Rosenbaum was only ‘armed’ with a plastic bag, which he flung at Rittenhouse, a third actor who would be key to the drama was also there: an eristic gunman called Joshua Ziminski who fired a shot into the night sky during the seven-second chase; a “warning shot” that immediately escalated the situation and led Rittenhouse to believe that his life was in danger, and to shoot Rosenbaum when he lunged at him.
Without this single gunshot, Joseph Rosenbaum would have likely not been killed, and the chain of events that led to the death of Anthony Huber, the wounding of Gaige Grosskreutz and the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse would have never taken place.
If the tossing of a golden apple at Thetis’ wedding was the prime mover of the Trojan War, the firing of this gun at that exact place and time —2.5 seconds before Rittenhouse killed Rosenbaum— was the trigger of the Kenosha debacle and its ongoing ripple effect across politics and Covidian history.
And it is no coincidence that the goddess Eris, the Greek personification of Discord and the instigator of the golden apple quarrel, had also been left out of the wedding of none other than Theseus’ friend and double, Pirithous. This time, she sought revenge by getting the centaurs drunk and consequently killed in what would be called the Centauromachia, which then ricochets into the kidnapping of the child Helen, the attempt to abduct Persephone from the Underworld, the loss of Theseus’ kingdom, and his death being thrown of a cliff, just like his father had before him, and like he had done to Sciron in his foolish, teenage years.
These are not just stories about events mirroring each other, but of the frailty of the fabric of reality that connects them in the first place. It only takes a small nudge from the goddess of Discord to set actions into motion, whose ripples will reverberate and slowly sync and unsync across characters, times and realities. Theseus is dead, but Rittenhouse has just become a man, and he should heed this warning: There is a larger story at play, and everything that has transpired is just its prequel —a prelude to the inevitable path towards the Minotaur that patiently awaits in the labyrinth ahead.
Brilliant. Just brilliant.