A set of
mythical chairs in
Hades that make the sitters forget absolutely
everything and sit with a completely blank mind for all
eternity.
These
chairs appear in the journeys of
Theseus and his friend
Pirithous in
Hades. Running from
Castor and
Pollux after they had kidnapped the young
Helen, they abandoned their endeavour and fled to
the underworld, where the
Lord of Hades was quite amused by their arrival. Since he could not
kill them (they were, after all, in the
realm of death), he invited them to sit in his presence, in the aforementioned
Chairs. There they sat, motionless, until
Theseus was rescued by
Hercules.
Pirithous, however, was required to stay in
Hades because he had plotted to capture
Persephone before he had to settle for the more attainable
Helen.
A viewpoint that I deem
interesting towards this subject is the
cruelty of
Hercules' actions. The
Chairs were very much a prison, but they were a prison without pain.
Theseus and his friend sat in a state of utter
ataraxia, almost like a
zen master in
meditation, and
Hercules had 'rescued' them from a very comfortable state. However, this is supposedly offset by
Theseus' practical use to
Hercules. If we expand this to a
universal context, we can argue whether letting everyone
lapse into
vegetative states in
transcendentalist communes is a correct thing to do; the said individuals would be in an utterly
peaceful state, yet they would cease to be of any
practical,
concrete use. Therefore, it's basically just a simple question of whether
social order comes before
inner peace;
Confucianism or
Taoism?
Bah. I
digress.