Serpent Visions is set in Bronze Age Greece, when bards and rhapsodes sang and spoke old tales to spellbound audiences. Teiresias, the blind soothsayer of Thebes, knows he will die soon. He must entrust his long-secret story to the right person while he can. Enter his daughter Manto, who he’s not since she was a small child.

At first Teiresias asks only that Manto listen to his tale. When he adds that he hopes she’ll pass it on, she promises only to attend to every word. Serpent Visions is the story he tells her of his twisty life influenced by the gods, including two changes of gender.

Two generations before the Trojan war depicted in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the brothers and cousins of the family of Oedipus Rex fought two notable wars at the gates of Thebes. These stories became the Thebiad, the first Greek epic, which survives in fragments. Manto has been credited with its creation.

In various myths Teiresias lives over generations, as does Manto: mythmakers weren’t concerned with time lines. Manto couldn’t have actually written the Thebiad, but she did save and speak it so it became established in the oral tradition from at least 1300 BCE.

Serpent Visions gives you the extraordinary tale of Teiresias as he speaks it. Part I, ‘Grace Unveiled,’ covers her seven years as a woman named Teira. In Part II, ‘Riddling the Sphinx,’ again male, he becomes involved in the tragedies of Oedipus’ ancestors and descendants.