Semele Asks to See the God

Semele, daughter of the king of Thebes, was loved by Zeus. He came to her in the night in the shape of a man, gentle and dim, and she carried his child.

Hera heard of it. She took the form of Semele’s old nurse and sat beside her, and in a kind voice she planted a doubt. How do you know he is truly a god? Any man can say so. If he loves you, let him show himself to you as he shows himself to his queen — in all his glory.

So the next time Zeus came, Semele asked him for a gift, and he swore by the river Styx — the one oath even gods cannot break — to give her whatever she wished. And she said: Show yourself to me as you truly are.

Zeus tried to stop the words, but they were already spoken. He could not take back the oath. He went up into the sky and gathered the smallest storm he could, the gentlest of his thunderbolts, and came to her as he was.

It did not matter that he chose the smallest. No mortal body could hold even a fraction of that fire. The room went white, and Semele was gone.

Only the child was saved. Zeus pulled him from the ashes, unfinished, and sewed him into his own thigh until he was ready to be born. That child was Dionysus. But his mother never saw him.

She had not been wrong to want the god. Every mortal who lives under the sky is hoping, in some way, to be touched by it. Her mistake was in the measure. She asked to receive all of it at once, and she was a vessel sized for a spark.

The trading concept

Oversizing. Convexity is the sky’s gift, and a portfolio built to receive it is right to want it. But the size of the exposure has to be set by what you can survive, not by how much you want the strike.

A position too large for the account turns the same event that should have been a windfall into a catastrophe. Leveraged too far, sized too big, even a “small” move can destroy a book that could have profited from it at a smaller scale. The voice urging you to take it all at once rarely sounds like an enemy; it usually sounds like a friend asking why you do not trust your own conviction.

The rule is simple and must be written before the storm, not during it: the sacrifice is sized so that you are still standing whatever the god does.

Further reading

• Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 3, lines 253–315 — Hera’s disguise and Semele’s request.
• Apollodorus, Library, 3.4.3 — Semele and the birth of Dionysus.
• Gustave Moreau, Jupiter and Semele (1895), Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris.