ABSTRACT
In Ovid's work, no love is unnatural unless it arises out of a need for power and control. Case in point is Myrrha's love for her father. The tale of Myrrha ends on a most fanciful note when the girl changes into a tree, which incarnates a secret. The tale of Myrrha's desire for her father unearths a shocking matter of what social coding calls "incest". By its very form the tree de-forms the idea of incest and turns it into something else, something natural for the imagination to think about. Something about the fanciful "nature" of myth disabuses us from simples and literals. When Ovid focused on metamorphoses, he forefronted the ideas of movement, change, and transformation as psychic necessities. Nothing is meant to be taken literally, by the letter. That is why, in Ovid, the changes he describes are little metaphorical miracles.
