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Borkenau starts his unusually interesting reinterpretation of Greek mythology with a description of a Cretan wall painting of the Flower Prince, showing a tall man with a crown of flowers on his head. The man is neither a god nor of the kings, but probably a royal consort, son and lover of the mountain mother, the Magna Mater who was queen and goddess at the time of the matriarchy in Crete. She was free to choose two phallic consorts. Her insigne was the 'labrys', which is a double axe, and her representative animals were lions. She was the impersonation and symbolization of eternal fruitfulness. She and her Flower Prince were originally not gods. Only later did she become the goddess of fertility, while her royal consort remained human and was sacrificed after the holy marriage. Their sacred intercourse took place in the fields to insure fertility of the fields. This is an example of hybris, the sinful pride of one who aspired to become like a god. A consort had to die annually. He was mourned by the goddess and resurrected by her.
Borkenau considers Freud's interpretation of the story of Oedipus partially correct, but mainly a projection of Jewish-Western patriarchal ideas into the time of Sophocles. Borkenau intelligently and convincingly applies methods learned from Freud and Reik to prove that what the Oedipus myth calls the step-parents were probably the true parents of Oedipus. Freud reasons in his works, Family Romances and Moses and Monotheism, that Pharaoh's daughter was the true mother while the modest Israelitic origin of Moses belongs to the myth. According to Borkenau: 'What is right for Moses should be right for Oedipus, too'. Laius is not the father of Oedipus nor Jocasta his mother. Careful reading of Sophocles also shows that Oedipus never murdered Laius. When Oedipus came to the crossing of the roads, he killed the charioteer. Laius was carried to his death by the horses, which was a ritual death of the royal consort.
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