EP 41: The Odyssey

You are listening to the Mythmaker Podcast Network. Welcome back to another episode of the Joseph Campbell Foundation podcast, Pathways with Joseph Campbell. I'm your host, Bradley Olson. On this podcast, we at the Joseph Campbell Foundation are excited to share the power of myth through selections from our archive of audio lectures given by Joseph Campbell.

over the course of his teaching and lecturing career. Today we're listening to a lecture titled The Odyssey, recorded in 1971 during a class Campbell taught at Sarah Lawrence College.

This was his 37th year of teaching there. And while you can still sense the energy and enthusiasm in his voice, it's leavened with just a hint of institutional weariness. He would retire the following year in 1972, after 38 years of service at that venerable institution. Campbell, it seems to me... was an extraordinarily organized and methodical teacher. And like the very best of teachers, he knew how to ignite the imagination, offering not just historical or literary detail.

but a grounding in atmosphere, in the cultural innovations of the time. He could place a work like Homer's Odyssey not only in chronological history, but, as Mircea Eliade might have said, in ilo tempore, in mythic time. That is... not just in the past, but in the always. Ilo tempore refers to time out of time, a time that is intuitively, if not literally, invariably present in the imagination's timelessness.

When we speak of Homer, there is so much that we don't know. We don't know if Homer was a real person or a composite figure representing many rapsodes, professional... performers who traveled from place to place reciting epic poetry, like the Iliad and the Odyssey, during a time in ancient Greece when the tradition of oral storytelling was at its peak of popularity. Scholars also debate the authorship of the poems, with some suggesting they were the work of multiple individuals, or even a woman.

Such doubts began in antiquity itself and were based on the subtle difference of vocabulary, as well as those of genre. The Iliad being martial and heroic, while the Odyssey is picaresque. and often fantastic. We also lack a concrete knowledge about Homer's life, including his birthplace, when he lived, and where he lived, and whether he was truly blind.

In terms of composition, we're probably looking at the early 9th or 8th century BCE. We can guess that due to several inferential factors, such as the appearance of cults centered around Homeric heroes. springing up at the end of the 8th century, and scenes from the epic began to appear on pots at just about the same time. One of my favorite theories about Homer...

was offered by William Gladstone, the four-time British prime minister of the late 19th century, who was also a passionate scholar of Homer. Gladstone hatched a novel and much misunderstood idea. That Homer and the ancient Greeks categorized color primarily by brightness and darkness rather than by hue, suggesting a perceptual system based on intensity, not chromatic distinction.

Glandstone pointed to Homer's description of Odysseus's hair as hyacinthy, a word that can mean either purplish-blue like the flower, or reddish-orange like the hyacinth gemstone. In Greek, both a flower and a precious gemstone bear the name hyacinth, and this confusing ambiguity led some to claim, incorrectly, that Gladstone believed Homer was colorblind when he described Odysseus' hair. But he wasn't proposing colorblindness. He was suggesting a different way of seeing.

A world not organized by the spectrum of hues as we know them, but by contrast and radiance. In other words, brightness, not hue. A different kind of vision. I am terribly entertained and frankly made nostalgic by the fact that a politician would be so well read in the classics as to be called a Homeric scholar. But then Abraham Lincoln...

who was born in the same year as Gladstone, was an avid reader of Shakespeare, particularly the tragedies. Alas, the golden age of great statesmen seems to have passed. I hope you'll enjoy the Joseph Campbell 1971 lecture to his Sarah Lawrence class on the Odyssey. As always, immediately following Professor Campbell's lecture, I'll return with some final remarks that explore some of the important...

and interesting ideas from his talk. And now, here's Joseph Campbell. Now, this being the eternal age, anyone... who finds himself in quest of the mystery of his own being, must go reverse in the cycle. And so I've rendered the hero journey in a reverse direction. And what the hero journey takes you to when you come to the crux of your journey, adventure, will be...

An experience of that generating theme, that generating principle, which brought forth the world in the first place. I would say, you come back to the place of the beginnings of the source. But as I pointed out in the first talk, these generating forms are of a number of types. There's the idea of the male-female union. That's the one that is dominant in most of the traditions. Then as a more playful, less primary point of view, there's the idea of the maker.

the deity who makes. And the ways of making are variously represented. The most authentic is that of making by way of the word. This comes forth in an Egyptian theogony, or origin of the gods, known as the Memphite theogony, where they got taught. with one of the most ancient of the Egyptian deities, simply speaks the names of things and things come into being.

and this however is rendered as though it were itself a sexual act the tongue being the male and the teeth the female organ and the speech comes through these as though one were begetting the world through words And then there's the idea also of the carpenter, which comes down with, in the imagery of Christ, the son of the stepson or the foster son of the carpenter, Joseph, or the prophet.

Also, the tailor is an image because the tailor has the web and he puts the thread of the spirit through it. The tailor seated cross-legged in the 14th and 15th century European... book tales was really a carrier of the creator idea. Any maker is in a sense the creator, and the creator god may be compared to a maker. And then there was the idea of the emanation.

of the world. The world emanating from the ether, through air, through fire, through water, through earth, and then the organization of the omen. uh four modes of uh achievement that come at the end at the crisis of his career the first the sacred marriage where the male and female are joined this is the normal or in the traditions of the nature religions and in our fairy tales and folk tales. The divine power is eminent in nature.

Where have you got a religion like any of the biblical religions, which divorces God from nature? God has made nature, and the two are ontologically distinct. The emphasis will be on the Father. figure. And the answers will be on social rather than natural law in terms of time. Then when you come to the idea of the discovery of the divine power in yourself as you get in buddhism for instance or in jainism or any of those introverted

You'll have the idea of the apotheosis of the hero. The hero finds that he is himself, the divine. One could say that the male-female, actually represented by the juncture of the two signs, male and female, points to the dominant in the nature religions, as they're called, the male relationship.

totally the father and so forth is one that stresses the laws of society as the laws that are essential in the traditional societies the laws of society are secondary to nature and are part of nature whereas in the biblical tradition they separate you from nature and the whole drift of the biblical tradition is the old testament

the battle of the Yavist cult against the nature cult. And finally, where we have the thunderbolt of the Buddhist sign, the Vajra, the thunderbolt of illumination, the emphasis... to become the discovery of the self. These are the three great religious emphases that are in conflict with society and society and the world. the macrocosm, this the microcosm, this the microcosm, as the terms that I use in my first call. Now when the hero has achieved his

his culminating, illuminating experience. Or I might say one more thing, that the bride or fire fair leads to a kind of titanism. A figure who represents a violence against all that has been said before and brings forth something totally new. The Promethean figure who tears the fire. from the quarter of fine and negative gods. When the hero has achieved his boom, he comes back then to the world, and from his achievement there come various sorts of new structurings. It may be simply a...

a new life for himself that has been found. Or it may be that he is the founder of a city or the founder of a culture. Or the founder of a religion. You can think Moses going to the mountaintop and coming back then to found a religion. Christ going into the desert. Crucifixion and all that kind of business. And founding a church. You can follow one of Cadmus, for instance, founding the city. These boom-bringers bring very nice thoughts. A boom.

that he just puts himself on the throne and gains the thing that he was that had inherited and lost similarly in the Odyssey Odysseus comes back and sets his house in order. So much then for these two cycles. They interlock. The hero is going back with regret.

Regressing over the process of creation to the point of creation and then he comes back as a re-creator of some top kind. Yeah, you had him coming out in the third quarter there. Oh, no, that was by accident. So he comes back in an age where everything is second and brings you home. That's right. The other thing was the other cycle and that's why I have to come after you. Now, I want to move toward the Odyssey and this is not going to be a...

a very quick move. I have some things to review and speak about first. The first thing I want to do is review very briefly that schedule of dates, great dates, from the emergence of the high culture, or rather the agricultural farms in the Near East. As you recall, I spoke of these... These beginnings about the middle of the 10th century, 10th millennium BC, 9,500 BC.

the beginnings, the very, very deep beginnings of animal conservation, animal domestication, and plant conservation, and the establishment of a relatively secure... well-fed communities as a consequence. After 2,000 years, this I call the proto-Neolithic. And in the Near Eastern area where this began, the name of the people to whom this is generally attributed to the Noctubians. We'll be saying more about this later in the year, I just want to give a brief brief brief.

Then from about 7500 BCI, we have clearly delineated a little settlement. And I took the next 2,000 years. as what I call the basic or basal Neolithic, the setting up of these communities. And that period falls into two halves. The first... are ceramic or pre-pottery Neolithic, and the second ceramic Neolithic or pottery Neolithic, particularly in the cities in a little town of southern Anatolia.

And in Jericho, there was a great well in Jericho, which became a kind of oasis, and the very early settlements in the... what's now called the Palestine area, were in Jericho, all these very early people, with the ceramic. We have the imagery of the goddess and we do know that the goddess is the principal divinity. She is the source of life. On the simplest level, she's the earth goddess.

On a more sophisticated level, she is the goddess of the sphere that envelops the universe. And her consort will be typically the lunar theory. the moon god who will be on earth represented by the moon by the bull whose horns are like the horns of the moon or on an earlier level before the domestication of herds of cattle, when you have the domestication first of the pig, he is the boar. We have the boar and the bull.

The tuss of the bull and the horn of the bull are both lunar designs. And it's the slipman who sheds his skin as the moon sheds his shadow to be reborn. These are the typical and major figures associated with the goddess. And then the birds associated with the goddess are these carnivores, the birds like the vultures. The vulture is that.

agent of the mother goddess who eats bodies back for rebirth. The goddess takes them back and gives them for the birth again. So the birth of which we look upon in a negative way is looked upon as an auspicious power. in these early traditions. Then we have another 2,000 years, which I would call the In this period, the metals begin to come along, so they're known as the Capical, the copper stone age.

And in the middle of this period, 4500 BC, we have the emergence of that beautiful painted pottery, which is certainly the culminating... statement of the old genealithic art a period of exquisite art this is i would say from this emergence of the ceramic to the about 3500 bc we have a kind of triumph of the the early arts graceful sensitive beautiful forms It's interesting that the early ceramic figurines of the goddess up here in the Basel Neolithic are extremely naturalistic.

The figures are quite alive when you see them. They're out of box and gouge, but they certainly have a grace and quality that gets lost, curiously, in the higher Neolithic time, when they become... hierarchically stylized and sometimes quite what we call archaic in character. Earlier art was immediate and fluent. very graceful and later becomes more stilted because rendering some hierarchical theme.

It's in this period of the High Neolithic that the motif in pottery of what the psychologists are now calling the Mandala. appear the organization of fields this is the earliest appearance of an aesthetic organization of a field in the world In the earlier Paleolithic, you don't have an aesthetic concept of a field. You have representations of animals sometimes one on top of the other, and it's a kind of, oh, whatever the...

with the wall ends there, the picture ends. But here you have, and you have it in the wall painting, the concept of a bounded field and an aesthetic organization within that. Then this next period, 3500 to 1500 BC, is what I would call that of the archaic civilizations, and it falls into two main periods. is that of the hieratic city-states, where the first cities in the history of the world emerged in Sumon. Now, it's in these cities that we have the differentiation of castes.

Distinct differentiation of functions of people. In earlier sinful societies, all of the adults inherited the entire culture good. But when you have a rather complicated world with a lot of different things to be done, you have the emergence, so to say, of professions. Part people. And we have to coordinate these with the feeling of being members of a single organic body.

Professional priests, professional governing people, professional trading people, and so forth and so on. And as I've said, the professional priests become the important figures. It is they who discover that the visible planets... moved at a mathematically determinable rate through the big stars, and it was from that notion, that realization, that the notion of a mathematically organized cosmos came into being.

This period here of the Hieratic City State is the period of the sudden crystallization of civilization as we know it. A city organized not in terms of economic need, but in terms of a spiritual principle. the principle being that of imitating in human life the mathematical order of the heavens and we still celebrate our religious festivals in accord with the heavenly progress of the sun Then, about 2500 BC, we begin to have the invaders taking over, the Semites from the Syro-Arabian desert.

Depardively bomb back, hurting people who had no concept of the Order of the Heavens at all. but just a winning and striking card. And their deity is a male deity. And we have this collision between two totally different mentalities. That of the second peasant world.

and that of the raging, vigorous, willful fighter world. And at about the same time from the north, the Aryans were coming down. Now the Aryans... shortly before 1500 BC, learned that they could hitch horses to light two-wheeled war chariots, two powerful horses. hitched to these very light chariots. When you look at the Greek vase painting showing chariots, you'll be surprised perhaps at how light and frail the chariot is.

I don't know whether you know it, but the horse is not an animal that can pull a great weight that catches him in the throat because his windpipe is way out front. And any band around the throat somewhat chokes the horse. So until the horse collar was invented, which would rest on his shoulders, that comes only much later, the horse could not be hitched to a heavy vehicle. So he had these very light, dangerous chariots.

Imagine riding one of these things with the chariot driver and the warrior in the chariot with these two powerful horses. The chariot appears about 1800 BC in the Aryan world. And this is a crisis of history that is as great in terms of military development as the atom bomb. This was an absolutely invincible type of fighting. And we moved from the chariot to the cavalry very shortly later, and these people just swept everything.

Now, from this arcane center of ancient Sumer, there was a gradual diffusion eastward and westward of the culture forms. The westward area that received them was principally crude. The eastern area that received them was Northwest India. That's around 2500 BC. A thousand years later, when the War Chariot comes along, The high culture forms appear in China in the Shang Dynasty. Shang is now dated 1500 BC. And at the same time, we're having fleets of trading vessels going out to the Mediterranean.

up the coast of Europe to Ireland and England, around the coast of North Africa as well. We have a single culture world now. First base. is the goddess mythology. Next come along the great warrior peoples, the Aryans in Europe, the Semites. in the middle east near east and in the former eastern world the mongols of various type coming in first the sham and then after them the jove people

come along about 500 years later. Now what I want to talk about specifically is the collision of these two orders. The Order of the Goddess and the Order of the God. in the Mediterranean world, which lies in the development of the Homeric tradition. And the dates for this development are going to be from 1500 to about 500 bc there's a thousand years there this is a period that has been called the heroic age and it was a terrible age the two

principal invading peoples were from the north, the Aryans, and from the south, the Semites. And specifically, the Aryans that we're going to talk about are the homeric arians the achaeans then the dorians and the semites are the hebrew it's a very interesting fact that the hebrew invasions of canaan were almost exactly coincident with the Dorian War at Troy. Same days, about 1195 BC. These Dorian invasions drove refugees south and the Philistines whom they...

Hebrews encountered when they entered Palestine, which is named after the Philistines, by the way. These were refugees from the Dorian invasion that are described in the Homeric. Next, the commitment of the Homeric traditions to writing comes along just about the time of the commitment of the... a biblical tradition to writing, somewhere in the 8th century BC, around 800 BC, for both traditions. So that they went along parallel tracks. And they had similar...

concepts. They have the concept of fighting going on down here and a kind of attic up there with gods in it who are interested in fighting and directing it. Except that in the Homeric tradition, it's a pantheon of gods. And in the biblical tradition, it's only one god with the sort of angelic chorus. This one god is on only one side.

But the Homeric gods are on both sides, and so are the Greeks. It's a fantastic thing that in the Iliad, the real hero is Hector the Trojan, even though the people who are writing it... of the Greek. This kind of openness to the other side you can get when you have a pantheon. You can't have it when you have a monotheistic tradition very well.

for these two sides. First we have the Mother Goddess community. This is the land-based agricultural tradition in the uh classical field ancient creed ancient vicene and these are called in the text land people. Then we have the warrior people, the Aryans. First to come down with the Achaeans, and the second the Dorian. These invade the Achaeans. become assimilated. The Dorians, who arrived in the late 13th and throughout the 12th century, but particularly in the 12th century, are

absolutely ruthless Iron Age warriors. That is to say, they have iron weapons. Earlier it was rocks. Now iron is a much more uh durable and uh uh plentiful metal. bronze. Bronze is an alloy made of copper and tin, and there's very little tin in the world. That is an age of aristocracy, you might say, but with iron everybody can fight and things are a little more tough than they were before. So the Dorians come in with a new impact and it's from there.

Warcraft that we have the traditions of the Heberic epics. The fall of Troy, which was really an Achaean city... It's attributed now to the dates about 1195 to 1185 B.C. And it did take place.

17th, 18th and early 19th centuries, it was thought that the epics of the royal tribe were sheer fantasy. And then this wonderful German merchant, Schliemann, who had read Homer and his boyhood, had the intuition that Troy did exist, and he had the intuition that he knew where it probably was. And when he had made enough money... to equip himself for an exploratory expedition. He went to the history of the town of Troy and Troy, and there indeed it was.

He performed this feat in 1872 before the period of Schliemann. Absolutely stunning discovery. And he was followed then in 20 years by another German, Dirkfeld, 1890. One I think is 93, something like that, who went at it a little more scientifically. But both of these men, from the standpoint of modern archaeology, were bunglers. rescue things that these men wouldn't even have noticed.

destroyed by these two and yet at the same time they were the ones who found it and it's to them that we owe the realization that the Troy did exist and that Mycenae did exist. And the architecture of Mycenae is the architecture of these great heroes, Agamemnon, Menelaus, and so forth of the Trojan War.

Now, in the epics and theatre of the Greeks, we have the combination of these two traditions. The image of the old Palastrian world, the cosmogonic cycle, and the hero journey. The deities of this cycle, the principal deities, were the goddesses and their male consorts. The three principal manifestations of the goddess are represented in three great classical goddesses. who represents the matron, the mother, the goddess spouse, and Aphrodite, who represents the courtesan.

the goddess of erotic delights. These are the three. The principal deity associated with them in the old tradition is Hermes. The symbol of Hermes is the caduceus, the staff with the unlocking serpents. That tells us who he is. He is the Lord of that energy, that vitality, that... fructifies the world and rends it healthy and strong. And so his sign is the sign of the medical profession to this day.

Figures that have come up in the Greek world in the patriarchal tradition are really basically pre-patriarchal. They belong to the soil. And the principal cults are the cults of fertility. which naturally carry very strong phallic and sex symbologies along with them. Against that... We have the world of these heroic warriors. The character, I suppose, the thing in the world today that would most resemble these would be the members of the professional football team.

Real big fighting fellas who like to fight. It's not that they have to, it's that they want to. And that's the way people enjoy life. You must remember that life in those days wasn't very long anyhow. And after you were about 35 or so, you began to creep pretty badly. So, why not go with Achilles when he says, take a short life full of deeds and fame, then the long life without contempt. He had the vitality of youth and knew how to have fun with it.

That you do by knocking people on the head and taking what they've got. And you have a deity behind you who helps you do this. And he's going to be a kind of wall deity, a thunder hurler. And his name will be Zeus, and his name will be Apollo. Now this is a true tradition. And when you have a team of warriors like that, they... forming these traditions into two types. One is the chieftain and the warrior, and the one wielding the weapon, and the others will be the magicians.

The priests who know the charms and formulae to recite command the Romans really work. These things have to go together. So we have the water hymns. Warrior hymns, or rather, peons of praise. Warrior celebrations. Celebrating the hero. Hero's themes. and we have the magicians or priests with their kings to invoke the gods. Now, since man was not made by God, but the gods made by men, God always has the character of the men who make them.

So the gods of these hero warriors were warrior gods, and the hymns invoked them to give assistance in battle. At this same time, The Aryans were going into India. And then you had the same situation, and earlier Bronze Age people, and in come the chariot fighters. That's an interesting thing, that in the East... The religious move always dominates the secular. It is stronger than the secular. And in India, it is the Brahmins, the magicians.

who have been dominant. But in Europe, it is always the secular attitude that we have, and the principal epics that we have in the West from here. Those are the warrior mentality and warrior style The Vedas of the Hindus to the Orchid and to the Homeric hymns of the Greeks. They're the dominant themes in India. The dominant in the West are the great warrior epics.

Now this Greek world, we can... date things in a very broad general way. If we take that date 1500 for the great invasion, first the Achaean and then the Dorian invasion. We can think of this whole thousand years as the Homeric age, really. But in the 6th century BC, just before the 500th date, We have the rise of cities. There were cities like Troy originally, but the emphasis of the Homeric people was not city building.

It was fighting. Then we have the gradual return of cities in the 6th century. And of these, the most important is Athens. The great period of the emergence of Athens is the late 6th century. And the great governor of Athens, the tyrant of Athens at the time, is Persis. It was Persispetus' idea that an urban mythology should be fashioned for Athens.

This is something that will be happening also in the biblical tradition. To fashion, to make up, to invent a mythology that will validate and support and give historical prestige. to this newly emerged people or city. And he founded the Pan-Athendian Games, these great games that were taking place and these included sports events like the Olympic Games and also contests of poetry, contests of playwriting and so forth.

And Precision just founded what we call the New Theatre in 535 BC. This theatre... was founded on the shrine, on the site of the shrine of Dionysus. Dionysus is the deity who is the light of wine, of wheat. He is a fertility deity originally, but he comes forth now as a deity representing the vitality of all things, and his singles are the blue.

the serpent, and so forth. He is a lord of death and rebirth. He is a counterpart, in a certain way, of Hermes. These two entities are very closely related. This cycle of the year is associated with Dionysus. What the Athenian playwrights did. was take the spirit of dionysos death and rebirth transcendence of death the moon that can cast off death as their inspiration and cast the warrior hero themes of the Olympians in the roles associated with this.

And what you'll notice is the hero always dies. Life goes on. What the heroes represent in the Greek tragedy are the sacrificed wolves. the sacrificed God, the sacrificed life, the sacrificed itself releasing life. How to anticipate things that are going to come up later in the year. The tragic attitude of the Greek is, this world as it is, is good, is great, is magnificent. It involves death.

And the one who dies is great. There's no point betraying the death of someone who doesn't amount to it. The point is the one who has reached the culmination, the aims, the fulfillment of what human beings would wish for. is the one to kill, because then you really experience the poignancy of life. Pindar, who used to celebrate the victories of young men at the Olympic Games, This is one that has stuck in my mind. He was celebrating a young wrestler, a youth that won the wrestling laurels.

And it was this, this moment of shining youth. Time mows men down like grass. All goes into dust, but at the moment of triumph, of its triumph. life shines and this is quite different from joe's attitude Why does man the Duchess regard him, O Lord? And there's been the contemplating skulls and saying, oh, since I'm going to be a skull, I should have seen that I've got on me now. That whole thing of evaluating life by looking at the skull.

which is a sort of meditation for months, as all the other antithetics of this kind of spirit should have said. Now that is the background of the...

the tragedies. The background of the epic is the warrior story itself, wonderfully told. Now I want to move directly to... the epic of Troy itself. Troy, we now know from the work of the Archelagist, did exist and was overwhelmed by the Dorians in the 12th century. Now, legends attached to this. The legends are not going to be historically factual. They're going to develop the thing in an interesting way.

We have these Pelasgian deities, goddess oriented. We have the hero epics. Now let's see what happens. The War of Troy goes back to the time of the gods. The three great goddesses, Athene, Hera, and Aphrodite. We're having a beauty count. And they chose to be judged. This languid youth, Paris, the son of Triumph, the Lord of Troy.

And he languidly, looking over the three of them, is to make judgment. Aphrodite cheats. I love all his cheats. That's one of the nice things about it. Aphrodite says, you choose me. I'll manage to let you run off with Helen of Troy, the most beautiful thing at this side of the moon. And so she won. And so Paris did indeed. run off with Helen. So first we have the beauty contest.

Now everybody was taking that for granted pretty well, until women began to get PhDs. And a very, very little fight comes along, Jane Harrison DeWitt. And in her work, the polyglomerate to a study of Greek religion, she points out that this is the most absurd way to start a war. And what it actually represents is a patriarchal... denigration of the female, putting this fuck in the position to judge three goddesses. And she goes rummaging among the theranics of the slightly earlier period.

And she finds some pictures that tell a quite different story, what they show. These three goddesses and each one looking like a battle axe rather than like something asking to be judged for her beauty. And here they are with a very severe look. One, two, three. And before them... is Hermes with his Tadduceus. And he's got a young man by the hand. And he's saying, you've got to face it.

Yes, the young man had to make a choice, but the choice was the goddess who would be his destiny. Was he going to be a warrior? Was he going to be a ruler or was he going to be a lover? These things don't go together. The earlier goddesses were the initiators. Well, all of the initiation cults is the goddess who is the initiator. And even into late periods, the Kambiri cults of the Samothrace area.

There the men were actually humiliated and turned into clowns by the women priestesses who were their initiates. This is a basic thing. The male has to be tamed, he has to be tenderized, he has to be broken in his will and reduced to something that can be handled in the domestic situation.

Then we have the next theme, that of the Helen abduction. Now it's an old custom of... Earth goddesses to be abducted. Persephone, abducted to the underworld. The woman, the virgin violated by the divine power. Little Daphne wouldn't accept it. She ran away and would turn into a tree. But the abduction of the female, and then her rescue by usually two heroes, twin heroes.

Now, when this story of Helen as a goddess, Helen certainly was a fertility goddess originally, because there are images of Helen in shrines in the Sparta area. And when a conqueror conquers a shrine, he will abduct the image so that the shrine will lose its patron power. And then one has to go back and get the image back.

One theory is that the Helen abduction is based on the abduction of a goddess image and its retrieval. Another is the one I've just spoken of, the earth goddess who has to be abducted every year if she goes into the abyss and comes up again. Helen was abducted by Theseus and rescued by her twin brothers, Castor and Pollux. Helen is abducted by Paris and rescued by Menelaus and Agamemnon. So we have the regular abduction theme here.

All right, Menelaus was her husband, and so we have now the theme of the Trojan War. Ten years fighting before Troy with the gods with their squabbles up in heaven. Now when Poseidon is winning up there, it's the Trojans. And when it's Zeus, it's the Achaeans. It's a wonderful game. They play with the gods. and proving nobody's taking this thing very seriously as an interpretation of how the war got the way it went. And finally, the war is won. This is the epic of the Iliad.

And the deity that is the most prominent figure in the Iliad is Apollo. This is the law of God. Now look at the situation. These men have been 10 years... women have been plundered there is no rapport no spiritual rapport at all woman is plundered And now these fellows come back. These returns are called the Nostoi. And a number of the Greek tragedies are based on what happened when they got home.

Now we all know about Agamemnon, killed in the bathtub by Clytemnestra. Just think of him. When they were on the way, he going to get his brothers... He leaves Chidamester here with their children, quite young at that time, and about two-thirds of the way the fleet... can't get up a wind. There's no wind. They're stalled. And so the magician says, well, we have to have a sacrifice, and a nice little virgin is the best. So Agamemnon sends home for Iphigenia, his daughter.

Then he kills her so he can go get up a win to get Helen back for his brother. And Clytemnestra's supposed to be a villainous when he comes back. He's got a gal with him and he comes back too, you know, who's prophesying madly.

and seers and he has a bad time. The most amusing and interesting Nostoi return is that of Odysseus. Are Ulysses calling the land? What happens with him? With twelve ships. Twelve. Watch out. We're in celestial sphere here. With twelve ships. He says, what's from Troy? And just off the coast of, what's now, Turkey, he goes into a little town, Ismaias, raids it, raids the women.

Runs off with the materials of the culture until he's still a monster. He's nobody to come home. And the gods see to it that he becomes tenderized. And the theme of the Odyssey is, you might say, the tenderization of Odysseus. How he has to buckle down to Paulus' struggle with himself. And it begins... with the gods blowing him around for 10 days on the Mediterranean. And you blow for 10 days on the Mediterranean, and you're out of the Mediterranean. That's to say, his first adventure.

After that blow, at the Isle of the Lotus Eaters, it's the Isle of a mythological, magical situation. The eating of psychedelic drugs and going off to sleep. and forgetting the world and then he goes down into his realm of sleep so i've come now to uh the point of actually tracing the tenderizing cycle of Odysseus and I'll pause for about 10 minutes and move into that. It's the transfer of access from the sheerly masculine fighting outer muscle, you might say, to the inward feeling world.

acquiescence of the male to this opposite power. Samuel Butler says that he thought the Odyssey was written by a woman, and the Iliad by a man. One way or another, the powers represented our respectively, the female and the male. uh power so uh

conferences with most of you and I think we've got a very good class this year. There are a couple, however, who don't seem to realize that I'm not there to find out what you're enough to know. You're there to find out what I know. So come with your questions, plans, and so forth, and make the best of that half hour. It's only a half hour. You're going to have no more than 15 of them during the whole course of the year. So here I am at your service. And I don't care how much you know.

it's you who has to care how much you can get from me so you're the initiator of the conference most of you seem to know that but there were three or four that seem to be waiting for me to come on here what can you tell me I'm not going to try that at all.

Let's follow our hero on his journey. Odysseus has been away for 10 years, and it's going to take him 10 years to get home. That means at the end of the 19th year of his project, he will return. It's interesting that one of the great problems in these archaic periods was the coordination of the solar and the lunar calendars. And we know that Penelope is up in her room there, weaving and unweaving away. And that's just what the moon does, so she may well be a lunar goddess.

that if sun and moon rise simultaneously, let's say in the first minute of the sign of Aries, they will... next year not rise simultaneously at that time and it will be in fact 20 years before they rise simultaneously again. That is to say, the period of separation of these cosmic realms of sun and moon is exactly the length of time of the separation of Penelope and Odysseus.

And we'll find when Odysseus comes home and a test is set up to see who is Odysseus. Odysseus is given by Penelope, they're all given by Penelope, a... the following test. She sets up 12 bronze axes. 12 again. The 12 signs of the zodiac. And the one who can draw Odysseus' bow and send the arrow through all twelve axes is Odysseus. He has gone around. He is the solar power, and he has come home to the goddess.

So there is a mythological background here. The interesting point about these epics is the themes are mythological. They are transformed to relate to human beings in their relationships. And it's through that double perspective that we get the structuring forms and also the exhilarating mysteries of these cycles. so we're going to leave troy and we're going to try to get home as i said when we left troy we went ashore and waited to town

10 day blow came up. And the next thing we do, we're in the land of the overseas. This is the beginning of the trip into the mythological realm. This is the land of mythological experiences. A power, the power of the gods has come which is stronger than the power of obesity. He is not in control of his 12 ships. They've gone out of control. And you'll find them going out of control in a number of ways.

later on his men who eat the lotus they want to they forget home this is the river of unforgettableness you might say where the world of time and space and its duties is left behind and you go into the realm of The mystical adventure. This is the threshold of adventure that I spoke about. Odysseus holds his men back to the ships one at a time, chains them in the hold, and goes on.

You can't let them quit here. The adventure hasn't even begun. Then comes the next great adventure. It's the adventure of the Cyclops. Going through the bullseye, so to say. Through the terrible threshold guardian. That's the threshold guardian motif. That dark guardian of the threshold. They go to his cave. He kills and eats half the men that Odysseus brings with him. The rest have to get out. I'm taking the two breadsticks, so I don't have to...

How do they get out? They get out by identifying themselves with rams. The man, the cyclops, has a herd of sheep. The men, you remember, three sheep together and one man under them. And then Odysseus following under a great big ram. The ram in this whole culture world was associated with the sun. The great Egyptian god Amun was the ram god, the animal vehicle of the sun. The ram is an animal of tremendous sexual energy.

These animals also like to stand up on high little hills, and they sort of suggest the solar figure. The ram has been associated from way, way back with the solar gods. very, very ceramic figures of the 7th millennium BC as a solar figure in contrast to the bull, which is the lunar figure. So, they... It's not the one eye, it's this eye of the Cyclops. The Cyclops has one eye, the second eye, and he is the son of Poseidon. He is the guardian, the outpost guardian of the realm.

of the divine mysteries, and our hero goes through it. He goes through it first by identifying himself with the Sun God. That is to say, the spiritual principle, the light. And his final adventure is going to be at the Island of the Sun.

When he is asked who he is, he says his name is Nomad. That is to say, he dissociates himself from his name. Earthly's social character, that's not his name, his name is Ulysses, or Odysseus, and Odysseus has certain duties, but no man has no duty. It's as though in the Hindu tradition he had gone into the forest, or in our Hindu tradition he had gone into the monastery and left his name behind. He has dismissed that whole world.

He has identified himself as a spiritual principle. Now when you have identified yourself as a spiritual principle and cast off earthly things, which is what's happened here, you may feel a spiritual inflation. And so, the next adventure, this is first below the Cedars, well first it's just minus, then below the Cedars, and the sidebar. For, then, is the God of the wind. The Spirit. And he's been given the Spirit, as anyone who has taken a good dose of LSD, but can you handle it?

A wallet full of windows. And he says, now just open it a little bit at a time. Well, it cannot receive the whole load of the divine breath. Open it a little bit at a time and it will get you home. And when they are just about behold, then think, Odysseus goes to sleep. Odysseus, the controlling mind principle, and the men who represent the impulses and so forth of the rest of the physical system.

Their curiosity takes over. They open the bags and they're blown back to the island of Aeolus again. It's a peculiar poem of Aeolus in that island there. He marries his sons to his daughters and so forth, a kind of interned community. That, in other words, is the mythological community. These are people living entirely in terms of the divine relationships where the goddess and the god are brother and sister. That's the old Egyptian pharaoh in the old Egyptian chronic house for many years.

It's a divine. Well, they come back. Can you imagine? We blew it. So you give us another one. You go on your own. So off they go without a win. So after you've received great inflation, you know, you will then experience a depression. This is known as the manic depressive, literally. You think you're a god. You know you're not. Well, you shouldn't be trying to be, is the point. You've got to be somewhere in between, but this is it. So, after L, there's no wind now.

And we're rowing. We're way down in the brutal, physical world. And we come to the island of the Lestergons. The ships, the 12 ships, they've got to row. Well, we all looked good for a couple of minutes there with the Lestergons until they suddenly realized these are cannibals and we are the next meal. And so comes the business of escape.

Only one ship escapes. So let's go and sink 11 of the 12 ships. Now this is, these are the tests you remember, that I've found out, and this is the business of... Self-divestiture. Odysseus is going to get down to himself, finally. He's going to lose the final ship. But on the way down, this is what's happening. So now, one ship left.

you come to the next aisle, the aisle of Circe. Circe of the braided luxe, the nymph who turns men into swine. Well, That sounds kind of bad. A little expedition goes, and there she is in this lovely solitary place. And what's she doing? She's weaving. Whenever you have goddesses with braided locks who are weeping, you will recognize the creator of the world. Because the world is the when.

woven by the goddess maya you know the god who creates illusions and the mother is the one who brings us all into the world and so creates the world in these old major traditions the mother goddess is the world creator Not the male guy. It's a much more sensible image. And six, it is this figure. Now I told you. The consort of the goddess in the old tradition is the boar, is the pig, and she reduces men to this condition. She is the goddess whose consort is the boar.

Tusks of the boar are the crescent of the moon, and the black face of the boar in between is the dark of the moon. Here, Odysseus does need help. And it comes in the way of our God of the Caduceus, Hermes. Hermes is the God who guides him through, and he's the God who conducted that youth. to face the three Gamasas that I talked about before. Who are the three Gamasas going to be here? They're going to be Circe, Calypso, and Nazikar.

The same good old three that we know before. Circe, in the way of the seductress. Calypso, and she's kind of a middle-aged nymph, with whom our hero spends eight quiet years. And then comes the last little one, Nausicaa, the little virginal nymph. So he has had the experience of the goddess in her three principal modes.

Hermes says, here, I'm going to give you a little help, and he gives him a plant, Moli, which protects him. That's the magical aid when it comes to the real crooks of his adventure. And he says, now... Don't let her scare you, and don't be too nasty with her. But with this to protect you, you just jump at her and on her with your sword, and she will acquiesce.

And she'll take you to bed, and it's going to be very nice. There's the sacred marriage motif, the meeting with the goddess. And please recall, Odysseus had a herd of pigs. In fact, when he returns up here, he meets his son in the flying herd shelter. The pig is the great god of this whole thing here. And he had a herd with 364s in it. That's a number of days in the sacred mythological year. All right. Everything's fine now. Seriously.

And when the men whom she had turned into swine were turned by her magic back into men again, they were younger and fairer than before. So it's not too bad when these things happen.

Next is, she becomes Odysseus' guide. And she guides him first to the underworld. So, trip seven is down to the next level, the ancestors. This is the female principal. She introduces you to the Ancestor's principal. The underworld. Now an interesting thing. In the classical underworld there are these twittering shadows, these twittering spooks. A visage recognizes them. There's one three-dimensional figure there.

It's Tyresius. I don't know whether you remember the story of Tyresius, which is in Orbit. Piresias was out walking through the woods one day when he came upon two great serpents populating and he took his walking steps and he placed it between them to separate them. and he was transformed into a woman. Those are our marvelous serpents. And what they represent is the one serpent who has become two, just as Adam became Adam and Eve.

the primal circuit becomes two, and each of us represents only half of the human mystery, only half of the life mystery. We're on either that side or this side. the female or the male side. Tiresias was turned into a woman and for eight years, that's an octave of years, he remained in the female form.

And then he is walking through the woods again. He sees two serpents copulating, or she is walking through the woods again, and she sees two serpents copulating. She plays with the stand between them. He's turned back into a male. And so in heaven one day, when Zeus and Hera were arguing as to who enjoyed sexual intercourse the more, the male or the female,

The group said, well, obviously neither of us can say, let's send for the one who can. So they sent me a kind of email. And Tommy just said, why the email? I don't know why Hera just says badly, but she did. And she struck him blind. And Zeus compensated him for that.

because he couldn't undo what Hera had done, but he opened his inward eye and gave him the eye of prophecy. So he does not... balance as we do with two eyes just now one side of the mystery he is in the center and he coordinates the two and isn't it interesting that at the culmination moment here of Odysseus' instruction The figure who he meets and talks with is one who is male and female, what in India is called the Anandari, the half-woman lord. Shiva is represented in that form.

He's catching on with something here. Next, he goes back to Circe again. Mama, what do I do next? She says, well, now you can go to my father's house. The Lord of Light, the ultimate light.

But she says there are a number of dangers on the way, and these are typical fairytale dangers. Danger one of the sirens. The allures of the luxury of the world. The allure of the taste of the juice, as Rav Krishna said. Enjoying the bliss of paradise. They sing a fascinating song. They epitomize the fascina instrumentum that I spoke of earlier.

Well, Odysseus wants it both ways. So he says, I'll stop up your ears, gentlemen, the members of his crew. But I'm going to leave mine open, and you just tie me to the mask here. No matter how much I scream or fight, Don't loose me. We'll get through this and I'll hear the sirens going just the same. So he goes through. That's like going on a bad trip with a lot of people to help you through all the dangers that were torn apart. Next.

is the wandering rocks. Well, this is a variant of the active door motif, the simpleities, the clashing rocks, the hero goes through. Next, there is Sir and Charybdis, these two unfortunate girls. One represents the whirlpool of the abyss. The other represents the rock. of a cliff the boat has to sail between. Later allegorical interpreters interpreted this as, the abyss of mysticism and the rock of logic don't get caught on either, but go between. One way or another, he comes to the eighth.

The island of the sun. And the sun's cattle are taboo. Odysseus goes to sleep again. His men kill the cattle. And a song comes up. wraps the whole outfit. Now, if Odysseus had been a Hindu yogi, he would not have gone to sleep at that point. And when he was going right through the sun door, never to return. Now this is the big problem of the mystical life. Are you going to go through and out? Or are you going to touch base and run home?

you have experienced it. This is the difference in Buddhism between the Buddha who believes the world and the Bodhisattva who stays in the world. Odysseus being a Greek. and a western oriented man comes back now the amusing thing is that with this shipwreck this is the okay divestiture. He's lost his last grip, his men he's simply thrown naked into the sea, grabbing a piece of rage. And the part of the water...

Now pulls him back fast all the way and his next great start is the Isle of Calypso. He's on the way back. That's our middle-aged name. He's there for eight years. Digesting what he has learned about the mysteries of marriage. Relation to. the female in a way that is not overly submissive, nor brutally aggressive, but of accord, as the lesson of Tiresias may know.

And it's there that he begins to be found, after perhaps six or seven years, sitting on the beach looking home. I mean... Even Calypso sort of wears out. Calypso of the braided locks also weeping. So Hermes comes and says to Calypso, Let him make a raft and let him go. So it's a pretty scene. Bye bye. And he's in the water.

And he's getting back to the area where the Cyclops was and called Satan's power, the Lord of the Sea. And the sea gets to be a bit turbulent. And he's knocked from his wrath. And he's washed up on the shore. of the Phaeacians. I'll write down the name of Nausicaa because she's the one here. So here's this beaten up, banged up fellow who's been swimming for nine days or so. He's in the bushes. And the little girls come down to the root spring to do their washing. And what do they love to do?

They love to play ball. Remember that little princess playing with the ball? And what do you know? The ball flips through their hand and goes into the bushes. And instead of a frog coming up and saying, what's the mad little girl, it's Odysseus himself. Anybody lose the ball? And now I'll take a round of applause on this rather long smile here. So this is quite a thrill. And she thinks, oh, this is the one. And she brings him home to Daddy. And Daddy had dinner that night and paid him the best.

He says, well, stranger, where are you from? And what brings you here? My lord, Odysseus. Everybody knows the name. 20 years ago, this was a big man in the world. Where's he been since? Well, here he is, and then Philip and Asuka realizes, obviously, to me. And then the father does a big thing. He equips a great ship that will take him to his own fair land.

and he is left on the beach to sleep. So, that's the journey of Ortiz. Now what I'm going to talk about tomorrow briefly is Abeditius' son, Talancus, who grows in question of his father. And the meeting is in The Swine Herds. Again, the king of Lord God has the savior here. At home, his home is being... destroyed, really, by the suitors. And Athene comes. Athene here, the patrons of heroes and of the home, of the patriarchal home.

Sends him to find his father and then the two of them come back in his life suit. So we'll save the wonderful return of Odysseus and his life suitors. for next time, but I hope this has convinced you of something, that if you just look at these stories and see where you are, in terms of this cycle, you'll be somewhere on the hero journey, I'll tell you, no matter what story you're taking.

and this one just wears out perfectly all the way along the lines of the whole system the sacred marriage and the meeting with the father and the return the whole thing

Professor Campbell begins his lecture by situating us in the pre-classical world that gave rise to Homer's Odyssey. I'd like to continue in that spirit. perhaps a bit differently than I generally do, by first considering Troy not only as a geographical site, but as an idea, one shaped by myth, memory, and longing.

From there, we'll turn to Heinrich Schliemann, the first to excavate the Anatolian hill he believed concealed the remains of the very city Homer had immortalized in the Iliad. And finally... I'll wonder out loud a bit about why we so desperately want our myths to have material and historical significance. In classical Greece, Historical record-keeping extended no farther back than the first Olympiad in 776 BC. That date roughly coincides with the adoption of a new alphabet.

adapted from Phoenician script, a watershed moment marking the transition from the older linear B, a syllabic script used mainly for bureaucratic record-keeping, and now long extinct. This shift in writing technology didn't just enable better record-keeping. It opened the door for the composition and transmission of epic poetry, allowing myths like that of Troy to be written down.

preserved, and reimagined across generations. Understandably, then, a proper historical record doesn't begin until around the 8th century. And up to the 19th century, invention of archaeology, which opened up a window into prehistory. What lay before consisted of legends, stories, and genealogies which were assumed to refer to real events.

All in all, classical Greece had no good source for their prehistoric past. In the ancient world, there was a common belief in the Trojan War as an historical event. The philosopher Anaxagoras was one of the few who doubted on the grounds of having no proof for it. There were no records or documents that related to such a war, yet ancient historians like Thucydides were quite willing to give credence to the Trojan War based on the tradition which evolved from Homer's accounts.

In fact, Homer's myth was so powerful, so affecting, that a virtual parade of conquerors conducted expeditions allowing them to stand and look out upon the plain where tradition had it. Achilles and Hector had dueled. As the Persian king Xerxes was about to invade Greece in 480 BC, he paused at the Hellespont and made the short trip south to Hiserlich.

which by then hosted a small Greek colony called Ilium and was known traditionally as the site of the Trojan War. Xerxes sacrificed a thousand oxen to the Trojan Athena. and his magi made libations to the great heroes of old. A hundred and fifty years later, Alexander crossed the Dardanelles heading in the opposite direction. He veered slightly off course.

so he too might stand on the Trode, eager like Xerxes to see the site of the Trojan War. Homer was Alexander's favorite author, and Alexander slept with a copy of the Iliad under his pillow. and carried the book with him always. He stopped his fleet in mid-channel to make sacrifice to Poseidon, hoping to appease the god who was so strongly opposed to the Greeks during their war with Troy.

Once ashore, Alexander dedicated his armor to the Trojan Athena, and rather brazenly, I think, took from her shrine... ancient arms and a shield that, as tradition had it, was preserved from the Trojan War. Before sailing away, he laid a wreath at Achilles' tomb on the plain of Troy and noted enviously, that achilles was a lucky man to have had homer to recount his heroic deeds and preserve his memory one might be inclined to overlook alexander's enthusiastic

fanboy-like worship of Achilles by remembering that he was only 20 years old at the time. My goodness. When I was 20, I had barely conquered acne, let alone half the world. By the year 48 BCE, when Julius Caesar visited Troy, the city was largely in ruins. He walked around searching for traces of the great wall built by Apollo, but found mostly scrub brush and dying trees whose roots were embedded in what remained of the foundation stones of the ruined city.

Caesar, who claimed the great Trojan Aeneas as his ancestor, was disappointed by his visit, saying even the ruins had been destroyed. And more than 19 centuries later, mostly in the academy. The debate goes on. Did Troy really exist, or was it merely a myth, a convenient setting for Homer's creative imagination to explore the problems of war, of divine and human nature? Of what use are morals or ethics in a tempestuous martial world? Was Hisserlich really Troy?

Unlike the countless pilgrims who trekked to Hisselick Hill through the ages and believed it to be the city of ancient epic fame, Heinrich Schliemann was not content with belief.

He was determined to prove it. To understand why Schliemann, born in 1822, could not rest content with belief alone, we must turn our attention from the ruins at Troy. to the ruins and reinventions of Schliemann's own past. Schliemann believed that Homer's Iliad was a more or less historical account of actual events that took place at Troy.

Schliemann's father, a rather unenterprising, feckless Lutheran minister accused of embezzling church funds, was fond of Homer and told his young son tales from the Iliad and the Odyssey. In what surely must be an act of revisionist history, Schliemann insisted that he decided at the age of seven that he would one day excavate the city of Troy.

Schliemann's mother, having had nine children, died young when he was nine years old, leaving him functionally orphaned as his father sent the young Schliemann off to be raised by an uncle. He worked for five years, apprenticed to a grocer, and then became a cabin boy on a two-masted brig heading for Venezuela. Twelve days into the voyage, the Dorothea foundered in a storm.

Schliemann, among the survivors, washed up in the Netherlands and eventually found work as a bookkeeper in Amsterdam. Over time, Schliemann represented a number of companies. though his true talent seemed to lie in self-invention. He taught himself Russian and Greek using a regimen he developed that was so effective, he claimed, it allowed him to learn a new language in six weeks.

Ever the linguist and showman, he wrote his diary in the language of whichever country he found himself in. By the time his life ended, Schliemann could converse in at least a dozen languages. English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Swedish, Polish, Greek, Latin, and Arabic. alongside his native German, making him either a prodigy or a prodigious exaggerator. And there are plenty of instances over the course of his life that suggest the latter is closer to the truth.

His linguistic gifts, whatever their precise extent, proved useful in the import trade. In 1850, he learned that his brother Ludwig had died after amassing a fortune in the California gold fields. Schliemann promptly made his way to Sacramento, where in early 1851 he founded a bank and began buying and reselling gold dust, over a million dollars worth in just six months, according to his own accounting.

When the local Rothschild agent complained about suspiciously light shipments, Schliemann took his leave of California, blaming an unspecified illness for his abrupt departure. Conveniently, during his stay, California had become the 31st state, and Schliemann became, at least officially, an American citizen.

In another six years or so, Schliemann was wealthy enough to retire at the ripe old age of 36. Still captivated by the stories of Homer and the ancient Mediterranean world, Schliemann spent the latter part of his life in pursuit of its physical remains, determined to give substance to the shadowy outlines of myth.

In 1868, he wrote a book that argued for Hiserlich as the site of the ancient city of Troy. And upon submitting the book to the University of Rostock, he was awarded a PhD in absentia. He now dedicated the second part of his life to discovering the actual physical remains of the cities of Homer's epic tales. Schliemann began digging at Hisserlich Hill in 1870.

armed with little more than an unshakable conviction that he knew best where and how to find the city of Troy. He had no clear excavation plan and gave little thought to the site's extraordinary antiquity. Troy, after all, had been built, destroyed, and rebuilt many times over the course of four millennia. Its history is layered like sediment. Ironically, in his haste to uncover Homer's Troy,

Schliemann managed to destroy much of it all over again. Believing the city described in the Iliad lay at the deepest strata, he used brute force methods to reach it. cutting a massive trench through the mound using dynamite and discarding quote-unquote insignificant upper layers and relics without proper documentation.

Schliemann carelessly destroyed much of the layer of Troy that is now believed to be contemporary with the legendary Trojan War. In his pursuit of Homer's epic vision, he demolished history quite literally. and left much of the archaeological record in ruin. It's true that archaeology was a very new science during Schliemann's time, and standardized rigorous...

excavation techniques were not yet widely adapted. However, his methods were considered crude even at the time, and a number of professional archaeologists later criticized them. Schliemann's legacy is complex, while he's credited with demonstrating the historicity of places mentioned in Homer and attracting public interest to archaeology. His destructive methodologies and ethical lapses remain significant criticisms. That is, at least archaeologically, the story of Troy. At this point...

I'd like to switch gears and consider the all too human impulse to historicize myth. It is, for so many people, nearly irresistible. Xerxes, Alexander, Julius Caesar, and countless others, named and unnamed, found it gratifying, a posthumous endorsement even, of their own martial ways of life. to believe that Troy still stood, however faintly, in some identifiable form over all these long years. Lord Byron, for his part, was surprisingly unimpressed by his visit to Troy.

Given that in just over a month after standing on Achilles' tomb, he would swim the Hellespont to imitate the mythological feat of Leander swimming to visit his lover Hero, a virgin priestess of Aphrodite. I would have guessed that Byron would have needed Troy to be a reality. But in his sardonic way, he saw through the romanticism that others projected onto the trode. He wrote,

And so great names are nothing more than nominal, and love of glories but an airy lust. From out the wide destruction which entombing all. leaves nothing till the coming of the just save chain. I've stood upon Achilles' tomb and heard Troy doubt it. Time will doubt of Rome. Byron acknowledged the... poetic and symbolic significance of Troy, but his letters and poetry reveal a rather cool assessment. He described the trode as a fine field for conjecture.

but remained unimpressed by the few scattered ruins and the supposed tombs of heroes like Achilles. Byron's ambivalence underscores a tension at the heart of the Troy question. The gulf between the grandeur of mythic narrative and the prosaic, eroded landscape we actually find. There seems to be a fine line, often a shifting one.

between the embodied experience of a mythic place and the compulsion to literalize it. To stand on the trode and feel the presence of epic time is one thing, but to insist... that this rock is the place of Hector's last stand, or that this trench must be Priam's gate, risks collapsing the symbol into a relic. What is lost, then, is not only ambiguity, but the soul of myth itself, the mystery in which meaning lives, a fine field for conjecture.

Byron couldn't have defined the field of myth any better. It's a phrase that, however unwitting, defines it as well as any modern theorist ever has. Myth, because it's constellated by symbol and metaphor. resist certainty. It demands conjecture. Its truths are experiential, imaginative, and most of all, psychic. And yet, there remains a powerful human impulse to anchor myth in historical fact, to find the tomb of Achilles, the walls of Troy, the very horse that once concealed cunning Odysseus.

Why is that? Why this persistent drive to bind the poetic to the material and the symbolic to the substantial? Perhaps it's because myth... Azimuth lives in liminal space. Neither is it fully material nor immaterial. Neither history nor fantasy, but something in between, something more enduring. And of course, the ambiguity of that in between can be unsettling. Its tension may even be psychically painful. We crave certainty.

evidence and orientation in the world. But to locate a myth in physical space is to relieve it of its mystery, and the imagination becomes, like Prometheus, chained to a rock. There is also a kind of psychological reassurance in historicizing myth. If Homer's Troy can be found, if we can be certain Achilles once walked this ground...

then the stories we tell ourselves aren't just beautiful lies, as Picasso once called art. They're true in the most concrete sense. That kind of concrete truth offers a reassuring comfort. It suggests that meaning is literally out there somewhere in the world itself and waiting to be discovered, and not just in our interpretation of it. But perhaps deeper still is the desire for contact. To find the remains of a mythic world is to feel, however faintly, that we're not alone in our longing.

that someone somewhere once directly confronted the energies we can't begin to comprehend. And if they can do it successfully, then I have hope that I may too. Historicizing myth, then, is not only an academic discipline, but a devotional one. We want to believe that the stories that move us are not mere inventions constructed as a defense against our human vulnerability our ignorance or our incompetencies. We want the stories to be real.

We want them to be historically verified because in some way it makes the story seem more sacred. And yet, the paradox remains. The more we try to fix myth in time and space, the more we risk losing the very thing that draws us to it, its imaginative, symbolic, soulful resonance. But myth is not a fossil. It's not a relic or a ruin. It's a candle in a very large, very dark room, flickering, burning, sometimes guttering, but still alive.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Season 5 of Pathways with Joseph Campbell. When it comes to myth podcasts, I know that there are so many out there to choose from, and I'm certainly grateful you've chosen to listen with us. Please make some time to visit JCF.org and check out our other offerings available on the MythMaker Podcast Network.

And while you're there, don't forget to sign up for the weekly Mythblast newsletter at jcf.org slash subscribe, in which we celebrate the power of myth at the movies all year long. If you're interested in learning more about my own work, please visit BradleyOlsonPhD.com and discover what's missing in your life. And please join me right here next month for another brand new episode.

of Pathways with Joseph Campbell. Pathways with Joseph Campbell is a production of the Joseph Campbell Foundation and the Myth Maker Podcast Network. It is produced by Tyler Lapkin. Executive producer, John Booker. Your host has been Bradley Olson. Editing and audio services provided by Charles Mallett. All music exclusively provided by APM Music. For more podcasts and information about Joseph Campbell, please visit jcf.org.