Godmindfamily, Chapter 16

Chapter 16: Homer’s Odyssey as Unwitting Parable

Since we’re looking at truths hidden in the classics, Homer’s Odyssey is an extended allegory for salvation and the coming of the Messiah, like the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

The Odyssey and the Iliad are the founding stories of western culture. For a long time they were dismissed as myths and legends, until the ancient city of Troy, whose siege is charted at length in the Iliad, was discovered at Hisarlick in Turkey (Roman Ilium), by the amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in 1897. The ruins show evidence of sacking around 1200 BC, the date of the Trojan War. I believe there is a great deal of truth in the Odyssey, as well. According to legend, Homer was a blind bard, who sang his tales of war and woe, but modern academics have cast aspersions on these traditions, despite their greater distance from the author. Historians believe The Odyssey was composed sometime in the 8^th century BC, 500 years after the events Homer purported to describe. Since the 700’s BC were a time when writing had apparently been long ‘forgotten,’ historians and archaeologists assume that Homer must have inherited The Odyssey from an oral tradition stemming back to the Trojan War.But there was writing in Mycenaean Greece, circa 1200BC (the estimated time of the Trojan War). This is an accepted historical fact. Tablets from the era have been found by archaeologists, inscribed with the syllabic script known as Linear B. Is it then so difficult to believe that some late Bronze Age chronicler wrote down stories of the Trojan War? It was, after all, the largest war of the period; Homer famously said 1,186 ships sailed for Troy,[i] which would imply at least 100,000 combatants. To the participants, it was probably the largest war ever known, the Bronze Age equivalent of a world war. Though it is admittedly possible to transmit oral traditions across centuries, it would be far easier to convey a written original intact across such a vast timespan, especially when one considers the size and detail of the two poems. Such a hypothesis has the added virtue of not requiring us to believe in the faintly ridiculous theory of a long line of bards with eidetic memories – the prevailing theory among the groves of academe.

In the Contest of Hesiod and Homer, the Oracle of Delphi reported that Homer was Telemachus’ son: Odysseus’ grandson. The Iliad and the Odyssey would thus be a family tradition of the Ithacan royal line. Part of the Odyssey, called the Telemachy, is from the perspective of Odysseus’ son, Telemachus. Odysseus would have told his story, Telemachus his, and the grandson would have thrown both together and put them into verse, for the bards to sing.

The hypothesis of Odysseus as the progenitor of the Homeric tradition is almost self-evident, provided we assume he existed. For who else was there at the gates of Troy – who else wept over the funeral pyre of Patroclus with brave Achilles? Who else survived the homeward voyage to Ithaca? According to Homer’s poem, the rest of his crew perished en route. Odysseus was the sole survivor. Who else, then, could have written or spoken of both the war and the return to Ithaca? Who else could have told the tale of the Odyssey, in its original form?

No one.

Again, the historicity of the Odyssey is irrelevant as far as its meaning and typological significance are concerned, but I believe the Iliad and the Odyssey were mostly historical.Homer’s Odysseus was the son of Laertes, King of Ithaca, and Anticlea. His maternal grandfather Autolycus was the son of Hermes and a cunning thief. Odysseus was thus the grandson of Hermes, the god of wisdom. Though the spiritual content of the Odyssey, as a pagan document, is far from infallible, the descents of legendary heroes from ‘gods’ is not nearly as ridiculous as it sounds, in light of the scriptural account of the fallen angels lying with mortal women to produce ‘mighty’ offspring: ‘God’s sons saw that men’s daughters were beautiful, and they took for themselves wives of all that they chose’ (Genesis 6:2) and ‘The Nephilim were in the earth in those days, and also after that, when God’s sons came into men’s daughters’ (Genesis 6:3–4). There was a tradition outside of Homer, that Odysseus was the biological son of Sisyphus, and had been bought and adopted by Laertes. Sisyphus was the founder and King of Ephyra (Corinth). He was so crafty that he betrayed Zeus, and cheated death (Thanatos) by trapping him, meaning no one could die for a time. As a punishment, Hades made Sisyphus roll a boulder up a hill, which would subsequently roll back down again, for eternity. Odysseus seems to have inherited cunning from both sides of his family.Odysseus’ story begins, ironically enough, as a suitor. Many suitors came from around the Greek world to court Helen of Troy, then Helen of Sparta, reputed to be the daughter of Zeus and the most beautiful woman in the world. Her father, Tyndareus, was too afraid to give her to one of them, for fear he would offend the other besotted suitors to the point of violence. Odysseus was one of the suitors, though he never seriously expected to marry Helen, because as the king of the small island of Ithaca, he lacked the wealth. Odysseus proposed a solution to Tyndareus: in exchange for his niece Penelope, Odysseus would make the suitors swear an oath beforehand to defend the chosen husband, whoever he turned out to be, against anyone who went to war with him.After the oath was sworn, Menelaus was chosen as Helen’s husband, and Odysseus married Penelope. As the wisest of the Achaeans, Odysseus chose the best wife: while all were distracted by Helen’s unrivalled beauty, Odysseus chose her cousin Penelope, who was not only beautiful, but relatively loyal, and wise. They had a son together, Telemachus.When Paris ‘abducted’ Helen of Sparta to Troy, Menelaus and his brother King Agamemnon of Mycenae, the most powerful king in Greece (known as Achaea), then pressured the other suitors to honour their oaths and go to war against Troy. Odysseus feigned madness in an attempt to shirk his duty, because of a prophecy that he would have a long return if he went to war. Alas, his ruse was discovered.Odysseus won the Trojan War by coming up with the idea of leaving a wooden horse on the beach and withdrawing the Greek fleet from the vicinity of Troy. The Trojans took the horse inside their gates, and out came Odysseus and some other warriors, who opened the gates of the city from the inside, and let the rest of the army in. It was the first recorded special forces operation, the most famous ruse de guerre in western history, and from a military perspective, it was a success.Having defeated the Trojans, Odysseus returned home from Troy. He raided the Cicones and lost a lot of his men in the process. Then they met the Lotus Eaters, whose hallucinogens made some of Odysseus’ crew lose their desire to return home. Odysseus harassed them back aboard ship.He and some of his men entered the cave of Polyphemus the cyclops, bringing a gift, and helped themselves to some of the cyclops’ cheese. Polyphemus was a bad host: he ate some of Odysseus’ men. Odysseus got the cyclops drunk on wine and he fell asleep. Then Odysseus blinded him by stabbing him in the eye. The hero and his men escaped the blinded Polyphemus, hidden amidst the herd of the cyclops’ sheep, as the sheep left the cave to pasture. Odysseus also eluded the cannibals of Laestrygonia, who destroyed eleven of the twelve ships that comprised his fleet.Odysseus came to the island of Aeaea. A demon, Circe, turned Odysseus’ men into pigs. Odysseus made Circe change his men back to human form but was beguiled, and slept with her, and tarried on her island. Aeaea is Capri, off the Tyrrhenian coast, which means ‘isle of pigs’ in Greek. Moreover, kirke means hawk in Greek, and there were hawks on Capri. Accordingly, the siren’s rocks are the Faraglioni, off the coast of Capri.Eventually Odysseus left her island, Aeaea, for the underworld, located in the land of the Cimmerians. The land of the Cimmerians is described as existing in perpetual gloom, with no sunlight. A volcano exists around Lake Avernus in Italy, an area associated with gloom, noxious air and ash clouds resulting from volcanic activity. There, Odysseus met his mother, the slain heroes from the Trojan War, including Achilles, and consulted with the prophet Teiresias, who told him that he will return home after a long and difficult journey, and that to do so he must not eat the calves of the sun god Helios. Odysseus returned to Circe’s island again to prepare for a longer voyage. He set sail, resisted the sirens’ allure, passing their treacherous rocks, the monster Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis (the narrow strait of Scylla and Charybdis is the Strait of Messina in the Tyrrhenian Sea). Later, the hero lost his crew because in Thrinacia they ate the calves of Helios, the sun god, ignoring his warning not to do so, and thereby incurred Zeus’ wrath upon the ship. Thrinacia is described as an island, and it means ‘a land with three headlands’: Sicily has three main promontories.Odysseus washed up on Ogygia, the island of another ‘goddess’, Calypso, who held him captive there for seven years, during which time they slept together. Calypso is described as the daughter of Atlas in the Odyssey: like Circe, she was a demon, isolated on her island because she was so dangerous. Ogygia was likely Othonoi, an isle near Corfu. We know Odysseus washed up on Ogygia after departing from Sicily, headed for Ithaca, so it must be in the Ionian Sea, and small enough to be isolated from civilization. Like Penelope, Circe and Calypso weaved at the loom – they are the dark side of femininity, while Penelope is the light. It was Calypso’s superficial similarity to Penelope that attracted Odysseus, though he eventually tired of her obsessive, controlling ways, and she forced him to have sex with her. Calypso promised to make Odysseus immortal if he stayed with her. This was a far bigger temptation than the one posed by Circe; Odysseus spent seven years with Calypso, and only one with Circe. Odysseus refused her offer of divinity; he wanted to go home to his wife, because he realised Calypso was evil, and she did not have the power to make Odysseus immortal; she was either mistaken, or it was a lie. Hermes compelled Calypso to let Odysseus go, and with her aid the hero built a raft, and was shipwrecked again on Scheria, where he was anointed with oil and treated hospitably. There, he told his tale to the inhabitants. Finally, Odysseus returned home to Ithaca after twenty years: ten at war, and ten at sea.Initially, Odysseus was disguised as a beggar on Ithaca. He passed unrecognised and found that his palace was occupied by suitors, seeking his wife Queen Penelope’s hand in marriage, so they could gain control of the kingdom. The suitors were eating up Odysseus’ cattle and drinking his wine. Penelope delayed marrying them by various tricks.

Odysseus was mocked while begging for scraps in his own palace. He shocked everyone by killing another beggar who insulted him. Then Odysseus revealed himself to his son Telemachus, who was continually threatened by the suitors, and two trusted servants, Eumaeus and Philoetius. Together, they plotted revenge against the suitors. Queen Penelope promised to marry whoever could string Odysseus’ bow and fire the arrow between a row of axe heads, as Odysseus used to do. None of the suitors could do it. Telemachus was able to string the bow, and was on the cusp of doing so, but his father signalled for him to relent, and he did. Odysseus, disguised as the beggar, took up the bow and hit the mark. The word for sin in Hebrew is chet, which means, to miss the mark. Odysseus, as a precursor of the man without sin, did not miss the mark, although to be sure he sinned grievously. Penelope is a foreshadowing of the bride of God in Scripture (Israel) who, despite dubious loyalty, will only marry the bridegroom, Jesus.

With Athena’s protection, Odysseus, his son Telemachus, and a couple of loyal servants trap the suitors in the palace and begin slaughtering them with arrows and spears. His wife is not sure it is he, she thinks he might be a god in disguise, until Odysseus reveals intimate knowledge of their bed, made from an olive tree. The couple are reunited and sleep together. Odysseus then visits his father Laertes, again proves his identity by his knowledge of Ithaca’s trees and the two men, alongside Telemachus, fight off a mob seeking revenge for the killings of the suitors.The fate of the hero is debatable. In The Odyssey, Teiresias prophesied that Odysseus would have to make one last journey to a far land, after which he would die in peace at an old age. An alternative tradition, from the Epic Cycle, has Odysseus’ son by Circe, Telegonus, come to Ithaca and kill some of Odysseus’ cattle in an effort to satisfy his hunger. Odysseus and Telemachus confronted Telegonus and Telegonus accidentally killed his father. Father and son only recognised each other as Odysseus died. Telemachus and Penelope were taken back to Aeaea by Telegonus and rewarded by Circe with immortality. This last part is obviously bogus, because Circe as a demon did not have the power to grant immortality. And given how the Odyssey proclaims Odysseus’ infidelity with witches, it is unlikely Penelope was around when the final version was told by the ‘hero’ himself.Those are the events of the story. Beneath the surface, however, is a wealth of symbolic, psychological meanings and biblical typology. Obviously, Scripture is the ultimate textual authority, and is of far greater value than pagan epics, because all of the Bible is true and inspired, whereas in mythology, the truth is vaguely glimpsed and distorted, as if through a glass darkly. Nonetheless, in the City of God, Saint Augustine established that even truth found outside the Bible is from God, and that the works of pagan thinkers can be mined for gold, while discarding what is disadvantageous in them (the mud). Thus we have various heroic sons of gods in pagan mythology – Jason, Perseus, Herakles, and all of them foreshadow Jesus. The figure of Dionysus contains a suspicious number of Jesus parallels. He was the son of the supreme god in the Greek pantheon, he died and was resurrected, his flesh was symbolically consumed by his followers, like Jesus he was associated with wine, and there are myths about Dionysus and his followers miraculously producing wine, like Jesus turned water into wine (John 2:1–11, although the former is a myth and the latter a real miracle). Dionysus’ mentor Silenus rode on a donkey, anticipating Jesus’ ride into Jerusalem on a donkey in the gospels. There is even a story that Dionysus’ followers struck rocks with a thyrsus (staff) and water flowed out, possibly a pagan distortion of the story of Moses striking the rock to obtain water in Exodus 17:6. The pagans were unconsciously projecting the truth in their myths, because it is inescapable, but in a form warped by their false religion, and the demonic influences that held sway over their minds. There are parallel allegories within The Odyssey: that of the Return of Jesus, and the esoteric reunion of the soul of the believer with God. But Odysseus was not the Messiah.The king is initially in exile (the Trojan War). To a theologian, this immediately evokes the Parable of the Nobleman who travelled to a far country and left his servants with talents to invest in his absence (Luke 19), which of course was Jesus, who ascended to heaven, and will return. Odysseus, then, is an extracanonical type of Jesus. He descended to the underworld and returned to the land of the living, a foreshadowing of the death and Resurrection. The one-eyed Cyclops (and the cannibals) represent the shadow or id. Accordingly, he is a monster that looks like a penis – an analysis Freud would doubtless agree with. He also stands for moral ignorance, spiritual blindness to the truth – hence he begins with only one eye and has it blinded.Odysseus is saved from the cyclops by means of wine and a ram, a male sheep – both of which are symbols for Christ, the lamb of God. The cyclops’ desire for food and drink blinded him. It is also a warning of the dangers of hubris – when Odysseus identifies himself to Polyphemus as ‘no one’, it helps him, because when Odysseus attacked Polyphemus, the brute yelled to the other cyclopes that he was being attacked by no one, so they did not come to his aid. But when his ship was leaving the cyclops’ island, Odysseus in his stubborn rage and pride boasted and told Polyphemus his name, which got back to Polyphemus’ father, Poseidon, who initiated a vendetta against Odysseus, resulting in his bad fortune. That was a low SD move that backfired.Circe, the sirens and Calypso are representations of the anima, Odysseus’ inner feminine dark side. They are also temptresses, who demonstrate the dangers of lust, and the necessity of overcoming temptation. Circe turning his men to pigs but her failure to transform Odysseus (Matthew 4;Luke 4), indicates that while they are swine, beholden to base, herd instincts, he is not. Despite succumbing to the demons’ charms for a while, Odysseus eventually tears himself away for long enough to leave them, thereby passing the test of temptation, albeit far less emphatically than Jesus did during his forty days in the wilderness. Calypso’s offer of immortality is another kind of temptation, analogous to the temptation to become a false Messiah, which Odysseus also very belatedly overcomes.The allure of the siren’s song was not sexual, or not only sexual. The sirens sing of knowledge, of the future. Odysseus is only able to resist the temptation of the siren’s song by tying himself to the mast of his ship and plugging his men’s ears with beeswax, as Circe advised him: forewarned is forearmed, and sometimes it is the only way to pass a test. Odysseus survived while his men and the suitors died, because Odysseus had higher self-differentiation than his men, as reflected in his ability to partially resist temptation, or at least have some idea of his own limitations, where others consistently failed. He controlled himself, maintaining his disguise in front of his beloved wife Penelope, when he must have wanted to reveal himself and embrace her, enabling the successful slaughter of the suitors, who showed no restraint, and low SD. That is what makes Odysseus relatively smart and the hero of the story.Odysseus’ and Telemachus’ anointment with oil in the Odyssey hints that they are part of the Davidic typology of rulers anointed by God: Saul (1 Samuel 10:1), David (1 Samuel 16:13) and Solomon (1 Kings 1:32) were all anointed with oil to designate their kingship. After David’s anointing, he was crowned king, just as Odysseus reasserted his kingship of Ithaca following his anointing with oil. Jesus was anointed with perfume (John 12:1), water, and the Spirit of God (Luke 4:18–19). Again, Odysseus was not Jesus, the Messiah, he was just similar in some respects. In sum, Odysseus partially resisted his fears and temptations, where others (the rest of his crew) failed the tests. He saved himself from the fate of the rest of the crew by obeying the advice of the prophet Teiresias – foreshadowing the importance of obedience to the words of the biblical prophets. It is also noteworthy that Odysseus was saved and helped by Athena and Hermes, the so-called ‘gods’ of wisdom. While they are obviously nowhere near as great as Jesus, they anticipate him, since Jesus the Logos, the Word of God, is God’s wisdom.Two of Odysseus’ servants were loyal to him (Eumaeus and the Philoetius), as was his former wet-nurse Euryclea and his son Telemachus, who eventually recognised him, but most of them were disloyal, especially the servant girls who slept with the suitors and spy on Penelope. The loyal servants were rewarded by the promise of freedom and property. In the Bible, the servants who traded the talents profitably were rewarded when their master returned from a far country (Matthew 25:21), and the servant who hid his talent and did not trade it was cast into outer darkness by the master (Matthew 25:14–30).Then there is the Parable of the Faithful and Wise Servant (Matthew 24:45–51; Luke 12:42–48), in which a master returns home in the night. The faithful servant who fed his household is rewarded, and the disloyal servant who got drunk and beat the other servants is punished. The house here also represents the body, and the welcoming of the returned master is letting Christ into that body. Odysseus’ reunion with Penelope is typological of the wedding supper of the lamb (Revelation 19:9), in which God renews his marriage to Israel. This was reflected in Penelope’s talk of ‘remarrying’ whoever passes her test, though her marriage to Odysseus never actually ended.

The reunion of Odysseus and Penelope, and her inability to recognise him at first, evokes Mary Magdalene’s encounter with the risen Christ, whom she initially mistook for a gardener (John 20:14–15). When Jesus called her by name, she knew who he was, and he told her not to cling to him (John 20:17). This is because Mary Magdalene may have been Jesus’ wife, a theory espoused (pun intended!) in The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail.[ii] Moreover, the rumours about the Magdalene ­– that she was an immoral woman or a prostitute – fit the typology: God likens his bride Israel/Jerusalem to an ‘adulterous’ (Ezekiel 16:31) ‘prostitute’ (Jeremiah 3:1;Ezekiel 23) who is ultimately repentant numerous times in scripture (Hosea). Mary Magdalene was demonically possessed by seven demons, until Jesus healed her (Luke 8:2), and some believe she was the ‘sinful woman’ of Luke 7:37–38 who anointed Jesus’ feet. The fact Jesus had a son means he must have had a wife (it would be unusual for a Jewish man of that era not to marry), even if she was not the Magdalene but another woman who died before the events of the gospel. Jesus was not a polygamist: he had an example to set and he set it well. One possible reason the gospels do not proclaim Mary as Jesus’ wife could be to protect their offspring from the Pharisees and the Romans, the same reason John’s parentage was concealed. John’s status as Jesus’ monogenes could be taken to mean he was Jesus’ only child, his only son (the rumoured daughter of Jesus and Mary was a girl) or his unique child. That even God’s Son was not exempted from the commandment to ‘go forth and multiply’ (Genesis 1:28) reiterates the importance of the nuclear family in holy scripture and that of marriage.If Odysseus is a type of Christ, then Telemachus as his royal son is a type of the Son of Christ, the reincarnated John the Apostle, who is unable to physically overthrow the suitors (the corrupt rulers – the Antichrist and his False Prophet) on his own, so they remain in place until his father (Jesus) returns in the Second Coming. The suitors stand not only for demons occupying the house (body) of the individual, but also on the macro-scale for the corrupt rulers of the last days, the Antichrist, his False Prophet and their ten kings (Revelation 13). The Bride of God is the nation of Israel, a church, the New Jerusalem and the material world.

Odysseus covered in the blood of the slaughtered suitors is an extracanonical foreshadowing of the blood-soaked robe of Jesus when he returns (Isaiah 63), having fought the peoples. Odysseus is reunited with his wife, Queen Penelope, a metaphor for the hieros gamos, the alchemical sacred marriage of the red king and the white queen, with the king representing the spirit and the queen standing for the soul, and the reunion taking place in the house (the body). In The Odyssey, this is a reunion, rather than a marriage. In the Bible, Israel is depicted as God’s wife, and Jesus as the bridegroom (Matthew 25:1–13; John 3:29), with the marriage supper of the lamb (Revelation 19:19) as a renewal of the marriage that was initially consummated via the Mosaic Covenant, though Israel’s idolatry broke the covenant and resulted in God giving her a certificate of divorce (Jeremiah 3:8). This was depicted through the life and work of the prophet Hosea, whose wife Gomer was disloyal, and sold into slavery, and bought out of slavery by the prophet and restored to her status as wife. To underline the point, Hosea and Gomer’s child was even called ‘not my people’ (Hosea 1:9), but it was made plain this condition was temporary. The parable of the wise and foolish virgins (Matthew 25:1–13), in which ten virgins wait for the bridegroom in the night, and the wedding feast (Matthew 22:14) are metaphors for the coming of God’s kingdom.

Returning to the Odyssey, Penelope is a metaphor for the remnant of Israel (Micah 4:2), the woman in the wilderness (Revelation 12), who does not capitulate to the false worship of the Antichrist. The father-son reunions are also vaguely reminiscent of the Parable of the Prodigal Son. In the parable (Luke 15), Jesus tells the story of a son, who received his inheritance from his father, and went into town and squandered his money in sinful ways and wound up feeding pigs, who ate better than he does. The son, perceiving his mistake, begs his father to take him back as a servant on his farm. The father welcomes the son back with open arms and throws a feast for him, featuring the fatted calf. The father represents God, the spirit, the son stands for the soul that incarnated in the physical world (the town) because of sinful desires, and was forced by suffering to see the error of his ways and seek a reunion with his father, which is the reunion of spirit and soul.

Odysseus proves his identity to his wife and father by his prowess with the bow, and his knowledge of fruit trees, an unintentional reference to the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge and the tree of life; the very fact his bed is made of wood, foreshadows Christ on the cross, and when talking to his father, Odysseus lists the 50 grapevines Laertes gave him, another allusion to the wine that is Christ’s blood. Moreover, King David and King Solomon were anointed with oil from the olive (Exodus 30:20–25).

The main message of the Odyssey, albeit an unwitting one as far as Homer was concerned, is that the family – particularly the husband-wife reunion following a period of war and strife – is a metaphor for the post-tribulation marriage of Israel and Jesus. The sufferings of Israel in the tribulation are often likened in Scripture to ‘birth pains’ of a pregnant woman (2 Thessalonians 2:3–4), and the child that is being born is God’s kingdom, firstly on earth, and later on the new earth. Through every marriage, parenthood, and the family, the marriage supper of the lamb is foretold, and the individual souls feel something of the love God has for his people through the human institution of the family.

A shared message of The Odyssey and the Bible is: the king is coming home, he is coming soon, and he is coming with overwhelming force. May the bride, the royal son and the loyal servants look forward to their impending deliverance, and their rewards. And may the evil suitors who are courting another man’s wife and eating what is not theirs, live in dread and terror of the return of the king, which will overtake them like a thief in the night.

[i] Homer. Butler, S (Trans.). 2012. The Iliad. Dover Thrift Editions.

[ii] Lincoln, Leigh, Baigent. 2013. The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail. Cornerstone Digital; New e edition.