Godmindfamily Appendix: ODYSSEUS

Odysseus and the sirens. Waterhouse, 1891.

Copyright © 2026 Robert Ensor

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.The author’s moral rights have been asserted. First Published 2026.

All Bible quotations, unless otherwise stated or referenced, are taken from the online World English Bible, which is in the public domain. It is available at the following link: https://ebible.org/eng-web/index.htm. English language Bibles are translated from Hebrew and Greek manuscripts. I am no linguist, and I don’t know any linguists, so I have had to rely on others’ translations and romanizations of the Hebrew and Greek texts. Occasionally, I have examined the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek of the Bible, zeroing in on key words where the received English translation is debatable or misses the full meaning of the original.

Introduction

With the release of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, interest in Homer's epic tale of a hero returning home from war has reached new heights. But the original text is a deep, multilayered masterpiece that is still widely misunderstood. Homer’s Odyssey contains unwitting allegories about eschatological events and spiritual development.

The Odyssey and the Iliad are among 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, woe and the wine dark sea, 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 rooted in 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] Given crews ranging from 50 to 120 men per ship,^[ii] this implies 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 epic 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. 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.

Chapter 1: Background

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.

The king is initially in exile fighting the Trojan War. The one-eyed Cyclops (and the cannibals) both represent the shadow or id. He stands for moral ignorance, spiritual blindness to the truth – hence he begins with only one eye and has it blinded.

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. While all were distracted by Helen’s unrivalled beauty, Odysseus chose her cousin Penelope, who was not only beautiful, but wise. They had a son together, Telemachus.

Chapter 2: Troy

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 several other elite 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.

Chapter 3: The Long Way Home

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 a bit spaced out. Consequently, they lost 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. Odysseus 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 or witch, 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 likely Capri, off the Tyrrhenian coast. Kaproi means ‘isle of pigs’ in Greek. Moreover, kirke means hawk in Greek, and there were hawks on Capri. Accordingly, the siren’s rocks are probably the Faraglioni, positioned 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. This was likely the location.

In the underworld, 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 likely the Strait of Messina in the Tyrrhenian Sea). Later, Odysseus lost his crew and was shipwrecked 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. 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. Odysseus eventually tired of Calypso’s 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; 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 he 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 island kingdom. The suitors were eating up Odysseus’ cattle and drinking his wine. Penelope delayed marrying them by various tricks.

Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and war, is an innate inner personality, an archetype with a spiritual existence independent of the individual's mind (which some archetypes possess). She was Zeus’ daughter, who grew out of his head, and was Odysseus’ chief guardian and protector; she admired him and helped him above all other mortals because of his wisdom and his willingness to come to her aid. Unlike Mars, who represents the brutal and aggressive nature of war, Athena stands for cunning, strategy and wisdom in conflict. Athena particularly helped Odysseus during his homecoming.

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. This is part of the Messianic typology of the exiled, returned and underestimated king.

Odysseus, his son Telemachus, and a couple of loyal servants trapped the suitors in the palace and began slaughtering them with arrows and spears. His wife was not sure it was he, she thought he might be a god in disguise, until Odysseus revealed intimate knowledge of their bed, made from an olive tree. The couple were reunited. Odysseus then visited his father Laertes, again proved his identity by his knowledge of Ithaca’s trees and the two men, alongside Telemachus, fought off a mob seeking revenge for the killings of the suitors.

The fate of Odysseus 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. According to this tradition, 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 demons, it is unlikely Penelope was around when the final version was told by the ‘hero’ himself.

Chapter 4: The Hidden Allegory

Those are the events of the story. Beneath the surface, however, is a wealth of symbolic, psychological meanings and 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. 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). For example, there is 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 unintentional allegories within The Odyssey, but Odysseus was not the Messiah, his story just anticipates the Second Coming in some respects.The king is initially in exile fighting the Trojan War.

To a theologian, this 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. The one-eyed Cyclops (and the cannibals) represent the shadow or id. 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 identified himself to Polyphemus as ‘no one’, it helped 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 self-differentiation move that backfired. Differentiation of self is a measure of emotional control and the ability to stand one’s ground and maintain a firm identity in the face of pressure from other people. It was established by the psychiatrist Murray Bowen in the mid-twentieth century.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 were largely beholden to base, herd instincts, the hero is not so easily swayed. Despite succumbing to the demons’ charms for a while, Odysseus eventually tore 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.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 protagonist of the story.

Odysseus’ anointment with oil in the Odyssey hints that he is 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. The oil of anointing largely consisted of olive oil, and Odysseus’ bed was symbolically carved from an olive tree. Jesus was anointed with perfume (John 12:1), water, and the Spirit of God (Luke 4:18–19). Again, Odysseus was not Jesus, he was just similar in some respects. However, Odysseus later reincarnated as Solomon, John the Apostle and the Prince of Israel, who is the Messiah alongside Jesus according to a close reading of the Davidic Covenant (see Godmindfamily, Chapter 14).

In sum, Odysseus partially resisted his fears and temptations, where others (the rest of his crew) failed the tests. 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 spied 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).

Chapter 5: Scriptural Parallels

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 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. In The Odyssey, Odysseus is reunited with his wife after this slaughter. 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 parable of the wedding feast (Matthew 22:14) are also metaphors for the coming of God’s kingdom. In the Bible, the bride of God is in one sense the remnant of Israel (Micah 4:2), the woman in the wilderness (Revelation 12) with twelve stars above her head representing the 12 tribes of Israel, who does not capitulate to the false worship of the Antichrist.

The father-son reunions in the Odyssey, like any father-son reunion, are vaguely reminiscent of the Parable of the Prodigal Son. In the parable (Luke 15), Jesus told 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 did. The son, perceiving his mistake, begged 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 – God – and soul.

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.

The king is coming home, he is coming soon, and he is coming with overwhelming force. May the bride 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] Ibid.