Odyssey 10.503-74
We’ve already had two members of Odysseus’ crew named, amongst a number of occasions where they speak in chorus. Sometimes we get the convention that ‘one on this side’ and ‘one on t’other’ says what follows, even though it is but a single speech enacted by a solo performer. There was Polites (‘Citizen’), the one Odysseus cared (or worried) most about (κήδιστος), who could not resist responding to the sound of a goddess’ voice. And there is Eurylochus (‘Broad-Ambush’) the antagonist, an annoying coward who nevertheless, like Thersites in the Iliad, speaks discomfiting truth to power. Now we meet young Elpenor (‘Man of Hope’), who seems most unfortunately to be used by Homer, or his present narrator Odysseus, to make some sort of point. The thing is, poor Elpenor makes this point by dying.
Who are you Elpēnor?
What is it that you’re here for?
Why did Homer make you live
To break your neck on Circe’s floor?
Who are you, sweet Elpēnor, and wherefore?
Circe has just given Odysseus assurance he needn’t worry about finding a guide to reach Hades. From where she is, apparently, it only takes a steady push from Boreas, the north wind, to get your vessel there. Hades must be somewhere to the south. But Circe does not predict or describe any sort of sea-crossing to which we have been used so far, such as crossing over the ‘deep’ (πόντος) or the ‘sea’ (θάλασσα); this is to be a crossing through a creature Homer calls Oceanus (Ὠκεανός):
Let’s not have your need for a guide on ship concern you,
But stand the mast, furl the white sails,
And sit back: the breath of Boreas, you see, will carry her.
But whenever it is, by ship, you cross through Oceanus,
There’s a small headland there, and a grove of Persephone—
Tall poplars and willows that lose their fruit— (Od.10.505-10)
If they’ve been identified correctly, these are riparian trees. We are of course in the habit of using ‘ocean’ to refer to the biggest bodies of salt water in our environment. But no part of this decadent usage can have anything to do with the referent Homer intends. Oceanus is a stream or river, not an ocean, evidently running fresh water. On the shield of Achilles, it is described as a river which is set into the shield’s outermost rim, as though it ran right ’round the cosmos inscribed within.
Needless to say, we do not presently observe any such seemingly liquid ring around the world. It will therefore take some effort of imagination to realise what Homer may be describing or referring to.
Homer describes the constellation of the Bear as at the pole of the world and the centre of the shield. It spins upon itself and never sets, as only a constellation at the pole would appear to do. But this is an impossible configuration according to the dogmas of modern astronomy, which see the earth’s present motions and attitudes as the only ones of which it was capable in human memory. In particular, a back-calculation of the present precession of the equinoxes will never result in the north pole, presently pointed at the star Polaris in the Little Bear, being located within the Great Bear. (For Homer it was simply ‘the Bear’; Ursa Minor only became a ‘thing’ in later times. The Phoenicians are supposed to have taught it to the Greeks, likely because it had replaced the Bear as the asterism to navigate by.) Current theories attribute the precession to multi-body gravitational dynamics, and so to be somewhat variable, but if we take ancient measurements seriously, as we ought, it has slowed down significantly. It is reasonable to wonder if a sudden displacement of the pole within the chronology of human history may not have left a remnant wobble in the earth’s equilibrium, from which it is gradually recovering.
Note above how the artist has replaced the Bear at the centre with the sun’s chariot surrounded by the zodiac. This is a symptom of the post-Copernican religious egoism, which Homer cannot be seen to violate. The obvious falseness of Homer’s description to their present sky at night was not lost on ancient authors. Aristotle picks out Homer’s use of οἴη ἄμμορος, ‘alone without a share’, used to describe the Bear’s unsinking property, as an example of ‘metaphor’. Elsewhere I have drawn out the implications of Aristotle’s comment:
… not just Aristotle but his whole audience feels that the only way currently to understand this line of Homer’s, readily evoked by its two opening words, is as an illustration of what the philosopher means by ‘metaphor’. Metaphor is the only option, by settled opinion, clearly because what the line literally means cannot be true! There is no dispute here, expressed or implied, about what that literal meaning really is; that would defeat the purpose of an illustrative example of metaphor. So here lies the key element in this tidbit from Aristotle: it leaves no doubt that the literal, non-metaphorical meaning of Homer’s phrase is that the Bear alone did not set …1
Much later Strabo, in the Roman era, tried to defend Homer’s veracity by claiming that what Homer really meant by the Bear (ἄρκτος) must have been the ‘Arctic Circle’, or the ‘Bear’s Circle’ (ἀρκτικὸς κύκλος). One cannot navigate by the Arctic Circle, however, without going ’round in circles. One needs a fixed point. In our skies there is but one. Calypso asks Odysseus to keep the Bear to his left as he pushes off in his raft. If the Bear was a polar bear, her instruction has shown him how to head due east.
Always remember that Classicists, mythologists, astronomers, archaeologists, historians, biologists, and all manner of non-professional folk presume an awful lot about the layout of the earth and the sky in Homeric and other ancient times. (Within ‘Homeric’ we might also distinguish between the time of the telling and the time of the action.) Mainly the presumption is that nothing has changed in these things, except very slowly, which is an absurdly false one when it comes to the earth and the sky; it is a presumption in the modern uniformitarian ‘sciences’ as well, where only presently observable processes, mostly gradual, are allowed to be responsible for the manifold phenomena confronting us. These include miles-high mountains, miles-deep trenches, and vast canyons all on a supposedly gravitating sphere; the diversity of biological genera living and dead; ‘Ice Ages’; and the planet Venus. There are seashells and the bones of Amphitrite’s salt water creatures at the tops of the Himalayas. These presumptions should therefore be characterised as reflecting one or more of the developmental neuroses, or to sensory-cognitive after-effects comparable to those of brainwashing.
If we are to take Homer seriously—and what has there been written since, which should more demand our attention and discernment than the educator of Greece and Rome—then we must take his usage seriously. Homer’s comedy is serious business, unlike whatever can be meant by ‘epic’. Other musical geniuses, not only Beethoven and Bach but also Pindar and Sophocles, are allowed to remain eruptions into the timeline of human consciousness. But academic types don’t care for geniuses, especially ones they don’t themselves produce and nominate. The poet whom Pindar and Sophocles no doubt considered the greatest genius of them all is made out to be, at a deeply formative level, a product of an oral tradition. Such a tradition is entirely an invented postulate of the modern academy. It depends on the concept of a ‘metrical formula’, which in turn depends on ignoring all the marks of accentuation introduced into Homer’s text by the Alexandrian scholars of the Hellenistic era—a time when the Bear was not at the pole.
Metre is not prosody. Metre was originally performed by the feet, as the chosen name for the metrical unit, ‘foot’ (πούς), still attests. Prosody is accent (προσῳδία), ‘applied song’, performed by the voice. When these Greek accents, sharply rising and heavily falling in pitch, are applied to a metrical pattern, they produce rhythm as well as melody. The graphic accent marks demonstrate prima facie that the text of Homer, which the Alexandrians preserved and restored, was understood by them to be a musical score. If you ignore all the notes in a modern musical score, all you’ll find left are pitch-free metrical formulas. Beethoven and Homer instead generated scores that were demonstrably all three of the following: metrical (look to the time signature), rhythmic (look to the note durations and the bar lines), and melodic (look to your singing heart and the twist in your spine).
It should be clear that I find that neither Homer’s compositions nor the truth have been well served either by modern Homeric Studies or by modern science. What depresses is the extraordinary arrogance of academic closed shops, like the oral theory of Homer or gravitational cosmology. There is more than is dreamt of or realised in their philosophies, in the word-music of Homer. It may be that Homer was in some way connected, more or less intimately, to a tradition of versifying. He certainly paints more like a connoisseur than a neophyte. But how could we ever know who or what constituted such a tradition? The ‘oral tradition’ variegating now for generations like obsessive worldbuilding, is entirely based on the concept of the metrical formula: a notion that multitudes of phrases were transmitted in packets like so many clichés, to be available prepackaged to an improvising performer without, miraculously, becoming frozen or opaque in meaning over the passage of time.
Words carry meaning, and hence the transmission of phrases is meaningful tradition. But metre is not what the words contribute to Homeric poetry; the metre is already there! The Greek language cannot be the source of dactylic, isochronic metre. The dactylic hexameter is a preexistent form, an orchestic word-free tradition, which describes the steps in the ‘Dance of the Muses’ (χορεία Μουσῶν). What the words contribute to this is prosody: pitch changes and stresses—notes and bar lines—which turn metre into music. (A purely instrumental accompaniment could do the same.) Hence metrical packets or building blocks are inadequate to explain the Homeric or any other kind of musical composition. The repetition of phrases in music is wetness in water. What can be gleaned about traditions, intellectual or otherwise, which were inherited by Homer, must be inferred from his words’ melodies and meanings, not their repetitions or their metre. Could there be an inheritance of melodic phrases in Homer? Again, who can know? It should be noted that the reuse of such phrases needs no motivation but the musical. What I have demonstrated in my recent work2 is that there is significant melodic composition in Homer independent of the phrases that bear the accentual patterns; in particular, no less than Odysseus and Penelope seem each to have a signature melodic line, a characteristic accentual sequence unique to them, which is not generated by the same words in each case. That is a major discovery, if true, which it would seem to behoove the closed shop to consider and test, but not ignore.
I hope I shall also be convincing that the internal evidence suggests how Homer’s was a script for a solo actor’s performance, using minimal props to spark the vastness and the precision of the human imagination. But Homer grounds our imagination in verifiable facts. From his age to ours, the fixed stars have been signposts of reality; we all know Orion and the Bear and the Pleiades. When Calypso has Odysseus navigate by the Bear, he places us in the world of real boats and real sailors. Except that one can no longer navigate by the Bear, unless one use it to point to the true pole. If we take Homer seriously, there has been a pole-shifting catastrophe between the world he describes and ours. This needs saying even to catastrophists, many of whom accept the reality of our thunderbolt-chiseled and upturned earth, but deny that any of these kinds of things happened except in prehistory. The word-forms of Homer’s language, however, show it to be younger than Mycenaean Linear B and older than classical Greek. This is an absolute fact of historical linguistics: the development only goes one way. Hence its sequence represents a defining marker in relative chronology—even for those who are used to taking seriously the idea that they are living in the 2,025th ‘year’ of some rock steady process that has been continuously tallied somewhere.
Every fossil is evidence of the catastrophic energies which created it. It has proved impossible to create fossils out of living material. The present theories of gradual fossil deposition are puerile. Rather, every proto-human fossil skull fragment is itself the evidence of the catastrophe which destroyed its owner and all or nearly all its kind, and transformed their remains into rock. It is also evidence of the radioactive conditions which, to begin with, distort and otherwise invalidate methods of chemical dating for samples so produced, except perhaps in the terms of relative chronology (that is, ‘earlier’ or ‘later’ without the use of spurious numbers in years). But these conditions may have then fostered mutations and other kinds of genetic response, which ultimately resulted, perhaps quite quickly, in the next related human species or sub-species. These, in turn, only leave evidence of themselves once they also are destroyed and fossilised. Every fossil therefore points two ways: toward present decimation and destruction under catastrophic conditions, and the subsequent environmental stimulus to new, unforeseen speciation. The fossil is a punctuation; the sentences of life, past and future, occur to either side.
So with open minds we ask: in the figure Homer calls Oceanus, might we at one time have been witness to an undulating ring around our sky, like the invisible Van Allen belts around the earth, or the rings presently belted electromagnetically upon Saturn and other nearby bodies? The late Jno Cook argued for the sometime existence of such Earth rings:
I had no trouble identifying the Sumerian Absu, the Egyptian Duat, and the Maya House of Nine Bushes as a set of rings seen in the southern night sky. The rings which were called “the Absu” in Sumer, are called the Abyss or “the Deep” in the Bible. The rings were almost universally, throughout the world, understood to be an ocean standing up from the south horizon …
It is clear that both Sumer and Egypt described the southern skies (the Absu or the Duat) as a sea, although some Egyptian descriptions have more of the feel of a swamp. In Egypt, the Gods and the dead pharaohs are described as moving by boat across this sea. In Sumer, the God of water was assigned to the sector of the sky below the equatorial.
See here for Cook’s assessment of the historical and comparative evidence. It may be notable, after all, that Circe has Odysseus sail due south. Equatorial rings, seen from the north, would have looked like elongated semicircles—that is to say, nested arches.
If these were separate bands of ionised plasma, rotating at different speeds, we should expect what is called the diocotron instability, which looks wondrously fluid:
This instability results in patterned effects such as we see in planet Jupiter’s atmospheric bands.
The repeating shapes stylised in this predynastic vase seem to be inspired by witnessing diocotron instabilities:
This phenomenon, wherever it was witnessed, seems to have been the inspiration for the ‘Maeander’ (like the river) or ‘Greek key’ in geometric art, which has persisted ever since.
Border patterns on much later Greek designs may in fact have their origin in traditional, stylised depictions of the stream of Oceanus.
The heavens are described as Odysseus navigates from Calypso’s isle (5.272-5), in lines which correspond to the depiction at the centre of Achilles’ shield:
As he looked toward the Pleiades and late-setting Boötes
And the Bear, which they also call by the name ‘Wagon’,
Who spins herself there, where she is, and keeps looking out for Orion—
She alone exists without a share in the baths of Oceanus …
It is easy enough to read this to say that the Bear alone does not sink below the horizon, seeing as she was at that time, to the consternation of modern neo-astronomers, the constellation at the pole. On an island, the sea generally defines the horizon; hence the waters of the sea must be the ‘baths of Oceanus’. But salt water does not seem to qualify as a bath in the lexicon of the Odyssey; Odysseus washes and scrubs off himself precisely the alien, disfiguring brine in the fresh waters of a Scherian river, while Nausicaa and her handmaids look the other way. It is not at all clear, therefore, what sort of apparition could be meant by the ‘baths of Oceanus’ in Homer’s Greek. The comparative evidence indicates that ancient peoples north of the equator saw an abyss or ocean in the southern sky which undulated in a way that suggested liquid, and perhaps was even thought to have been a source of fresh water upon the earth during moments of electrical excitement. Hence while the ‘baths’ may have become a way of referring to the horizon, Oceanus himself may also originally have been a sky object, like the asterisms mentioned, which, unlike the northern Bear, dipped into those baths with the stars. What is clear is that he was a cosmic river, thought to be the ultimate or original source of earthly bodies and streams of fresh water.
If an undulating ring around the earth is too much to take on board, think of Oceanus as the Milky Way, which otherwise would not get a mention in Homer. To cross through a river generally means to get to its other side. Adjacent to Oceanus in Circe’s description—one assumes, past its further bank—are mentioned fully four other rivers which are not the Milky Way: into Acheron (‘swamp’?) conflow both the Pyriphlegethon (‘flaming fire’) and the Cocytus (‘mourning’), itself a branch of the Styx (‘shudder’). The Styx, therefore, perhaps is, or was once, also a visible thing. Are these, too, phenomena in the sky? Vibration of varying intensity connects the species of fiery plasma with those of grief. When Calypso swears good faith to Odysseus by the Styx, she describes it as ‘down flowing’ (κατειβόμενον, 5.185). This may mean it flowed down to the earth from above, rather than from the surface into the ground.
On occasion ordinary rivers have been nominated to represent these four, but how could these be ordinary rivers? Who ever heard of a river called ‘flaming fire’? Water tends to put out fire (“I live by the river!”—Joe Strummer). Flows of lava are generally singular, spreading events, not sources of continuing, permanent rivers. The four are generally understood, however, to be rivers of the ‘underworld’, unseen or at least no longer visible. This is also likely the implication of their being, for Homer, part of the invisible realm (‘Hades’, Ἀϝίδης). Hence they may be phenomena now gone but not forgotten, thought not to have been destroyed but still to exist beyond Oceanus, which would have then been the nearer border of the visible world. A separate river Oceanus encircling the world does not impress the senses today, however. It is judged a figment of primitive cosmological fancy, or romantic poetising, although there is still a widespread belief in an invisible hell.
Consider that the constituents of our so-called ‘ancient world’ understood themselves to have a complex and much more ancient past than ourselves. Hesiod tells of five different ages of man. Polynesia remembers nine ages, each with a different sky. Elsewhere we hear of successive ‘suns’, a number of widely dispersed texts around the world affirming that the present one is a seventh such sun. The past, and the dead, are no longer visible except as decaying and eroding remnants. Could it be that they are all still there, existent; gone but not forgotten in the invisibility beyond Oceanus? It is not hard to see, at any rate, how the idea of such a fluid barrier to an invisible reality would be attractive to a performing artist; it is like a fourth wall with a silent, peering audience beyond.
The kingdom of heaven—that is to say, the regime which at Jesus’ time, like ours, seemed to govern the erstwhile straying and discharging god-objects (or ‘planets’) which operate in the heavens—is a thing we nowadays prefer to call the ‘solar system’. We style it more a clockwork than a kingdom, in that we ascribe the present good order to mechanistic ‘laws of nature’ rather than the benevolent governing will of the sky’s Father. We imagine that the objects involved, including our own earth, are attracted to each other, but o’er-mightily to the sun; the only reason we do not act on this attraction is that we are diverted orthogonally by a native inertia, resulting in elliptical orbits around the principal beloved. It is a stupefyingly agreeable fantasy, which has to ignore the manifest nature of the sun and planets as electromagnets, where repulsions as well as attractions are involved, in motion within their own and exogenous electric and magnetic fields.
It makes no sense, however, to allow such contemporary religious blinders to alter, censor, or otherwise pervert the recordings of ancient composers and visual artists. Nor indeed the record of mountains, rocks, and sediments. In testimonies Cook gathers from around the world, the Absu and its analogues present themselves as arched rings in the southern sky, with a different number attested depending, apparently, on latitude: in the Yucatan and in India, there were nine undulating half-rings or arches, for example, but in Egypt seven. If Homer’s words are describing the same thing, he evidently knew of only five, which would then be a clue to his latitude. There are the four named infernal rivers, at times conjoined except for the Styx, while outermost, at the periphery of either the cosmos or the underworld, runs Oceanus. We might say that this configuration was associated with fresh water, and was perhaps considered a source of fresh water rivers, although not a source of briny oceans.
Whatever it is that Homer means us to be looking at or imagining during Circe’s prescription for the journey to Hades, in heaven, on earth, or beneath it, past or present, it is clear that any audience would find it difficult to get its bearings. The reorientation which seemed to have been established after a solar year on Aeaea, Circe’s Isle, has once again been upended. To cross through the stream of Oceanus, perhaps beyond the Milky Way, would seem to be a journey beyond the limit of the visible world, given the iconography of Achilles’ shield; yet on the other side, there seems to be a normal landfall:
There’s a small headland there, and a grove of Persephone—
Tall poplars and willows that lose their fruit— (10.509-10)
This familiar sort of prospect for landing, after what we should have called space travel, does not so much reassure as further disorient. It is the disconcerting sort of realism, as confronts one in dreams or nightmares or abstract art. Real frogs in imaginary gardens. Or icons appearing on your toast. How does Homer locate us, and restore our bearings?
Through Circe’s speech it seems the performer is given a series of directional cues, which I presume he acts out while his voice continues to deliver Circe. Of course, it could instead be that she uses her body to give the instructions, like a coach teaching a new technique. When she says, ‘hug close to the rock, like I’m ordering you (ὥς σε κελεύω),’ I imagine her embodying the move: ὡς carries it with it the gesture ‘this way’, ‘thus’. One remembers the ‘walk this way’ vaudeville joke from the film Young Frankenstein. (The ‘rock’ is my interpretation; the original simply says ‘draw yourself close’ after describing an area where there’s a rock or cliff and the coming together of two thundering rivers. Circe does not say which two rivers these are, of the four plus Oceanus that have been mentioned.)
The first directional cue is the journey due south, which may at one time have meant a journey towards a now unimaginable and looming cosmic apparition. When she comes to the spot by the rock, Circe mimes the ritual she deems necessary; the line,
Dig a trench, an arm’s length over here and over here, (517)
seems designed for wide-armed gestures ‘over here and over here.’ The miming out of these sacramental actions creates an intelligible space around the performer, which allows for a settling physical orientation whilst imaginatively surrounded by the frightful wonders of an heavenly underworld. A recipe guides you through chaos in the kitchen: one must offer mixed honey (μελίκρητος—milk and honey?), then wine, then water. Odysseus is to appease the ghosts with the promise of a sacrifice once he gets home, of his finest barren heifer. He’s going to ‘fill the barbecue with quality ingredients.’ For Teiresias he’ll set aside his best black ram. The sex and fertility of the beasts is as pointed as it goes unexplained. In addition, right away—not when he’s got home—Odysseus must sacrifice a ram and a black ewe.
The mechanics of this—where the sheep he needs could come from, for example—and all sorts of other logistical problems are allayed, it seems to me, by the misdirection of giving directions: turn the sacrificed animals toward Erebus, but ‘turn yourself away,/Heading for the on-flowing river’s streams …’ (528-9). Erebus seems later to mean ‘darkness’ generally, with also perhaps a connotation of dustiness. But here in the Odyssey the context seems to require a definite location, and nothing precludes a location in the sky. Jno Cook suggests that the shadow of the earth upon its riverine rings would have made the impression of a shifting starless portal through the arches. When the ghosts do in fact appear, they are said to gather out of Erebus (11.37), as through a gaping door.
We therefore focus on the pointing of the animals and the turning in another direction, inhabiting the celebrant’s movements and hands rather than trying to make sense of the scene around him. The ghosts will gather at the river it seems, where he is facing, while the sacrifice is behind him. We are to imagine his men flaying and broiling the animals behind the quasi-priest, while he (once again) must dramatically ‘draw the sharp sword from by your thigh’—and sit. Sitting down with his sword out? The Odyssean performer is a ham. The battle sword’s job, this time, is somehow to keep the dismal remnant souls from getting at the spilt blood to his rear. So we face the ghosts, seated, with butchering and cooking going on behind our backs.
… do not allow the corpses’ powerless heads
To go near the blood, before you consult with Teiresias. (536-7)
To be continued …
[You will find the Greek performance of this passage at the end of the next post, pt. 2.]
