These songs describes in grim detail the suffering of victims as warriors slash and spear one another, old men and children are slaughtered, women are enslaved, corpses are mutilated and denied burial. The violence ends only when the gods have victimized the hunting party. . .

Homer should NOT be confused with  story-tellers who celebrate their exploits and advertise their fitness for survival. This practical use of story telling existed in Homer's day--it appears historically by the time that the first pharaoh smote, or claimed to have smitten, his first enemies [figure left]. And it survives today in hunting and fishing lodges all across the American wilderness, where my neighbors' dens are decorated with heads of assorted prey, and whole stuffed birds and fish, all of which inspire epics about the cleverness, bravery and endurance of their killers.

The Homeric Songs belong in this same general tradition of trophy talk, but they are not about Homer or Homer's master or the greatness of the Greeks who plundered Troy. They're all about victims, and this focus raises an important question. Why would Homer, or anybody, tell the story of a hunt from the point of view of the hunted?

The Homeric songs are among the earliest remaining literature of the Hellenes or Greek-speaking people. The literary record shows these people to have been, first and foremost, story-tellers. They told stories of a large pantheon of deities, led by the god Zeus as king and the goddess Hera as queen. They told more stories of their ancestors, "the heroes" whose deeds were remembered and made famous through ritual ceremony, graphic arts and song.

The most important, most famed Hellenic hero was a hunter dressed in lion's skin, Heracles (or Hercules, to the later Romans who had forgotten Hera; Heracles' name means "the fame of Hera"). In his quests or labors, Heracles typically uses a primitive wooden club and arm-wrestling to slay dangerous animal opponents and gigantic monsters. He is a link back to distant, prehistoric times. He would have been right at home in the Ice Age.

Far back before Heracles and all remembered stories there was Paleolithic cave painting, dating from as early as 30,000 BC in Europe. These earliest surviving works of western art typically are concerned with the hunt--and not with the hunters but with the hunted. They are images of victims. Why? The stone age tradeoff with the animal victim was that, in exchange for its meat, hide and bone, it was immortalized by humankind in art. The pictures were painted in underworld galleries where the dead animals could see that people are trustworthy and do nice work.

This art worked like a charm, from the cave-artist's point of view. The artist took credit for successful hunts when the animals vainly flocked in to dinner to have their portraits painted. Restoring the images of these poor beasts, as they had appeared in life, the artist also alleviated the guilt of the diners for killing and devouring their prey. (Yet how much happier the animals must have been, eventually in Neolithic times, to cut a deal with humankind for domestication. They finally got some real benefits, not just human lip service!)

Painting preceded writing in Europe by tens of thousands of years, but the literate Hellenes' arrangement with their heroes was essentially the same deal as the Paleolithic compact with wild animals. Like the food animal, the hero gives up the world of sunshine but receives in exchange an immortal fame, a presentation in art that the living will see or hear forever. Though some of the magic has gone out of it, this same aesthetic bargain still exists today, as can be seen in countless public memorials to the war dead and religious shrines of the martyrs.

What most interested the Hellenes about Heracles was not his magnificent strength, courage or skill in fighting but his terrible suffering. His quests were "labors," and they were agonizing. His namesake, the goddess Hera, was responsible for his glory (glory = "kleos" in Greek) because her animosity toward him caused all of his trouble and pain. "Hera-kleos" wore the lion's skin, and he wore it in such a way that he appeared in the lion's mouth (see figure above left), because he identified himself as victim.

Ironically, nobody remembers who Homer was, but he clearly was an heir to this very old magical tradition of victim presentation. Homer remembers the dead for their suffering, and he associates their labors with the sacrifice of animals that are killed and eaten.

In nearly the age-old way too, the Homeric bard sings the praises of victims in exchange for dinner. Let's now look in on an evening's entertainment at one of these ancient banquets...

On his way home from the Trojan War, Odysseus has been shipwrecked and washed ashore, naked and alone and unconscious, on the distant island of the Phaeacians. Fortunately, these strangers not only know Greek, but they follow Hellenic customs of hospitality more closely than any Hellenes actually do. They charitably revive, clothe, praise, and feed Odysseus before asking who he is. He gets to tell them his story on a stomach full of roast pork.

The Phaeacians are an ideal audience. Telling a good story to them can save your life, as in The Thousand and One Nights where clever Sheherazade gets to live one more day if, each night, she tells a story of continuing charm to cruel but enchantable King Schariar. Once the Phaeacians hear Odysseus tell about his ten years of hardships in homecoming, they immediately agree to provide an ultra-fast boat with a sleeping cabin, so that he can return home to distant Ithaca in only forty winks.

How does Odysseus charm them? His story is more than entertainment or pastime. It's a means to achieve personal identification. When Odysseus tells his story--even though it is a very strange story--he ceases to be a stranger. The story brings him to life by revealing his suffering, his humanity. As the Phaeacians hear the story, they come to view Odysseus as a person of "good disposition," worthy of charity (Odyssey  9.362).  Story-telling is humanizing. It awakens kind-ness.

Story-telling produces meat for the story-teller, too, almost in the old Paleolithic way that cave-painting produced it. A professional story-teller works the Phaeacian dining room, ahead of Odysseus on the evening's story-telling program. He's the bard Demodocus. Another Sheherazade-figure dependent on story-telling for survival, Demodocus sings for his supper. (Actually, he gets the food up front, before the art is performed, as the practical Hellenic custom of "hospitality" requires. First get the meat, and only then sing of victims. No meat, no song.)

Demodocus receives a nice piece of pork in advance, sings about Troy on request after dinner, and moves his audience to tears. The tears are an essential part. The listeners must be made to care about the people in the story and what becomes of them. And what becomes of them can't be good. Homeric story appeals to sympathy.

Demodocus sings sadly enough about the final destruction of Troy, an attack planned and led by Odysseus himself almost ten years earlier (Odyssey 8.469). Listening closely and hearing that Demodocus knows the true story, Odysseus reacts to the song appropriately. He weeps.

In a favorite Homeric figure of speech, an elaborate simile, Homer compares Odysseus' sobbing to the groans of a helpless war victim: 

The simile identifies hero with victim. Through Demodocus' art, Odysseus seems to have returned to the scene of his greatest military triumph only to find himself transformed into the helpless war widow who is beaten and hauled away into slavery. The image of the weeping woman is a reminder of the brutality at Troy, including Odysseus' own reputed crime on the night of the fall of the city, the killing of Trojan Prince Hektor's helpless young child Astyanax. The weeping woman could be Astyanax' mother, Andromache, whose laments fill the Iliad.

The Iliad also identifies hero with victim, when in the end the ruthless warrior Achilles weeps with his enemy, the grieving old Trojan king Priam (image left). In his anger Achilles has killed Priam's son, Hektor, but Achilles finally comes to sympathize with Priam, and to allow the old man to ransom Hektor's body for burial. He is moved by Priam's suffering because he foresees his own death in Hektor's death. He imagines in Priam his own aged father begging for the corpse of Achilles.

Much more about Hektor, Priam and Achilles later. The immediate point is a simple one: identification with victims is Homer's golden rule. What you do is what you get. Just as Heracles dresses himself in the skin of the lion that he has killed, the Homeric warriors come to view themselves as their victims. Achilles identifies with Hektor; Odysseus identifies with a Trojan widow. In Homer, those who do not identify with their victims become mere animals or monsters (because they treat their victims inhumanly as such). Those who identify with their victims are filled with suffering, but they become truly human through their expression of grief.

Homeric identification operates in several ways at the same time:

• Poetic: identification is a reflection of the story-teller's art of characterization, impersonating others through sympathetic re-enactment. The experience of these characters and their suffering encourages the audience to empathize, to be more aware of the human. condition and more respectful of others. 

• Moral: as a cultural value, identification is the seed for the Golden Rule, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." This is common sense instruction on behavior. If I cause pain for others, I can expect to receive pain in retaliation from the enemies I have made. If I raise a fist at you, you probably will raise one at me. If I hold out my hand toward you for a handshake, you are likely to do the same toward me. Because of imitation, what we do unto others is likely to be done unto us.

• Religious or psychological: tactical concern about retaliation aside, there is a deeper fear of spiritual consequences of aggression. The Homeric warrior becomes his own enemy. A wound inflicted is a wound received. In modern religious or psychological terms: hurting others creates guilt, and guilt causes suffering. Homer obviously did not know guilt by this modern name, but he was very familiar with its punishing operation. In Homeric song, the infliction of pain on others leads to retaliation or punishment by the gods, and the result is suffering.

Odysseus' story to the Phaeacians fully develops this spiritual level of interest. Its more modern counterparts include stories of spiritual conversion into an opposite self, such as the conversion of St. Paul on the road to Damascus, as well as confessions of guilt and entry into a radically new spiritual life, such as Augustine's Confessions. The "born again" story formula appears in many varieties today: i.e., the criminal who reforms, the spy who defects to the enemy, the priest who loses faith, the confirmed bachelor who marries, the man who turns into a cockroach, etc.

In the very ancient spiritual idiom of the Odyssey--ritual sacrifice of animals--identity is transformed from the victim animal that is eaten to the spirit that endures in those who eat. Animal flesh is destroyed in the natural process of survival, but art rectifies this injustice: the ingested animal victim becomes human through incorporation. Once sacrificed and devoured, the victim gains the power of speech that it lacked when it was only a dumb animal. Its story now comes out, told through the voice of the speaker who has been fed. This imputed survival is its living "spirit."

Odysseus' after-dinner story describes the transformation of men to animals, and animals to men. To clarify this theme, let's briefly review some of Odysseus' tale.

Odysseus' story in summary

Odysseus suffers a long series of punishments by the spirits after the Trojan War. He becomes a victim animal, but finally he is transformed back into manhood and released to return home:

• Odyssey 9.39. Odysseus and his crew sack the city of Kikones on the way home from the war. This brief episode shows the ruthless character of the plunderers who have destroyed Troy. They are pirates. Their victims mean nothing more to them than so many cattle: the males are slaughtered and the females are taken for breeding stock. As the crew lingers feasting upon the captured cattle, however, the allies of Kikones are able to mount a counter-attack with "the hand of heaven" on their side. Now Odysseus is on the defensive, and his men begin to be killed. It's their turn to be victimized and devoured.

• 9.62. Divine punishment continues as the Achaeans flee from Kikones. Zeus raises a wind that blows the ships far off course. From this point forward Odysseus loses control and self-direction. Gods sweep the voyage into a series of alien worlds where Odysseus and his mates are treated as animals (just as they have treated their victims at Troy, Kikones, and elsewhere).

• 9.82. Visit to the land of the Lotus Eaters: the crew begins to forget who they are and where they are supposed to be going. Those who eat the Lotus are transformed into animal consciousness, becoming like mindless cattle grazing in a pasture.

• 9.105. Visit to the land of the cannibal Cyclopes: Odysseus' crew members are eaten like animals. The grotesque experience in the cyclops Polyphemus' cave repays Odysseus and crew for victimizing others. Polyphemus' name means "much fame," but you don't receive fame, of course, unless you are eaten. (Remember the covenant of the cave, the Paleolithic bargain with the wild animals.) Odysseus wants no part of this animal deal. He escapes from the cave of fame by giving up his fame--that is, by calling himself "Noman," hiding his name. Yet he still hasn't learned his lesson. As soon as he thinks that he is beyond Polyphemus' reach outside the cave, he congratulates himself on his cleverness, and he foolishly brags to the cyclops that he is Odysseus, the famous sacker of cities. By identifying himself once again as famous, Odysseus is cursed by Polyphemus. Under the curse, the famous man must be consumed after all.  (Back home in Ithaca, where Odysseus is presumed to be dead, his livestock are being eaten, and the diners are courting his weeping widow, and threatening to kill his orphaned young son.) Odysseus now tries to appease the anger of Zeus by sacrificing animals to him, but the god refuses to accept these offerings. It's Odysseus himself that Zeus wants!

• 10.1. Visit to Aeolus, the god of winds: the Achaeans can't get home because their greed and envy unleash unfavorable winds. In a classic episode of the falling out of thieves, the crew now imagines their captain Odysseus as a swindler who won't share the spoils fairly with them. Thinking that Aeolus' wind bag is a sack of gold that Odysseus is keeping from them, they can't resist opening it when Odysseus is asleep. The explosion of the escaping winds blows the adventurers far off course again. Awakening to this wind storm, Odysseus now realizes that he is accursed by the gods. Aeolus describes him as the "vilest of humankind."

• 10.77. Visit to the Laestrygonians: more cannibals see Odysseus and his crew only as food. Most of Odysseus' comrades are eaten here, and the survivors are reduced to terror and grief.

• 10.133. Visit to the goddess Circe: the voyage at last reaches a place where magical transformations are possible. Circe is a witch who can turn humans into animals, but she also can turn animals back into humans. These are digestive powers, and they are exactly what's needed to return the animal-Achaeans back into people. With help from Hermes, the god of magic, Odysseus and his crew regain the appearance of manhood from Circe. They become the eaters again, instead of the eaten, and they recover the strength that they once had in their innocence before Troy. Reborn in this way, seemingly young again, they remember their destination, which is home. Yet Circe instructs Odysseus that he can go home only by way of the underworld. As in Paleolithic art, it is only through death that the animal victims become human. 

• 11.1. Visit to the prophet Teiresias and the world of the dead: the spiritual journey concludes in religious ceremony with animal sacrifices offered to spirits of the dead. The ritual reflects the practice of ancient hero worship where the living visited the dead to gain instruction about the afterlife. In this underground place of visions Odysseus sees that his mother has died for grief over his absence. He also learns that he must NOT steal cattle on his way home or else he will find his home overrun by evil-doers, devouring his flocks. Last, he receives a prophecy from Teiresias that he can restore order to Ithaca, if and when he gets home, but then he will need to atone for all of his transgressions by making a long pilgrimage to offer sacrifices to Poseidon and the other gods.

Phaeacian King Alkinoos is moved by Odysseus' story. The king's name means both "powerful mind" and also "he who has power to bring back to life." Alkinoos understands the story, and he sympathizes. He arranges for a ship to return Odysseus home to Ithaca at once.

Some magical features in Odysseus' tale

Odysseus' story has the magical power to persuade an audience of right-thinking people to help him on his quest. Within the story there are numerous magical features also. They can be described broadly under three general categories:

1. Gods explain everything--because there is no such thing as chance, luck or accident, everything is controlled. Odysseus has many adventures, and many of them are weird, but nothing happens without an explanation. Nothing is hidden, everything is revealed. If things can't be explained in human terms, they are explained in terms of gods, goddesses, and daemons. (Daemons are simply unnamed spirits.) Examples:

• the winner in battle has the help of gods: Odysseus defeats his adversaries at Troy "by Athena's help" but Odysseus and his men lose the fight against the Kikones because "the hand of heaven was against us."  Sometimes these descriptions are more specific (Athena's help at Troy) and sometimes they are more vague or uncertain (the hand of heaven), but warfare always reflects spiritual conditions.

• storms at sea reflect the anger of gods and favorable winds reflect the favor of gods. The experience at sea is always paranormal because sailors are committed into the hands of greater powers. The weather can be controlled by proper behavior, especially civil respect toward others, prayer and sacrifices to the gods.

• gods turn humans into animals and animals into humans. One becomes an animal as divine punishment for treating other people as animals. (In the modern cliché, you are what you eat. In Homer's bigger picture, you are eaten as you eat.) From suffering comes a mystical recognition of the wholeness or inter-dependence of life and death. Humanity is restored through deeply felt grief.

• the poet or bard is inspired by the gods: the bard Demodocus can create an accurate picture of Troy for his audience, even though he was not present at Troy, because he is "inspired by a god." The Muse (the goddess of memory) teaches bards their songs. Modern literary critics have had an awful time explaining where poetry comes, but Homer explains everything.

2. Story precedes experience. Words have power to cause things to happen, like God's commands in the Genesis creation story, or Odysseus' own persuasive appeals to the Phaeacians. Stories come true. Some examples within Odysseus' story:

• Teiresias' prophecy: Odysseus needs to get home, and he needs to fix his life. Before he can do these things, he has to hear the story about how they will be done. He needs what we might call a fortune teller. That's Teiresias, the prophet, the seer who is believed to know everything in advance. What Teiresias says to do, Odysseus does.

• The cyclops' prophecy: the cyclops Polyphemus long ago heard a prophecy that he would lose his eye because of somebody named Odysseus. The prophecy comes to pass.

• The cyclops' curse: Polyphemus prays to his father, the sea god Poseidon, that Odysseus will suffer trouble in his house. The curse is effective.

• The Phaeacian prophecy: King Alkinoos has heard a prophecy that Poseidon will bury the Phaeacians' city within a mountain because of their help to a stranded traveler. In a later scroll of  the Odyssey this prophecy also comes to pass! (Alkinoos, the power to restore to life, was believed to be underground in Homer's day. Hellenes in ritual ceremonies went down into caves and holes in the ground to gain wisdom about this underground death and rebirth process.)

3. Ritual acts and gestures produce magical results. There's a technology involved in controlling spirits. When the techniques are followed precisely, the spirits are bound. Some examples:

• Controlling Circe: the medicine god Hermes tells Odysseus what to do to control the goddess Circe by taking a drug, raising his sword, and requiring a promise from Circe to do no harm. Odysseus and his crew achieve the appearance of manhood again because Odysseus does exactly what he is told to do. 

• Raising the dead: the goddess Circe tells Odysseus how to hear the spirits of the dead, including the dead prophet Teiresias, by feeding them blood from specific animal sacrifices. Odysseus performs the ritual sacrifices as instructed, and the dead begin to speak.

We will return to these general features of magic throughout our discussion of Homer and Powers of Literature. In sum, story-telling begins by accounting for the dead. It reveals the part of the cycle of nature that the living can't see in ordinary experience, without the use of art. Story tellers provide useful foreknowledge about death. Knowing how the gods manage the dead gives the living a limited degree of control (magic) over death.

Sympathetic magic

The magical use of art to control events is known in cultures throughout the world. The form varies greatly from place to place, but anthropologists call this general activity "sympathetic magic." An artistic or artificial presentation is intended to cause sympathetic or similar things to happen in the real world.

In voodoo, a gesture that harms a figurine, by sympathetic magic, causes harm to the real-life victim presented by the figurine. A pretense of raining in the rain dance causes rain to fall. This practical, magical basis for art is universal, though it is observed most clearly at great distances from the observer. It seems most obvious in the study of belief systems that are very ancient or very foreign, such as Paleolithic culture in prehistoric Europe where cave art was believed to satisfy the needs of animals to be remembered or glorified.

The Hellenic people, almost modern by comparison, believed in oracles and prophecies. These stories of sympathetic magic are visions or presentations of future experience. A biography, or at least the important aspects of it, can be told before the life is lived. The concept is comparable to "fortune telling," astrology or other primitive determinisms. The oracle, prophet or seer doesn't make predictions or forecasts based on probabilities, as far as the believer is concerned. The story may not be probable at all, but it is inevitable. It will happen.

In the Odyssey, before he can return home to Ithaca, Odysseus must hear the story of his life-to-be from a oracle or prophet. Clever though he is, he can't see the path forward by himself or make up his own story. Because he has become lost in a maze of bewildering spiritual punishments about his past, his future must be told to him by somebody who can see ahead. That guide is Teiresias, the oracle who knows past and future.

But where does Teiresias get the story? How does he know the future?

The future in Homer frequently depends on the past; hence the future often can be foretold, if the story of the past can be recalled. In these cases the future is not simply some made up story, acted out according to the whim of gods or the desires of human actors themselves. It is not invented out of thin air by creative seers and priests.  It is not some new thing, independent of things that have gone before. It is what must happen, in fairness, to complete or compensate for what has gone before.

Under such a system of retributive justice, guilt works out through time: "the first shall become last" and vice versa. Time brings about a fairly predictable series of role reversals like the transformation of Odysseus the oppressor (the victor at Troy) into Odysseus the victim (the weeping war widow). Odysseus has been a famous sacker of cities; accordingly his fate, and the cyclops' curse, will return him to a home which reflects the cities that he has sacked. He has stolen the cattle of others, so his own cattle will be devoured. Ithaca, when he finally gets there, will be a reflection of dead Hektor's household: Odysseus' grieving wife Penelope will take the place of sorrowing widow Andromache, and Odysseus' paranoid young son Telemakhos will suffer from delusions that he is about to be murdered like Astyanax.

Because the future is the spiritual consequence of the past, in this way, Teiresias and other Homeric seers can read it in victims. The blood allows them to speak and to prophesy. Show the seer your victim, and the seer shows your future to you. 

In this prophetic system, events that appear to the living as if they have passed actually are still present, spiritually. What happened in former times is the spell, charm or curse under which the living exist. In this mythic or recurrent sense in which the past isn't past at all, history must be taken quite seriously because it is the key to understanding the changes that are going to happen.

The purpose of this classical Hellenic tragedy was to arouse strong emotional sympathy in the audience, as noted by the earliest western literary critics, Plato and Aristotle. (More about their views on art in Lesson 11.) The theater audience was to be moved to pity and fear for the suffering victim, the tragic hero. The emotional purpose is essentially the same as in Odysseus' story-telling to the Phaeacians.

Hellenic tragedy in its heyday was taken seriously. The classical plays were not only or mainly entertainment, like Hollywood drama. The Hellenic theater was a public institution, and citizens attended the public performances as a matter of civic duty on religious feast days. In its early form, the celebration opened with the ritual sacrifice of animals and a public feast or communion meal; then the actors, wearing masks to obscure their own identity, using music and other effects to transform their stage into a magical spirit world, sang and spoke the words of heroes of long ago...

Now let's return to our proposed mother of all stories, the primitive story of the hunt told after dinnertime. The underlying pattern hero story, or tragedy, of the Hellenes is the story of the animal killed on the hunt--which is also the quest story of the suffering of the hunter who identifies with the slain animal, like Heracles in the victim lion's skin. 

The simplicity of this story is deceptive. Its core idea is the sacrifice. All life comes from death. The dying victim gives life to the one who sacrifices; then the one who sacrifices in turn becomes the victim. This cycle unifies all life, all organisms of all time on earth.

Sacrifice offers a first theory of creative story-telling, just as it does for cave painting in visual art. When the artist has feasted on the animal, the animal is incorporated in the artist. In exchange for its animal body, it gains the artist's body, which includes the artist's power of speech to tell its story. Literature first comes from this incorporated voice within, this ingested alien that has its say through the artist's voice box. This art appears to be the earliest form of spiritual possession, possession by the victim food animal. 

Later, still long before the time of the Homeric songs, human dead generally took the place of slain animals in story-telling. According to new ideas about spirits at this time, animal sacrifice could be "offered" to human dead. The voices of hero-ancestors could be heard when animals were sacrificed to them. Not surprisingly, the most ancient hero-spirits (like Heracles or Odysseus) often were portrayed with animal qualities. Animal sacrifices also could be "offered" to the gods, with a similar result that gods often took on animal characteristics, like Zeus in the form of a bull. 

This newer form of sacrifice, as offering to hero, or offering to god, may have been the poetic origin of mythology, history, and prophecy: speaking for people of the past and speaking for gods. The practice of ancestral and divine impersonation could have arisen with the domestication of animals in the Neolithic period. At that time, the old magical idea of attracting the animal for dinner would have begun to fade away, because food animals had been domesticated. But the need to avoid guilt for eating would have remained as strong as ever. Before the cruel circuses of the Roman Empire, animals seldom were killed for sport, or even for personal consumption. Previously, slaughtering and eating meat had a higher justification or pretence, the communion with ancestor-spirits and gods.

Of course, I have been describing ancient beliefs about sacrifice and the arts related to it. From a modern scientific perspective, this feasting and story-telling  phenomenon is explained in medical terms. Human beings have a unique nervous system that can be regulated to some degree by conscious thoughts. This system consists of a sympathetic nervous system (SNS), which raises stress levels, and a parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), which relaxes them. The SNS drives up blood pressure, increases heartbeat, and optimizes the body for physical action, especially fight or flight emergencies. When it is frequently used, the SNS tends to get stuck in the "on" position, so that we can't relax--a condition that leads to sleeplessness, stroke, heart disease, impotence, ulcers, indigestion and a host of other stress-related ailments. We can shut off the SNS, however, by consciously stimulating the PNS, which triggers a calm, vegetative state, optimizes our gastrointestinal tract for digestion, and allows us to sleep.

Ancient Hellenes were physically stressed--possibly much more stressed than most of us are today, due to the severities and dangers of life in their challenging times. They needed relaxation, especially after dinner and before bedtime. Fine arts accompanying evening meals would have helped to induce parasympathetic tone. From after-dinner story-telling of the sort portrayed in the Odyssey, a Demodocus could have earned a living, an Odysseus could have made friends, and an Alkinoos could have benefited most of all, gaining the boon of physical health. A fantastic traveler's tale of the type told by Odysseus was just what the doctor would have ordered, had a doctor been there.  

Children of Adam and Eve

Animal sacrifice was known and practiced with variations throughout much of the ancient world, not only in areas of major Hellenic influence. Animal sacrifice is introduced in Genesis in the story of Cain and Abel, the first children of Adam and Eve. 

Recall the story. Abel is the keeper of sheep, and his sacrifice of the firstlings of the flock is accepted by the Lord. Cain is a tiller of the ground whose sacrifice of the first fruits of the earth is not accepted by the Lord. (Can you see why the sacrifice of animals might be more "acceptable" than the sacrifice of fruits?)

Abel is the sacrificer who becomes the sacrifice. Cain slays Abel, and the spilled blood of Abel calls out from the ground to the Lord. Abel also now speaks and lives in Cain, for bloodshed brings role-reversal, and Cain becomes the suffering victim. No longer will Cain be a tiller of the ground. His life takes the form of a vagabond wanderer, the life of an animal. He believes that every man he meets will kill him. This animal fear is his guilt, and it is not forgiven. The Lord promises only that, if Cain is slain, the pattern of victimization will continue and escalate for "whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold."

According to another verse of Genesis, incidentally, Cain became the father of all those who play the lyre (the musical instrument used by mediums in hero rituals, and later used by bards to accompany heroic songs). Claiming that heroic tradition goes back to Cain, this biblical verse appears to recognize that the singing originates in killing.

The story of Cain and Abel is far from Homeric in its spare style, but broad similarities between Cain and Odysseus are unmistakable. Killers become sufferers, homeless vagabonds who fear for their lives, punished  by divine retribution as if they were animals. Punishment is not the end of the story, however. In an ending that is often difficult for modern audiences to understand, both Cain and Odysseus turn out to be heroes. Why? They are not murderers of modern crime fiction but sacrificers of an archaic ritual type, killers in whose guilty suffering the victim is reborn.

The essential story pattern survived in tragic literature centuries after animal sacrifice ceased to be practiced. Shakespeare, for example, returned to it in Macbeth (cir. 1604 AD) and Julius Caesar (cir. 1598 AD) where murderers, haunted by the blood of their victims, receive punishment by spirits, eloquence, illumination and eventual butchering. In later literature, like Shakespeare, this plot development, from murder to victimization, may look simply like poetic justice or irony, a merely literary device. In the primal view of Homer and Genesis, however, it is the sacrificial order of nature herself. 

Additional related readings
and journal topics

1. Aftermath: so how did Odysseus lose the rest of his crew and ship before washing ashore at Phaeacia?  In spite of Teiresias' warning against eating holy cattle, Odysseus' crew runs out of provisions on the way home from the underworld when they are stranded by adverse winds on the island of the cattle of the sun. Only Odysseus refuses to eat the god's cattle, and only Odysseus survives to tell the story (or so he says). All other hands are lost at sea, as Zeus sinks the ship.

Odysseus tells this story in a sequel for the Phaeacians. This part of the tale includes his adventures with more ghosts, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, and the destructive storm at sea. Read Odysseus' encore performance here, if desired. Odyssey x. 362 - xiii. 16.

Do these subsequent stories in the sequel continue or develop the Homeric ideas about fame and hiding, eating and cannibalism, animals and gods, victims and slayers? Are some episodes parallels of others? Do they add anything new or are they simply repetition? 

2. Scholarship: for still the world's greatest collection of examples of sympathetic magic, see Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough. For a general discussion of archaic conceptions of recurring time, as contrasted with modern linear and historical conceptions, see Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (Harper & Row 1959). Scholarly but readable treatments of Hellenic religion and animal sacrifice can be found in Walter Burkert's fascinating books, Greek Religion (Harvard Press 1985), Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth (U California Press 1983), and Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions (Harvard Press 1996). The last book particularly describes relationships between hunting and the quest pattern of story telling.

Greek voyages of discovery are studied in a wonderful book by Francois Hartog, Memories of Odysseus: Frontier tales from Ancient Greece, tr. Janet Lloyd (U Chicago Press 2001). For the original volume see Memoir d'Ulysse (Editions Gallimard 1996).

3. Oracles, prophecies and visions applied: By what stories do you live? If you don't have a story in mind for your future, how can you control your life at all? If you do have a story in mind, isn't it only a fiction?

4. The food chain: Our usual modern idea of the food chain is a collection of supermarkets or fast food restaurants, not an ecosystem. What might be the consequences?  Perhaps the grocery and restaurant businesses are elaborate devices to eliminate guilt for eating, hence true successors to cave painting? (And why are so many restaurants run by people of Greco-Roman descent!)

5. Animal stories: can you now suggest why the first stories that you ever heard as a child were animal stories?  What's the message in "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" or other classic children's stories that feature talking animals? What's the appeal of animal toys?

6. Isaac and the ram, other Hebrew parallels: for a further Biblical parallel see the Genesis story of Abraham and Isaac (Genesis 22, 1-19). How does this story of sacrifice differ from other stories discussed above in Lesson 2? Consider also the story of Jacob and Esau (Genesis 27) in which old Isaac gives his blessing after dinner to the son who feels wooly. Compare the pastoral deception of Isaac by Jacob with Odysseus' trick escape from the cyclops Polyphemus.

The Biblical episode most parallel to Odysseus' consultation of Teiresias is the curious story of King Saul and the Witch of Endor in 1 Samuel 28: 3-25, dating from perhaps 1000 BCE (the time of Helladic Dark Age). In those days at least two groups of prophets provided consulting services to Saul, King of the Jews. There were men who prophesied by impersonating the Lord in the usual Jewish way. (They said: "Thus says the Lord . . .") And then there were women who somehow raised dead prophets from the underworld to prophesy. The King James translation of the Bible describes these women as witches, probably because James was obsessed with witch detection. More modern translations are less sensational. In the New American Bible, for example, the prophetess of Endor is described as a "medium," meaning simply a host of spirits.

In any case, when live Jewish prophets weren't working, Saul could ask a resurrectress about dead ones. The curiosity in the story of Endor is the admission that the lady gets the job done. She raises the dead prophet Samuel, and somehow she makes Samuel tell the doomed king about his fate.  Moreover, this prophecy turns out to be as correct as any in the scriptures.

The similarities between the two otherwise unrelated stories of Saul and Odysseus, and the matter-of-fact way in which these stories are told, suggest that there was nothing very extraordinary about resurrecting prophets in those days. The parallels with the Easter story are hard to miss.

7. Tragedy: see introduction to Greek tragedy from Cambridge classics. More about tragedy later in Powers of Literature (in Lesson 11), and much more about Shakespeare, too. Shakespeare knew the ancient connection between tragic drama and communal feasting, as evidenced by the banquet scene in Macbeth and many other passages.

8. Christianity: can you see why Christianity might catch on among people of Hellenic culture or training? why Constantinople, so near Homer's geographical world, would become a center for the new religion? 

9. Punishment for the sins of our fathers: are we punished for the sins of our fathers, or rewarded for their virtues? In what sense can this be true? (See, for example, Exodus 20. 5: "I the Lord your God am a jealous God, inflicting punishment for their father's wickedness on the children of those who hate me, down to the third and the fourth generation, but bestowing mercy down to the thousandth generation on the children of those who love me and keep my commandments.") 

10. Understanding images: look at the image immediately below on this page (the warrior figure on which I have typed "Homeric Songs web index"). I have restored and colorized the image. The original sculpture is a white (formerly painted) marble carving that once decorated the east pediment of the Hellenic temple of Aegina, probably dating from the early 5th century BCE. The art books describe this semi-prone figure as "wounded warrior" or "dying warrior." Is that a good description? Keep this question in mind as you study the Odyssey. We will return to it later.