00:04:00.180When we went back to, if we think back to the earlier chapters that are being relayed by Bards or by Odysseus himself, there's just nonstop action.
00:04:13.440These chapters are a little more subtle.
00:04:16.760um I was hoping that we would read out loud one passage from chapter 17 and then another passage
00:04:26.220from chapter 19 the book 17 book 19 I guess I should say uh the first one is a very famous one
00:04:33.960of Odysseus's homecoming and his dog Argos recognizes him uh in chapter or book 19 uh I
00:04:43.800thought that we could read the passage where Odysseus is having his feet washed and we learned
00:04:51.780about his scars revealed to the serving maid and we learn about how he received his name and then
00:04:58.900I thought we would read the passage of Penelope relaying to Odysseus her dream about an eagle
00:05:05.900coming and killing her goslings if we have time it might be interesting to read about
00:05:14.56020 lines from the gospel of luke in which jesus is visiting a pharisee named simon and he has his0.99
00:05:26.740feet washed by a prostitute very interesting um if we do take this
00:05:34.000thesis seriously one connected with mcdonald of0.96
00:05:39.640mimesis in effect of the gospels written in greek uh homer was the shakespeare of that time if you
00:05:52.720will you you sort of can't get away from him he's the foundation of education that they might be
00:05:59.620sort of spinning passages referencing them flipping them over uh mimetically
00:06:08.720reiterating passages and so there there is a parallel passage with foot washing
00:06:15.220so it's a short passage only about 20 lines so I thought we could read that as well so that is my
00:06:22.720a very brief summary of the little action that that occurs in these fourth chapters and then
00:06:27.440those are my ideas going forward um i know that mark has an interesting thing to say it's something
00:06:35.120we've it's it's from a previous chapter and we i i think that we were suggesting things about the
00:06:45.120cyclops that we maybe we weren't quite ready to nail to hammer the nail into the coffin
00:06:55.520of the cyclops so to speak we weren't fully ready to offer this as an interpretation but
00:07:02.340mark went back to it and um it it might be interesting just to return to the cyclops
00:07:08.980and what you've discovered there and so on.
00:07:36.700If we look at it again in the future, do another class in the future.
00:07:39.480We'll look at it through the REM lens.
00:07:40.860I mean, I actually did read this, but it was like 25 years ago.
00:07:44.340And I've looked at it previously, but I've never really gone through it.
00:07:47.740But, yeah, what you're saying is there's almost like a rough draft quality to a lot of these seminars.
00:07:52.420We're sort of figuring it out as we go along.
00:07:55.180And that happened with the Homeric Hems.
00:07:56.960I had not read the Homeric Hems until we looked at them maybe a year and a half ago or two years ago.
00:08:02.700And then we had a rough draft interpretation, and then lo and behold, a final draft interpretation appears in book one of Rem in Myth to Power.
00:08:20.860So because we know you're a well-educated man and would have read this many times over and committed it to memory.
00:08:28.640When I was five years old, yeah, committed the Greek, the ancient Greek to memory.
00:08:31.640I read it in Greek first, and then, yeah, it's weird reading it in English now.1.00
00:08:37.420Yeah, it's kind of a pleb tier, basically.1.00
00:08:40.260When you're given lemons, you have to make lemonade.1.00
00:08:45.640So, yeah, I mean, the thing I was going to say is that it is really remarkable.
00:08:50.320I mean, I think that there's a lot here.
00:08:52.320And to be honest with you, I think I was looking at, and I think this is the problem in the past,
00:08:58.040And we've mentioned this before, but look, you really have to look at these parables closely, and you can't look at them in a cursory way. And to a certain extent, even though there's a common symbol language, and symbols do have a significance, they may have a kind of different significance in one parable and so forth. I've made that point.
00:09:17.660But generally, I think you just have to look at the stories in a close way to determine meaning. You can't look at them in a cursory way. And I think that this is a mistake that has occurred in the past.
00:09:29.240Even people who are analyzing myth from a perspective that we would find sympathetic, dare I say like a guy like Alfred Rosenberg, I think he's sympathetic to us in some ways, but I think that his analysis is much too rough, much too general and much too cursory.
00:09:45.040And he's missing things because he's not looking at it closely. He's kind of aggregating different ideas from other thinkers, other classicists at the time, who were considerably more based than we are now. But even they were also, I think, looking at it in a too general manner.
00:10:01.140I think you have to look at it closely. But I think ultimately you're rewarded with that because once you go in in close for the close details, you can come out and you have a better sense of the overall picture. You have a greater understanding of the broader symbol language.
00:10:16.040So it's very fruitful to do these deep dives. And there's no better place to do deep dives than on Homer. We saw that with the Homeric Hymns or with the Bible, of course, these two massively important works, the Bible and Homer.
00:10:31.420Homer, meaning the Homeric hymns, Iliad, Odyssey, and so forth.
00:10:36.080Whoever actually wrote those, but basically the religio-cultural tradition of, together, the Bible and Homer are the religio-cultural foundation of the West, if you could argue.
00:10:50.520You have to look at them closely, and they're going to be the most fruitful.
00:10:53.640And I think I sort of underestimated exactly how fruitful even the Odyssey would be.
00:10:58.740You sort of get into this thing, and you're like, oh, it's like an adventure story. It's like a big Dungeons and Dragons story, basically. It's adventurers visiting different monsters and so forth. But of course, the monsters all have this symbolic significance.
00:11:14.120One thing I wanted to point to is that this was understood, and this is very, I think, very important to us and to understanding the sort of similarities between the Greco-Roman religion, because there are some similarities, and the Abrahamic tradition that would follow.0.79
00:11:30.000In the Greco-Roman tradition, you do have Neoplatonists basically performing the same as Jews do on the Bible, which is a midrash, essentially.
00:11:40.240You have Neoplatonists looking at the Odyssey as a midrash, doing a kind of exegesis and trying to understand the symbols, essentially, that Homer is presenting there.1.00
00:11:52.060And they understood it to be deep, and I think that instinct is correct.0.98
00:11:55.400Now, I'm not sure that the readings were always correct. And I would say this of Midrash as well. I think that there are bad readings in the Talmud, for example. But then there are also useful readings that you can look at and say, OK, that makes sense when you look at the Torah. Symbolically, that makes sense and so forth. So I think it's similar what's going on.1.00
00:12:13.500And all of this, of course, is useful for us to understand the similarities, because it does tend to support R.E.M. theory more broadly.
00:12:23.060Porphyry was one of the key Neoplatonists that was engaged in this work, looking at Homer from a symbolic perspective.
00:12:34.180I prepared a little text just so it'll be easier to kind of convey the thoughts without stumbling through it with my own words or whatever.0.74
00:12:41.360But he was someone who, you know, basically was engaged in this midrash, but he also was looking at it from a Neoplatonist perspective.
00:12:52.140And his general position was that Odysseus is the philosopher, even the model for philosophers.
00:12:58.260And so he was reaching some of the same conclusions that we were in the sense that it's a kind of descent into the underworld.
00:13:04.320It's a descent of the soul into the underworld and the reemergence.
00:13:19.860I gave you my sort of thesis on the olive tree.
00:13:22.540But one of the important things that we can associate with the olive tree, which was mentioned on these other calls, is Athena, the goddess of wisdom.
00:13:30.100So therefore, it becomes a symbol of wisdom.
00:13:32.620Now, I've given you my interpretation of olive oil as it's used in Jewish ritual as an ointment.
00:13:37.960And I've given you some seemingly sort of bawdy conclusions as to what the significance of that might be.
00:13:43.900But another sort of obvious layer of that that you could say is that it represents wisdom.
00:13:48.860You're being anointed. So Athena is the goddess of wisdom.
00:13:53.420So you're receiving wisdom. You're receiving it on the head, on the forehead.
00:13:57.200That's a very sort of PG conclusion that you can reach.
00:14:01.200And I think it's one layer of what's going on there with the anointment.
00:14:04.720So the Messiah is wise. He's anointed. Jesus is wiser than even Solomon. He's the anointed one. So he has wisdom. And that wisdom, part of the symbolism there is a shared symbolism with the Greco-Roman symbol language, which again is ultimately a shared symbol language, where Athena represents the olive tree, or the olive tree represents Athena and so forth.
00:14:27.540So the appearance of olive trees become important here. And there are a couple of notable appearances just off the top of my head of the olive tree. One is the marriage bed itself is rooted into an olive tree and it can't be moved. This is one of the tests for Odysseus. Penelope is like, how do I know that this is really my husband? Which is curious. I mean, I guess they've been apart for 20 years, so it kind of makes sense.
00:14:51.240But she doesn't recognize it, which is interesting in and of itself.
00:14:54.500But he says, well, because the marriage bed is rooted into an olive tree, so it can't be moved.
00:15:02.680And this is what the Neoplatonists are thinking, that this is a, ultimately, it's the journey of the philosopher, so his goal will be wisdom, the olive tree, etc.
00:15:10.860Now, of course, Homer exists well before Plato, so how does this even make sense?
00:16:09.700So I write, the episode in the Cyclops cave
00:16:12.380represents a parallel with Plato's cave.
00:16:14.800Once we understand this eye to represent the sun, it is Delos, the visible reality, and Polythemos, many famed, that's the name, Polythemos is the name of the Cyclops, and his name means many famed.0.72
00:16:30.760This represents a tyranny for the Mercurian nobody that is Odysseus, right?0.59
00:16:36.920We have this god who I think is a parody of basically Helios, right?
00:16:41.540By God, you're saying the divine demigod, or maybe he's a divine creature of some kind, son of Poseidon, the Cyclops himself, Polifemus.
00:16:53.620No, so the argument I'm making is in this tweet I say that Homer is blind and sees only the unseen, i.e. Hades, is our first clue that his myths basically are insincere odes to Apollo.
00:17:07.880or they're not really, it's not really about Apollo.
00:18:06.040So he can tell these sort of stand-ins for the Phoenicians, the Phaeacians, whatever he wants.
00:18:10.860He can make any story, he can invent any story he wants.
00:18:13.800And he's inventing stories the whole time.
00:18:15.580I mean, these four books, he's pretending to be a different person.
00:18:19.160And he's inventing these sort of elaborate biographies that are distinct and separate biographies for different people that he's talking to.
00:18:26.060Often he indicates that he's a Cretan.0.95
00:18:29.180And Cretans are famous, they're the proverbial liars of ancient Greece.0.98