00:10:07.420And I don't know if he had done some research outside of this class.
00:10:11.240So maybe he he's aware of what I'm going to say, but I think it's it's worth kind of
00:10:15.280Making the point to the rest of the class, does the Cyclops, the one-eyed Cyclops, have some sort of solar significance?
00:10:23.160In other words, the idea that we put forth on the last call was that maybe he's a kind of demonized caricature of, like, the Apollonian priest, right?
00:10:34.940He's got a flock. He's this big sort of Dungoyim-type character, it would seem.
00:10:41.280So does the eye have a solar significance, and does he become a caricature of the Apollonian priest, for example?0.78
00:10:49.360And there also we would contrast him with other priests that we encounter in the Iliad that are blind, that are also priests of Apollo and Thebes, such as the seer that he encounters in the underworld.
00:12:07.280So it's showing this sort of proto-Jewish God dominating what might end up being these kind of caricatures of non-proto-Jewish Hellenic or Aryan figures, essentially.
00:12:19.540But what I would say, though, is that there is some proof for the idea, or there is some speculation, I should say, that is compelling.
00:12:29.100Adelbert Kuhn is a German philologist of the 19th century.
00:12:34.000and he put forth this idea and he's going off an etymology given by Hesiod which uh you know
00:12:42.100sometimes this etymology is considered a folk etymology folk etymologies in my view are very
00:12:48.000relevant so what a word actually what a name or word actually meant in its origin is almost less
00:12:55.000relevant than what the poet thinks the name means and that what other people think the name to mean
00:13:00.520So the meaning of the name, you know, even if it is ultimately derived from a folk etymology, these folk etymologies are still relevant, is what I'm arguing, especially when you're looking at art on a symbolic level, because really you're trying to figure out what the artist is saying.
00:13:18.240So if the artist is giving this meaning to the word or name, then we should consider folk etymologies and so forth.
00:13:25.080In any case, Hesiod's, it's also kind of ridiculous because Hesiod is, in theory, one of the first poets ever to utter the name Cyclops.
00:13:35.920Now, I mean, of course, there is this idea that, you know, maybe for hundreds of years, this is a kind of culmination.
00:13:43.900Homer and Hesiod is a kind of culmination of earlier myth tradition and so forth.
00:13:47.600and all that can and may be true. But nevertheless, I think that Hesiod would probably have a pretty
00:13:54.340good idea as to the meaning of what the name Cyclops meant. In theory, someone like Homer
00:14:00.160or Hesiod could have invented the name, right? In theory. Again, folk etymologies have value
00:14:05.680and might have the most value in some cases. But he says that the name Cyclops means
00:14:12.560circle eyes, or wheel eye, which is interesting. So Adelbert Kuhn takes this idea and says,
00:14:20.340this may suggest them as solar figures, because the wheel has a very close association with the
00:14:26.180sun, as does the symbol of the eye. So we have in Indo-European mythology two motifs. We have
00:14:33.080the sun as the all-seeing eye. It's the all-seeing eye. Not only can it see everything, it reveals
00:14:38.860everything we think of the delos the visible so it's revealing everything we're seeing everything
00:14:44.060with the eye because the light that it admits of course the wheel is also associated with the sun
00:14:50.220through the chariot wheel and the and that this is a kind of indo-european trope so it's not just
00:14:56.740apollo it's not just helios it's shamash it's surya in the vitus and so forth that's the guy
00:15:06.800So the idea is that the I means circle I or we lie, we lie, which I think would give it the most punch in terms of understanding that maybe the I has a kind of solar significance.
00:15:18.020Yeah, it cooperates our reading of 2001 as well.