#36 DEFINING WESTERN THINKING: HOMER, AESCHYLUS, PLATO, PHILIP AND HEPHAISTION

Whenever I ask a question of the Gatekeeper about the governing energies of a nation it will usually receive a straightforward answer. He will reply there are three and they co-exist in varying degrees of intensity. But Greece, Greece is different.

While I may see it as a nation as a whole, he will see classical Greece as a confederation of nations each with different energies but Greece presents another challenge. Just as I reacted to Anthony, the desert father identifying Mary, the Mother of God with her lives as pagan goddesses some of the governing energies of our spiritual DNA choose to be called after Greek gods and goddesses. The feminine aspect of El Moyra, for example, prefers to be called after the goddess of wisdom, Pallas Athene; the feminine aspect of Djwal Kuhl chooses to be called Leto after the goddess who gave birth to Apollo and Artemis while the offspring of Hilarion, his multi-talented creative energy, chooses to be called after the messenger of the gods, Hermes. If The Line to God was being written in Chinese or Hindi the names would change to Buddhist, Taoist or Hindu gods and goddesses. Of course, I asked why and the answer was long enough to fill a book, but the short answer was diplomatic. The names are to break down the divisions between paganism, Judaism and Christianity while capturing the essence of each different energy. All of them, he said were embraced by God. So, Athens is easy. Pallas Athene had to be the dominant energy but who else, I asked the Gatekeeper, influenced the city-states of Greece?

“In Athens … Pallas Athene is joined with Hermes for its governance and St Germain in his Apollo aspect for its fine arts. Macedonia has, as its dominant energy, Aries, the God of War, an evolved form of Hilarion as is Hermes, the messenger. This line of Hilarion gives Macedonia its headstrong violent action and to some extent, its divine vanity, generosity and self-indulgence – all epitomised in its great son, Alexander the Great. Troy was the first city-state and it is reasonably complex. Its dominant energy is shared between the Artemis-Diana aspects of Mary – Ephesus in today’s Turkey is Mary’s city - and St Germain at his commercial, trading and diplomatic best. Both their energies spurred the migration of Trojans after the war. And, finally, we will look at Sparta with two dominant energies of Hilarion and El Moyra acting together giving it its athletic rigour and military thrust.

You will notice the dominance of St Germain in Grecian thinking. He is the great innovator. He is also the great Romantic who blends the legend, myth and heroism on which Greece is founded. He integrated Greek music and arts as a means of disseminating Greek sculpture, architecture, drama and poetry. But its music, which he also created, is lost unfortunately.

“Gatekeeper, why was Greece the cradle of Western thinking?

”Greece had already Persian, Babylonian and Egyptian logic and thinking. As a trading nation it accessed the East and West and blended their ideas. Socrates and Plato didn’t make up logic; it was developed elsewhere and your scholars have ascribed it to them. In the ideal state of Plato, humans are all very logical, like Marxists and any state founded on that thinking, like Syracuse, collapsed.”

“It can’t have been any accident that the incarnations of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Hephaistion were all linked?”

“It wasn’t. Look at the time frame from our point of view. Egypt was in decline and Greece had stopped the expansion of the Persian Empire largely inspired by Homeric heroism. The Mongols were about to invade the Middle East it was the perfect time for Alexander to advance taking with him, courtesy of Aristotle’s tuition, the Athens School of Thought. Greek thinking had come from the Middle East, been further developed by the Greeks and through Hephaistion, it would return to its source. This re-importing goes on and on throughout history. Look at China now – made barbarian through the Maoist Cultural Revolution; this thinking will be replaced by Chinese returning the mother country with their original beliefs and re-importing with them their ancient culture. The Athens School of Thought influenced the whole of the Middle East and through that process it could be re-imported at the Renaissance to Europe and reinspire them. Let’s start with Homer. I’ll answer your other questions as we go along.” (Litchfield 2005)

HOMER (c1218BC-1135BC): MASTER OF SPIN?

Nobody really knows anything about Homer’s life. It’s a blank slate. Scholars argue about whether a man called Homer actually existed or whether he was just a legend; others argue he was not one poet, but many: a group of bards, who composed on the spot or who possessed prodigious memories of one another’s work and were the culmination of a long oral tradition of remembered sung verse. So the Homeric question is foretold: who was Homer? What role did he play? When did he live? How did his wondrous epic poems of such suppleness and scope come to be in the form they are?

In Greek, Homeros means hostage and this meaning has led to speculation that Homer was a prisoner of war in a pre-literate age. Homeros was the one who did not fight, but could instead remember the highlights of a battle for recitation later on. Scholars also question whether the same poet could compose the Iliad and the Odyssey because of the inconsistencies among their language, vocabulary and story lines. Others argue that one could be the product of youth and the other of late maturity. While others are adamant that the characters who are woven in and out of the action, like Achilles’ mother Thetis, behave completely consistently throughout the poem, always themselves, a feat that would be impossible if there were many authors.

A common joke about Homer is that his poems were not written by Homer, but by another man of exactly the same name!

There is also a tradition that says Homer was blind and this is reinforced by a marble bust we have of Homer showing him with his head tilted up and his eyes closed in a manner reminiscent of a blind pianist. Various cities in Greece claim to be his birthplace. But all scholars agree that if Homer existed, he was a genius and the Iliad and the Odyssey are among the greatest works of world literature. The superlatives keep coming. Why? We have only the written texts with no music or instrumentation to reflect their original beauty. We have to rely solely on the poetry of Homer’s epic songs.

The Iliad

The Iliad tragedy defines its plot in its first line: it’s the story of the power, fury and wrath of Achilles, Greece’s greatest warrior and his dispute with his commander in chief, Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, the prime Greek power in the second millennium. It covers forty days of the ten-year siege of the Asia Minor kingdom of Troy, called Ilium in Greek. The remnants of Troy exist in contemporary Turkey on the Bosporus Sea.

Ostensibly, the Greeks were fighting to recover Helen; the trophy wife of Agamemnon’s cuckolded brother, Menelaus, and the sister of Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra. Many scholars are dubious of whether this was the real reason for a protracted decade-long war. But, the tragic action of the Trojan War, with its dramatic soliloquies and searing imagery, is played out against an irreverent soap opera of the dysfunctional family of gods and goddesses from Mount Olympus, making it the masterpiece of classical literature.

The Odyssey

The first line of The Odyssey reads:

“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns, driven time and again off course once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy … ” [Robert Fagle]. Odysseus, the man of twists and turns, is the first hero, in Western literature to use his brain to temper his outstanding bravery and physical prowess and Homer shows us how he schemes.

The Odyssey begins with Odysseus’ fantastic scheme of trickery and deception, to end the war that exhausted both Greeks and Trojans. His plan was for all Greek ships to retreat out of sight and leave a massive wooden horse on a wheeled platform outside the gates of Troy filled with silent soldiers. Everyone knows what happens next. The epic poem tells of the ten-year homecoming of the sensual, smooth-talking schemer, Odysseus of Ithaca from the Trojan War. Odysseus is simultaneously telling his story and listening to it as if Homer was performing it in front of him. It describes his fighting and romantic adventures and his manipulation by the Gods and his eventual reunion with his wife, Penelope, and his son Telemachus. Throughout his journey Odysseus loses his colleagues, his self-esteem and his ship until he descends into the afterlife. Rising from the dead he is stranded on the paradise isle of Calypso for many years before he eventually returns to Ithaca.

These complex Homerian epics had a profound effect on Western civilization. Every Greek school child studied them and most of them learned them by heart. They were their major source of moral and practical instruction as well as the symbol of Hellenic heroism and unity. Romans followed the Greeks and learned from Homer the heroic ideal and all its contradictions: its grasping pride, its animal strength and its ultimate humanity. Hector’s courage and valour were the models for the leaders of the Roman legions. Later, a hundred generations of Europeans would closely study Homer’s texts and enjoy his poetry.

But what is Homer’s story? As I put the first questions to the Gatekeeper, Ulysses elbowed his way forward as a bawdy adventurer while the blind and alcoholic Homer, who loved him, painstakingly turned Ulysses into a hero.

Conversation with the Gatekeeper

“Who is Homer, Gatekeeper?”

“Homer is the blind bard from Hicksville, Greece, in Boeotia, a rural province north of Athens, born about 1218BC. His father was comfortable and he was well taught by a tutor in formal Greek, rhetoric and religious legends. His name was Midas (pronounced Meedas) and his last name, Homeros, was both a description and a rank, and he went to the later stages of the Trojan War when he was about twenty two with a dual role of war correspondent and entertainer.”

“What caused his blindness?”

“When he was six, he fell from his father’s chariot and concussed by a severe blow that damaged his optic nerve. His eyesight deteriorated throughout his childhood and he went completely blind after twenty-eight but long before then he was what you’d call legally blind. Homer was an alcoholic and one day in his desperation to get some alcohol, he drank fusil oil which is an alcohol made from fermented wood. The poison further affected his nerves and deteriorated his already weak eyesight. The question to ask now is: why was the genius an alcoholic? This is typical of God’s gifts. When He allows genius He also allows a shadow as a challenge. Alcoholism comes from a chemical disease: it is an inability to deal with disappointment which triggers a descent into melancholy, into a black heart.”

“Did his blindness give his poetry any special insights or approaches?”

“His loss of sight increased his competent tonic judgement to perfect pitch and increased the rhythm in his head, so he thought in rhythm and was not distracted by the constant visual stimuli that surround the sighted.”

“We have a bust of Homer. He seems a big man. Is it a true likeness?”

“Homer was a burly man, inclined to run to fat without the extreme muscular development of Greeks at that time. He was physically strong and excelled in wrestling. With light brown hair, with a fair gold streak through it, he had olive skin, a curly beard, a snub nose and his bust or statue, which does look like him, flatters his blunt features.”

“How did Homer get his front line copy for his epics, especially about the intimate life of the Trojan enemy?”

“Odysseus hired Homer as a chronicler and performer. Homer was a musical singer and a clever performer on the lyre but his main function was to entertain Odysseus: reciting, gesturing, singing and playing the lyre. He would mostly sing his own compositions, and glorify those who were getting drunk around him, flattering those who paid for his food and drink. He based his songs on what he saw or was told by soldiers, by slaves or by the heroes themselves.

“A master of spin?”

“Yes, but Homer understood what he was doing. He was not on anyone’s side. You ask why he sang of the Trojans in his lyrics; Homer had access to the Trojan minstrels. Like performers everywhere they love one another’s company and he knew their songs and in the camaraderie they told him their best Trojan stories. In a time of the remembered word, Homer’s poor eyesight led him to train a prodigious memory.”

“How did he gain the background for the Odyssey?”

“When Odysseus left Troy after the victory Homer went with him in his perambulation of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Odysseus would not go home until he had made sufficient money to make his time away in Troy worthwhile. During this time he employed Homer as part of his household; he clothed him, fed him and most importantly, kept him in wine. Homer had many casual affairs with men and women, he was quite promiscuous, but his most long-lasting love was Odysseus, it persisted over ten years. Re-read the Odyssey with that knowledge and tell me if you can see his love there.”

“How significant was this love affair in both their lives?”

“For Homer, it was very significant, but not for Ulysses. The only significant love in Ulysses life was Ulysses.”

“I have enjoyed a book that speculates on the geographical locations in the Odyssey. Did Homer intend Ithaca to be really Ithaca? What about his other locations?”

“Yes, Ithaca is the same place then as it is now – opposite Sparta just as Prime Minister William Gladstone said in the nineteenth century. They simply had an aimless journey around the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. They were pirates intercepting rich ships, plying their trade routes. They were coastal cruisers; they prowled the coasts east then west to the Black Sea to get the golden fleeces described in Jason and the Argonauts. They had adventures in the mountains of Caucus. In winter, they beached their boats for repair and became brigands intercepting exotic trade from wherever. They went into the Balkans or they stole amber and gold from the trade routes as it came down the Danube. They would take their spoils to Alexandria to convert them to gold and leave it there… you couldn’t cart it around with you… there were banks in Alexandria and Antioch… treasuries.

Odysseus is what you’d call a raconteur. In the winter storm months, Homer would record in his memory Odysseus’ fireside yarns. Then Homer, the bard, would clean them up, taking the pornographic bits out. The storm months were like a perennial buck’s night – raunchy, rude and boastful. Take, for example, the story of Circe who would turn the crew into pigs. It’s a blokey story – here is this magical nymphomaniac who loved to fuck her brains out exhausting man after man and when she kicked them out of her bed they became pigs – this was a bar-room frolic and Odysseus stories were about how clever Odysseus was, how brave and clever Odysseus was and how brave and clever and sexually potent Odysseus was.

They wintered in Rhodes, Malta, Cyprus and in small islands off Sicily wherever there were good harbours and lived the roving life of carefree pirates. Odysseus was twenty when he left Ithaca for eight to ten years of war. He and Homer felt liberated after they survived the brutal Trojan War with its huge casualties… slowly they came to terms with their memories as they amassed their fortune.”

“I have a clear picture now of Ulysses but what’s inside Homer? What makes Homer, Homer?”

“Homer poured all of his energies into his poetry; he was in a constant state of creative passion, living on alcohol and a meagre amount of bad food, and gallons of wine to wash down the mouthfuls of dried fish. He didn’t have enough discipline to control his drinking and carousing. He was like Brendan Behan or Byron; he couldn’t sustain the power of his creative spirit. It is so difficult for anyone to appreciate his enormous creative urge to absorb all measurable experience and reduce it to his art. He had a continual warfare between his intellect and his body. His body demanded to live in a normal way, eat, sleep and exercise and his urge wouldn’t allow him that. Drink wine or work … but, his urge said do both. This is a commonality of all bards and writers as they struggle to be a creator. It’s like a servant made into a eunuch to enable them totally to concentrate on the job at hand.

Homer was not a normal person. He was emotionally crippled except in his fantasy world in which artists increasingly live. Often people like Homer had a form of autism… it is not severe autism… there are many shades. It affected his thinking processes so that his perception was changed. Mozart and Homer had a minor form; they didn’t communicate normally, were very childlike and they saw, heard and interpreted what they saw and heard in a way alien to the common view.”

“The Gods of Olympus in Homer are petulant, spiteful, violent and licentious, why did he incorporate this soap opera of gods and goddesses into his work?”

“He did this to please the people; it was a strictly commercial decision. Homer had to earn a living and give his audience what they loved. His audience was reassured by their gods’ interference and by their love affairs and quarrelling in their vast dysfunctional family. They were super humans rather than gods and you could not possibly identify with the Greeks’ very small world.”

“Homer imbues his characters with moral dilemmas. Given the man you described where did his fine moral consciousness come from?”

“He didn’t have one. Nevertheless, throughout his poetry Homer dramatically poses moral and ethical questions. They occur all the time. Homer used them because he’d heard them argued and they stirred the emotions and shocked his audience; they started arguments, provoked fights so he kept posing these moral questions to make his drama more exciting. He was a very perceptive man far more Socratic than Platonic in his ideas and approach.”

“What was Homer’s spiritual challenge?”

“A most unusual one which he would struggle with over a few lives… it was the containment of his incredible creative force. It would cripple him in the way it crippled Brendan Behan and Dylan Thomas in alcoholism.”

“And his greatest achievement?”

“The Odyssey was his greatest creative achievement. It was his well polished gem and in writing it he sacrificed himself to his creative force.”

“Why did St Germain incarnate as Homer?”

“Simply because he wanted to. He finds it difficult to resist the allure of genius – St Germain had much to imprint on the pages of human culture and it was most effective to do it as Homer.”

“What qualities of St Germain did Homer bring in?”

“Let’s tick off the positive qualities first… his creativity, to forge beauty from words and music, his great sensitivity to the shaping of social mores, his ability to be a profound influence on people’s behaviour to all number of people through reading his work until it became the cultural keystone of the Greek ethos. The interesting thing, Homer was, like many artists, possessed with the spirit of divine invention… his humanity was incapable of holding his divine gifts in place and he became the victim of his creativity. Now to the negative qualities of St Germain in Homer. He was a liar, absolutely over indulgent and he was also, and this is paradoxical in St Germain, who is usually very gallant, very sympathetic to women with a great love of the gender game, but in the character of Homer, he was gynophobic.”

“What was Homer’s life purpose?”

“To lay the foundations of Western literature and to be the founder of the Greek ethos. Did he achieve it? Yes, absolutely, but he paid a very high personal cost for his creativity. Yet, almost everybody loved Homer; even the people he satirised loved him. They identified with him as they, in turn, inspired him. Homer knew his human failings without making any excuses for them. He loved humanity. He laughed and sang and people just wanted to be around him to enjoy him. Homer was never judgemental he told it how it was and even his villains were pitiable. Do I like Homer, dear friend? I love Homer.”

“So do I, Gatekeeper. How did he die?”

“Homer died ignominiously at eighty-three: he was a widower by then. He was in Corinth visiting the court of a small king and being feted at a banquet held in his honour. In a drunken stupor, he choked on his own vomit.

“What a way to go for such a great poet. Any chance we’ll find more of his work?”

“Most of the written transcripts of his work are lost. There are some remnants buried with the Alexandrine Library on the east coast of the United States of America in Massachusetts. And my response to your next question is the same as whenever you will ask it. These remnants of Homer will not be found until the time is right. And the time is right when their discovery will not be turned into a circus or a theme park or used as a means of making a fortune, or as a political platform. We, of course, are resigned to it being a National Geographic television special.” (Litchfield 2005) “

Let’s look at Homer again, fifteen hundred years later.