Much Ado About The Odyssey

A few folks have appropriately made connections between The Odyssey and the evolution of consciousness.

Julian Jaynes commented on the lack of a distinct ‘I’ in the poem’s statement: ‘am Odysseus!’

Jean Gebser, decades before Jaynes, emphasized the latency of the ego in that statement, as well as the telling phrase: ‘awakening shore.’

The Odyssey, according to Gebser, reveals certain ‘mythologemes’ at work in ancient consciousness. These are transformative tensions at work beneath the surface. Homer’s myth describes and imparts the process through which the ego wrestles with the oceanic forces of psyche and awakens to itself. The ancient and prevailing mythic consciousness is overturned as the new ‘mental’ consciousness comes into being.

But lest we presume this is some developmental order or teleological sequence, it is more appropriate to compare what is happening to the dynamic and interdependent transformations of living systems: like the emergence of eukaryotic cells, and the upending of the more ancient prokaryotic world. These are not neat developmental advances but complex re-arrangements of the world that bring forth new morphologies and new possibilities (as well as new challenges).

Many more analogies from evolutionary biology could be used as our example, but the emphasis here, I’d like to suggest, reveals something about the nature of this transformation—and indeed all major transformations in cultural evolution.

Odysseus is called polytropos, ‘one who makes many turns,’ but also one who is continuously turned about.

He is a man of mental consciousness - cunning, clever, someone who can circumvent the old order of things. Ego consciousness makes things happen, it acts upon the world in a way that directs it, sets it to order. But to turn the world is invite being turned by the world.

To shatter the old ways is to initiate oneself into a cosmogenic process that the ego, alone, can never be prepared for—and thus another latent tension and future reversal is born.

The new, which turns the world, anticipates yet another turning-to-come: a more integrative consciousness which can transverse sea and shore, waking and dreaming, symbol and sign. [Incidentally, this also raises our attention to Iain McGilchrist work, who states as much in his own terms]

Cultural transformations are enantiomorphic in that they contain many turns and reversals. They are polytropic. Whether or not one presumes to be in relation with the world, and whether or not one presumes to have usurped the gods, the gods have their ways of living in the crossroads and cracks. They, too, have their way of bending and turning the heroism of mortals into strange new possibilities.

The Odyssey reveals that the transformations of consciousness continue to be latent with the generative tensions and enantiomorphic reversals that, in their restlessness turning, fashion and re-fashion the cosmos.

In this most recent ‘turning’ of worldview, however, perhaps we should take Marshall McLuhan’s invitation seriously: let us make this turning more than ‘awake’ or ‘a wake,’ but something more transparent and lucid, capable of dreaming and waking, making happen and letting happen.

To wrap up this little meditation: perhaps it is appropriate that The Odyssey is re-entering popular discussion. We are still in the telling. Penelope is still weaving and unweaving her husband’s mask.

The mental world, after all, is polytropic, and we are still being turned about.

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