There is no such as mothers who are only bad. Every mother has also a positive part and we can find it only if we are capable of listening to our hearts.
Ulysses and the internalized positive mother
In the Odyssey, we find a trace of a prayer made to the positive mother figure when, as advised by Athena, Ulysses goes into Alcinous’ palace, walks immediately towards queen Arete, bows down and embraces her legs, begging her to help him.
... “go first to the queen”... says Athena.... “if she is in a good humor
then you have hopes of seeing your friends and returning to your high-ranking home and the land of your forefathers”...
This is what Homer says in Book VII.
He had already said something very similar in Book V.
Poseidon had stirred up a violent storm against Ulysses and only the help he receives from the nymph Ino and the goddess Athena save him from sure death. Ulysses sights the land of the Phaeacians but here he is faced with another huge problem.
... “Woe is me, Zeus has let me glimpse the land I’d lost all hope for after coming all the way through this abyss
but I see no way out of the frothy sea
only sharp rocks protrude with waves all around
that scream and roar and only one naked stone wall rises up out of them… (Od.V, 53 and following verses)
Ulysses is faced with a wall of stone and it isn’t the first time that such a thing happens in his life. Ulysses had stone walls before him for ten years while he was at Troy.
Then he was dealing with Troy’s city walls and Ulysses found the solution to his powerlessness by using cunning and deceit. This time he is faced with a rocky coastline that keeps him from being able to come to shore. In this case, cunning and tricks won’t be of any help to him.
Ulysses has to transform himself, he must completely turn himself upside down and look for a solution through humility and prayer. It’s not easy to leave behind his arrogance and find the way of humility. By trying again and again he will finally succeed.
After having been smashed against the rocks several times, Ulysses finally sees the mouth of a river and he prays:.... “ Hear me, Sire, whomever you may be: I believe you must be often called upon, by those escaping Poseidon’s wrath by leaving the sea. It is by venerating the immortal gods
That a lost man just like me now arrives before your river, at your knees I come, after so much suffering.
Have pity on me, sovreign: I am hereby your servant”. (Od. V, 445-450)
Where Ulysses has landed is at the virtue of humility, a land that was hitherto completely unknown to him. He is the one who says to the sovreign river “I am at your knees”; have pity on me, I am begging you. If Ulysses before had an arrogant heart just like the Suitors do, now he becomes capable of having a humble heart. His prayer is no longer a way of commanding or winning over the divinity, as it usually is for most.
When Athena advises him to do the same thing with queen Arete, Ulysses is ready to do so. He has already learned that there is not only a negative part within the mother, a devouring part; there is also a positive part, one that is capable of being welcoming and giving.
He manages to get there by following his heart. He gets there by abandoning his determination to hold on to his wounded pride and his refusal to make any changes whatsoever.
He gets there after having been thrown against the rocky shoreline and having risked being smashed to pieces and then deciding to keep on swimming to see if beyond the rocks there is some small beach that he could land on.
This is how Ulysses finds the mouth of the river and sends out his prayer.There is yet another wall of stone that Ulysses will come up against, and that is when he lands in Ithaca and is faced with Penelope’s hardened heart. This time he will need both humility and cunning. He will need the power of hatred and the power of an immense love, fused together, so he can break down the wall of stone and find a heart of flesh and blood.
Here I would like to reflect on another important element. If going from pride to humility is like passing from one universe to another within the same life dimension we are in, by having Ulysses go from a world full of storms to a world of peace like the one the Phaeacians live in, Homer is telling us that truly our life is made up in such a way that we can go from one universe to another. This is possible if we can stop complaining and accept creatively the “thousand woes” that this life has in store for us; our ability to do so is conditioned by our ability to not act like victims when we are confronted with trouble, but like artists of our lives and of the life of the universe in which we live.
Ulysses’ passage from victim to artist is described in the way Ulysses acts while at Alcinous’ court.While Demodocus sings about the Trojan war, Ulysses does nothing but cry. He cries for himself and for the thousands of painful experiences the gods have inflicted him with.
Soon after the scene changes: it is no longer the storyteller who is singing, but it is Ulysses. He is no longer crying and he sings about all his misadventures and his trials and tribulations with such art and mastery that the Phaeacians don’t want him to stop, even though it has gotten very late.
Again a comment on “La preghiera degli Ulissidi” {The prayer of the Ulysseans}:... “For me, prayer, in its most basic form, has meant and still means being able to create a source of light and a source of continuous transformation in my life. A constant journey from lies to truth and authenticity. A way of transforming and unifying my self and my various internal parts. A journey that carries me from ugliness to beauty”...
During his journey from Troy to Ithaca, Ulysses must face continual losses. Every loss can help Ulysses transform a part of himself, if he can understand its meaning and accept it.
... “prayer is an indispensable action if we want to go from living life as thieves to living life as a gift and from living life as violence to living life as a work of art”...For ten years, beneath and inside Troy’s city walls, Ulysses lived in violence and thievery and he continues to do so when he leaves Troy and attacks the Cicones to steal their goods.
Up until this point he knows nothing about life as a work of art, which demands a continual effort to synthesize opposites and a continual transformation of oneself. He will learn this throughout the rest of his journey, step by step.
Now let’s look at the type of prayer that is most meaningful to me.... “.. prayer .....is the best way to accomplish a fusion between the I and the SELF, the Personal SELF and the Cosmic SELF”....
The best example of this dialog and the reflection that then leads to action can be seen in what happens between Athena and Ulysses, when he has just landed at Ithaca.
… “then Athena came near him
with a young man’s body and like a shepherd
delicate and gentle like kings’ sons are”...(Od. XIII, 221-223)
… “of all the gods
I am famous for wisdom and cleverness
not even you recognized
Pallade Athena, Zeus’ daughter, whom has nevertheless always through every danger stayed near you and saved you”… (Od. XIII, 298-301)
Ulysses complains that he hadn’t seen her come on board his ship to save him from having to suffer so much, but Athena forcefully tells him that she has always been near him during every danger and she has always saved him.
This interaction describes a fundamental aspect of the SELF as defined by Homer and Cosmo-Art.The SELF is always with us to save us from every danger, but this does not mean that it keeps us from experiencing the pain we need to go through so we can transform ourselves.
It is necessary to have full faith in the SELF, that often operates in our favor even though we are unaware of it.The dialog with the SELF must always be cultivated and maintained so we can create the kind of trust that is not just given to us freely, but which must be worked for day after day. When we have this trust, it becomes possible to make plans and put together strategies to help us reach our goals, with the assurance that we are fully supported by the SELF.
Ulysses must save his life that is threatened by the Suitors and he must find a way to eliminate them. He must also find a way to make sure Penelope is not dangerous, unless he wants to end up like Agamemnon.
Athena and Ulysses speak at length about this, and they “meditate” and “reflect” on what the best way would be for Ulysses to present himself at the palace and how he can massacre the Suitors.
Athena advises Ulysses to disguise himself as a beggar and Ulysses has to decide to accept this suggestion or not. It is a terribly difficult one to accept and Homer describes all the pain and humiliation that Ulysses has to undergo by presenting himself as a beggar.
What man would accept to be a beggar in his own house and to patiently take all kinds of harassment from a pretentious wife, just to win her back after a long absence?
Nevertheless, Ulysses accepts to disguise himself as a beggar:And speaking thus Athena touched him with a wand; and she wrinkled his beautiful skin on his agile limbs, she made his blond hair disappear from his head, she made his skin like that of an old man,
she made his eyes, once so beautiful, bleary; and she threw a filthy rag on him as well as a tunic both ripped and dirty, black from the horrible smoke; above this she put on a great skin of a swift deer: she gave him a cane and a torn ugly sack, that he slung over his shoulders with a rope.
(Od.XIII, 429-438)
It was important for Ulysses to meet Agamemnon in Hades and learn from him what had happened when he returned to Clytemnestra with all the arrogance of a king returning victoriously after a long battle, full of gold and with Cassandra as his slave.
When he got off the ship a red carpet was laid out for him to walk on, but when he entered the house he was killed by his wife’s lover, Aegisthus, as is mentioned in the first verses of the Odyssey.
Agamemnon’s arrogance (and he indeed had an arrogant heart) is in contrast with Ulysses’ humility, and Ulysses manages to become so by maintaining prayer-dialog with Athena.
The shift from having an arrogant heart to becoming capable of having a humble heart is one of the most difficult changes a human being must undergo, if he or she wants to live with wisdom and be able to create secondary beauty.
Arrogance can not be transformed by arrogance, pride cannot be won over with more pride. We are all born arrogant and prideful and we create conflict all throughout our lives. It takes a lot of strength and above all a lot of humility to change ourselves and it is very difficult to blend strength and humility.
The dialog between Athena and Ulysses is followed up by action and the action is: to accept to transform himself into a beggar and to accept to be deeply humiliated by the Suitors and even by the servants. This is not an easy thing to accept: it is a very bitter task. The strength necessary to be able to accept it can be found through prayer, through the special type of prayer that is a fusion between the I and the SELF.
I will again take a quote from “La preghiera degli Ulissidi” {The prayer of the Ulysseans}:The fusion between the I and the SELF ... “is not an end in itself. Its purpose is to transform the I and to create a fusion between the I and the Life of the Cosmos, between the I and You of a man and a woman. This last fusion is the most difficult to achieve for human beings. As history shows us, not only is not everyone capable of realizing it, but many are downright against it”...
For example, all of those who, both in the East and the West, invented vows of chastity and have affirmed that living as monks is a life as perfection, whereas instead being married is a second-class lifestyle that keeps one from reaching perfection, are opposed to it.
Before Ulysses departs for Troy he and Penelope experience a symbiosis, but now, after twenty years of being apart, Penelope is full of a deep pain as a result of having been abandoned. She also is full of a concealed hostility towards him.
She is also obstinately opposed to growing up and becoming a woman capable of loving a man, but she is not very aware of this.It really is quite nice to be courted by one hundred suitors and not have to ever decide who she will choose among them. It’s nice to be able to deceive them by weaving her tapestry by day and unraveling it by night. She gets a subtle pleasure from maneuvering them with her tricks and at the same time knowing they will kill Ulysses for her, if he should ever return.
Up until this point there really is not much difference between Agamemnon’s Clytemnestra and Ulysses’ Penelope. One of them is consciously plotting her husband’s murder while the other is plotting using a wily ambivalence, typical of those who do not want to get their hands dirty and be fully responsible for their actions.
Penelope’s ambivalence is mentioned for the first time in Book I of the Odyssey, when Telemachus encounters Athena:She neither refuses the hated nuptials, nor does she have the courage to go through with them; in the meantime the Suitors are ruining my house with their banquets and soon they will tear me to pieces as well».(Od. I, 249-251)
But Penelope herself tells Ulysses, who is still disguised as a beggar, that her heart breaks during the day and at night she is overcome by thousands of fears and doubts:
and so my heart as well jumps here and there with opposing emotions whether to stay with my son and faithfully protect every thing,
my wealth, my slaves, the tall and great palace,
being respectful of the nuptial bed and the talk of the people;
or whether to just follow the most noble of the Achaeans,
the one who best courts me in my palace and offers me endless gifts . (Od. XIX, 524-529)
Ulysses’ cunning and intelligence help him out in many ways but in many situations they are ineffective all by themselves.
He needs continuous help from Athena as well as sometimes directly from Zeus himself. Their intervention is the result of Ulysses’ constant prayers to them.
CHAPTER XXIV
Many explanations can be given regarding Ulysses’ descent into Hades. The one that convinces me the most is that Hades represents the place where humanity’s deepest guilty feelings are kept and whose existence is not even imagined.
According to Freud, the unconscious has no bottom, but if it had one that is where the guilty feelings that determine and oppress the lives of human beings would reside.
Homer is right when he attributes to Ulysses the ability to go into the realm of the dead only after he has spent time with the sorceress Circe.It takes a magical sorceress to be able to go into the most hidden depths of humanity and be able to encounter them as if they were the shadows of death or the shadow of Teireisias.
The shadows of the dead are the traces left behind from the passions and the false ideals that human beings allow to govern their lives.Achilles who cries over having sacrificed his life for the glory of war; Ajax who lost his mind from having become a slave to his need for revenge; Agamemnon who, with immense stupidity, sacrificed himself and others because of his arrogance; the Suitors (book XXIV) who put their infinite, arrogant demands in first place in their lives; and then the endless line of all of those who lived for vanity and for ephemeral things.
Each shadow is a reflection of Ulysses and it is a mirror in which he can look and learn about all the dark sides of his personality, as well as all the facets of the guilty feelings that are created because of that very darkness.
Teireisias sums them all up and he can predict the future because he knows what he is guilty of and what the guilty feelings, that his culpableness generates, really are.
This is what governs the life of human beings in the present and in the future and it will continue to be that way until each person decides to look at them directly and purify themselves of them.
Guilty feelings do not have to do only with a culpability that is either only imagined or acted out. They also have to do with Promethean guilt. To those types of culpabilities, that is, that are considered such because they break the rules set by the gods.
And who are the gods?Nature? The mother? The clan? Tradition? Conformity? The laws of the State?
In the case of Ulysses, on one hand there is a god, Poseidon, who tries to keep him from getting home so as to get revenge on him for the fact that he blinded his son, Polyphemus. On the other hand, though, there are other gods, including Zeus, who want Ulysses to be able to get home.
So, is Ulysses guilty or not?
He is both guilty and innocent. The Aristotelian logic of “either or” here does not work.
What works is the logic of the presence of opposites.
Anyone who is familiar with the tragedy “Antigone” knows that Creon, the king of Thebes, has emanated a law which forbids that anyone who died while fighting against Thebes can be buried. Among these are Eteocles and Polyneices, Antigone’s brothers.
Antigone decides to give her brothers a proper burial, following the law of the heart and disobeying the law of the State.
For Creon, Antigone is guilty and she must be punished with death. We all know, instead, that Antigone is innocent and that she was absolutely right in following the law of her conscience, against the law of the state, even at risk of losing her life. Antigone was killed.
When a law is unjust, if we do not obey such a law we are not culpable. For this reason Antigone is not guilty, nor is Ulysses guilty for having opposed the maternal law represented by Poseidon.
But Ulysses is guilty of all the hatred that he has carried inside himself against his mother since prenatal life, hatred that he has nurtured against her for her wanting to dominate him. He is guilty for this hatred until he frees himself of it.
Regarding the mother who wants to dominate her son, Homer gives us a vivid picture through Circe’s actions, when she transforms Ulysses’ companions in swine and she takes any type of human power away from them. He does the same when he describes how Calypso keeps Ulysses prisoner on her island.
Polyphemus is the first devouring mother that Ulysses encounters during his voyage. Poseidon, who is Polyphemus’ father besides being the god of water, is another representation of the phallic, omnipotent mother who wants to impose her will to dominate her son at any cost.
By opposing the mother, a child opposes the absolute god that the mother represents for him or her, and this is an unpardonable wrong that becomes inscribed in the deepest parts of the child.
Anyone who wants to become a free human being must free themselves of these guilty feelings. To do so one must go down into Hades, into the deepest depths of one’s psyche. That is where we can find our hatred against the mother and that is also where we can find our complicity with the mother. This, too, is something we are guilty of.
Every culpability generates its own guilty feelings but what comes up to the surface are the guilty feelings and not what we are really guilty of.Circe made Ulysses’ descent into Hades possible.
What does the sorceress Circe symbolize? The depth of feminine wisdom? Of the enormous ability that a woman has to transform a man into either a
To be able to unravel my own guilty feelings I received great help by listening over and over to a recording by Louise Hay. She insists that we must come into contact with our hatred and decide to dissolve it through forgiveness.
This forgiveness is not a condoning of the actions of the other but it is a decision to detach from hatred, out of love for oneself.
Every time I am afraid of what others can do to me or of what I might do to myself, it is this very fear that helps me come into contact with my feelings of guilt and of the punishment that I am expecting.
If I try to understand what true culpability these guilty feelings are pointing out to me, then perhaps I can free myself of it and free myself also of my guilty feelings.
To free oneself of maternal domination and to accomplish one’s own personal life purpose instead of the maternal one is a Promethean culpability. It also generates deep feelings of guilt.
Ulysses’ Promethean guilt is that of freeing himself of the mother and of accomplishing the cosmic goal of secondary beauty.
Today it is not necessary to encounter the sorceress Circe and make use of her esoteric wisdom to descend into Hades. It is sufficient to enter into a conflictual intimate relationship. No one like a woman has the power to provoke and exasperate a man.
And when a man reaches the very bottom of his exasperation, he is right there in Hades, where he can either face his destruction or find his salvation.Either the man reacts with extreme violence against his wife or against himself, or he becomes capable of encountering the Teireisias that he has inside himself, asking himself about the origins of his profound hatred and how he can resolve it, step by step.
When a woman reaches the point of completely exasperating a man, acting herself in reaction to her feelings of guilt, all the ancient hatred that has been accumulated towards the phallic mother re-emerges, along with homicidal urges and a need to get revenge. When this happens, it is necessary to call upon all of one’s strength and all of one’s wisdom so as to avoid acting on this homicidal urge against the woman, who has become only a maternal projection both for the man and the woman. This is true because women, too, are full of hatred towards their mothers but they are rarely aware of it.
It is difficult to get one’s hurt pride under control, it’s difficult to decide to forgive, it’s difficult to decide to create concordance and beauty and not more ugliness.Only when the goal to create beauty has become a strong inner value is it possible to forgive in the name of beauty.
And this is what Ulysses did, as Homer described and not as in other versions of the myth of Ulysses, where it is told that Ulysses kills Penelope as soon as he returns to Ithaca.
CHAPTER XXV
Homer, and the Greeks before him, had a very clear concept of the kind of arrogance that human beings tend to have and that destroys the most sacred values in human life.
In the depths of their wisdom, they knew that whoever was culpable in this manner would, sooner or later, be severely punished by the gods.
The Greek literature that was produced after Homer never loses sight of this wisdom and the Greek tragedies are the works that best describe it.
Homer knows that Ulysses is not exempt from being guilty of hybris, but in contrast to the other authors of tragedies, he follows the whole path that his hero Ulysses must travel so he can make the passage from hybris to its opposite, which is humility.
Homer clearly shows Ulysses’ hybris when, just after leaving the Cyclops’ cave, Ulysses sarcastically yells out the name of who it was that just blinded and deceived him, stealing his herd of sheep.
BOOK IXAll of the wrath that Ulysses had repressed while he was in the cave now returns in full, and Ulysses violently hurls it against Polyphemus.
“Cyclops, in your deep cave with your violent strength,
you did not tear apart the companions of a weakling,
the crime was bound to turn against you,
mad you were to dare eat your guests;
for this Zeus and the other gods have punished you”. (Od. IX, 475-479)
As I was saying: the one who was boiling with rage in his heart even more; ripped off the top of an enormous mountain and threw it,
right in front of the blue ship’s prow,
almost striking the tiller.
The sea swelled up when the boulder fell in;
the ship was grabbed by the wave and taken back to the beach,
the sea brought it back to land.
But I grabbed a long pole,
and I pushed it sidewise: calling to my companions I ordered them to grab the oars so we could escape the danger,
making gestures with my head; they rowed with all their might. (Od.IX, 480-490)
Ulysses manages to save his ship and then he throws more poisonous words full of hybris at Polyphemus.
His companions beg him to calm down but he has no intention of listening to them. His arrogant heart must win and annihilate his enemy.
This is a taste of human insanity, Homer is saying between the lines, and while it is true that Ulysses is among the wisest of the Greek princes, it is also true that Ulysses is full of arrogance and hybris and he will have to suffer greatly to rid himself of this madness.
But when we had gone twice the distance at sea, I again spoke to the Cyclops: around me my companions held me back with honeyed words:
“Wicked one, why are you provoking the wild man?”
Far from using honeyed words, his companions call him “wicked” and they beg him to not provoke the Cyclops, speaking of their fear of death. But Ulysses, all wrapped up in his hybris, is deaf to their pleas and does not listen. Isn’t this exactly what happens over and over again in human relationships, when one’s hybris gets into conflict with the hybris of the other?
and just then by throwing a boulder into the sea he brought the ship back to land, and we were sure we were about to die.
If he hears you speak or yell anymore,
he will surely smash our heads and the ship as well,
with some big piece of rock; he can throw so far!”
That is what they said to me, but they could not persuade my magnanimous heart,
and I again spoke to him with rage in my soul:
“Cyclops, if by chance any mortal should ever ask you
why your eye has been so horribly blinded,
answer that the destroyer of fortresses Odysseus did it,
the son of Laertes, whose home is in Ithaca”.(Od. IX, 495-505)
Ulysses believes he can easily free himself of this crime of insane arrogance by making a sacrifice to Zeus, but Zeus refuses his offering.
The god does not want animal sacrifices, he wants that the heart is transformed. He strikes not to punish, but because through pain human beings can understand their errors and transform themselves.
….. to Zeus black Chronides cloud, who reigns above all,
I killed the ram and burned its thighs; but he did not want my offering, and he was already meditating on how all
my solid ships and my faithful companions would perish. (Od. IX, 552-555)
In this situation Ulysses’ companions have committed no crime and it seems incomprehensible why Zeus must make them die. The truth is that Ulysses does not own his guilt and he insanely shifts it on to his companions. How did he know that Zeus did not