Dream of Odysseus
Jan. 18th, 2007 05:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
porphyryThis morning while I was waking up I was also dreaming.
I dreamt that I was writing the opening monologue of a Greek tragedy. The speaker was the ghost of Odysseus. He was saying that he had been denied entrance to the Elysian fields and even to the normal resting place of the dead in Hades as punishment for all the monstrous lies he told at the court of the Phaeacians: the cyclops, the Circe episode, Scylla and Charybdis, etc.
Instead, he was condemned to wander the earth in service to the lord of the fallen spirits, who himself is a terrible liar, pretending to the credulous that he is the greatest god and creator of the universe. His service to this being is always to lie and deceive. Odysseus then gives a catalog of all the deceptions he has carried out at the orders of this creature. This was to be phrased in such a way that the discerning would come to realize that every deception gave rise to belief in a famous Christian miracle, and that finally he even impersonated a human being and worked seeming miracles that caused those around him to hail him the son of god (i.e. the demon) and tricked a hapless bystander at his execution into taking his place so that a real body could hang on the cross.
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There is little here that is original, except the combination. Ulysses is famed as a liar from the Hippias Minor to Dante, with Juvenal Sat. 15 making the observation that all of his most fantastic tales are told at the banquet of the Phaeacians on his own authority rather than Homer’s. The Neoplatonic theology of fallen spirits comes from Porphyry (who may very well have intended it to characterize the Christian god, but his surviving works are too fragmentary because of Christian censorship to say—although Porphyry took a kinder view of Jesus personally), while the theology of Jesus as a disembodied spirit is a Gnostic heresy know as Docetism (from Latin for ‘he seems’); this included the idea that he tricked Simon of Cyrene into being crucified. The idea of revelation from the shade of a Homeric hero comes, besides Homer, from Philostratus.
I am not foolish enough to make any claims concerning the character of this dream, but I will quote something from the Divine Iamblichus (in the translation of Dillon, Hershbell and Clark, for convenience):
“On the Contrary, either when sleep departs, just as we are awakening, it is possible to hear a sudden voice guiding us about things to be done…But dream-sleep and possession of a seizure similar to a blackout, a state between sleep and wakefulness, and presently a stirring or complete wakefulness, all of these are divine as fit for reception of the gods, and they are sent by the gods themselves.”
I dreamt that I was writing the opening monologue of a Greek tragedy. The speaker was the ghost of Odysseus. He was saying that he had been denied entrance to the Elysian fields and even to the normal resting place of the dead in Hades as punishment for all the monstrous lies he told at the court of the Phaeacians: the cyclops, the Circe episode, Scylla and Charybdis, etc.
Instead, he was condemned to wander the earth in service to the lord of the fallen spirits, who himself is a terrible liar, pretending to the credulous that he is the greatest god and creator of the universe. His service to this being is always to lie and deceive. Odysseus then gives a catalog of all the deceptions he has carried out at the orders of this creature. This was to be phrased in such a way that the discerning would come to realize that every deception gave rise to belief in a famous Christian miracle, and that finally he even impersonated a human being and worked seeming miracles that caused those around him to hail him the son of god (i.e. the demon) and tricked a hapless bystander at his execution into taking his place so that a real body could hang on the cross.
______________________________________________
There is little here that is original, except the combination. Ulysses is famed as a liar from the Hippias Minor to Dante, with Juvenal Sat. 15 making the observation that all of his most fantastic tales are told at the banquet of the Phaeacians on his own authority rather than Homer’s. The Neoplatonic theology of fallen spirits comes from Porphyry (who may very well have intended it to characterize the Christian god, but his surviving works are too fragmentary because of Christian censorship to say—although Porphyry took a kinder view of Jesus personally), while the theology of Jesus as a disembodied spirit is a Gnostic heresy know as Docetism (from Latin for ‘he seems’); this included the idea that he tricked Simon of Cyrene into being crucified. The idea of revelation from the shade of a Homeric hero comes, besides Homer, from Philostratus.
I am not foolish enough to make any claims concerning the character of this dream, but I will quote something from the Divine Iamblichus (in the translation of Dillon, Hershbell and Clark, for convenience):
“On the Contrary, either when sleep departs, just as we are awakening, it is possible to hear a sudden voice guiding us about things to be done…But dream-sleep and possession of a seizure similar to a blackout, a state between sleep and wakefulness, and presently a stirring or complete wakefulness, all of these are divine as fit for reception of the gods, and they are sent by the gods themselves.”
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no subject
Date: 2007-01-19 06:34 am (UTC)Practically every really deep dream, or artistic inspiration I have had has manifested in that early-morning state.
(sorry about the double post.)
no subject
Date: 2007-01-21 06:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-01 04:26 pm (UTC)