http://www.quora.com/What-is-a-narrative

As a person who does not understand narrative very well intrinsically I have become fascinated with the topic through a personal deficiency.
http://datavisualization.ch/showcases/ebb-flow-of-book-characters/

One thing that I can understand is that narratives are inversions of maps. In other words narratives are to time what maps are to space.

So as we can say the map is not the territory we can also say that the narrative is not the temporality.

We can consider the fractal nature of time. http://www.if-online.org/Fractal%20Time%20pdf%20file.pdf It is flowing at all scales.

An excellent example of a narrative map is at http://xkcd.com/657/large/

A good example of a map narrative is “Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas” by Denis Wood  http://www.sigliopress.com/books/atlas.htm

The relation of Map to Narrative is a spacetime interval. This means there is a phase space between time and space within the interval, such that from some points of view the map is bigger and the narrative smaller, and from other points of view the narrative is bigger and the map smaller.

So you would think that if I can understand maps and diagrams I would by a simple transform be able to understand narratives. But it really does not work that way. I can understand narratives of works of art that I do structural analysis of, but I cannot invent a narrative myself. I manage to tell stories in daily life but I cannot make up one. I found this out when I tried to write an Epic See http://archonic.net/epic/index.htm

My problem is that to me all possible paths are the same, and I don’t know how to choose between them. This is nihilistic of course. But what are we to do . . .

http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-cool-unique-story-lines

No one for a long time has written a book that encapsulates the worldview. Dreyfus gives some examples from history like the Anead, lliad/Odyssey, Dante’s inferno, Brothers Karamazov, or Moby Dick. He has a new book about that called the Shining Ones.

I have a fundamental handicap that I cannot understand how to produce a narrative, even though the narative is merely the inverse of the map. So although I know the structure of the Worldview, I have not figured out how to turn that in to a Novel. I started writing and Epic Poem of the last adventure of Odysseus (http://archonic.net/epic/index.htm) in order to attempt to produce a story that reflected my knowledge. I agree with Heidegger that Poetry and Thinking are intertwined but allow you to get at different kinds of depth. I tend to attempt to write poetry rather than narratives myself. But unless the worldivew is posited as a narrative then it is not possible to absorb it easily for others entrapped in that worldview.

So lets invent something. First I would like to posit the premise that Male and Female differ in that Males are oriented toward Space and Females toward time. And so the spacetime interval appears in human relations between genders. Now smith said that genders are a kind of a kind, but if you think about it we can see that in terms of category theory that the genders are actually modifications. Thus there are arrows, functors, natural transformations, modifications and fluctuations as the first five levels of N-Category theory. So one thing to think about is how the various relations between people, say a couple or a family or a group are conditioned by the various N-Categories with gender falling at the modification level.

Now the way that genders relate to the worldivew is in terms of the initiation ceremonies. It turns out that Apollo and Artimis are the masters of initiation for the two sexes, with boys becoming wolves and girls becoming bears. Now it turn out that boys and girls experience the meta-levels of Being in different orders in the initiation ceremonies, but the initiation ceremonies are complementary. See my Jung reading group presentation at http://archonic.net/jung_alchemy_presentation_2000_03_09.PDF and http://archonic.net/ago00v00.pdf.

It turns out that these sequences in the initiation ceremonies are the same as the sequences through life that the different sexes follow.

The story of Ariadne maps out the female initiation ceremony. Perseus maps out the male initiation ceremony more or less. Goux has described Oedipus as a failed hero who has aborted the initiation process.

So I think there is a story in that. But how to turn it into a narrative I am not sure. I can map it, but cannot temporize it properly into a narrative.

http://www.quora.com/How-has-monotheism-affected-a-civilizations-ability-to-progress-in-science

This is actually a complicated question to answer because so many things are being assumed in the question and the first anonymous response which I take to be the questioners further explanation. However, the question itself does beg for an answer. Is Monotheism a precursor for Modern Science and our progress in it which has changed the world so much? This core question is pretty significant if it were true, that monotheism was a prerequisite. Personally I don’t think this is so. And my evidence for that is that China discovered everything that was available in the Renaissance a thousand years earlier and then forgot them again and again. The real key to progress (or regress, as it may be) is not forgetting and adding various inventions on to each other to produce new inventions. This is something that Indo-Europeans managed to do, and I think the concept of Being, unique to them, has something to do with their success in this regard. I think Being is a precursor. In other words I don’t think it is the semitic contribution of monotheism that is as important. However, there is no doubt that it played a role by supplying through synthesis the idea of the Supreme Being when Monotheism and Ontology are conflated. But these are the contributions of the two nomadic tribes in the Middle East. But there are also the contributions of Egypt and Mesopotamia, which we are just now starting to appreciate, because it had been lost for so long. All of these factors contributed to the foundations of Science through the production of a meta-worldview, which we now live in as the world wide dominant worldview which is quickly supplanting all the others. It could be argued that Science would not be what it is if it did not have to struggle against Christianity. And it is certainly true that Reason defines itself against the superstition of religion. But the fact is that Reason existed in Plato’s academy which lasted for a long time, and through Euclid’s elements persisted to become the core of the educational system in the West. In Euclid’s elements we get a condensation of the knowledge of Being and its relation to rationality. But it took a long time for rationality to show the kind of results in science that would allow it to pull free of religious superstition. But on the other hand, rationality itself fully developed in a Polytheistic society. One could argue that Christianity merely delayed the rise of Scientific culture though the intensification of superstition after the Roman era. The seeds were sown by the take over of the world by Alexander which seeded Athenian Greek culture across the known world. But Romans were not interested in theory, but only practical applications, and when Rome fell apart after adopting Christianity, then the dark ages and general european collapse ensued until the Renaissance when there was a rediscovery of the Classical past in which Reason was given pride of place within a polytheistic context. Thus one could argue that Reason is the child of Polytheism and that it was only with the re-introduction of polytheistic elements during the Renaissance that that Reason could gain a foothold again, as something other than a support to religious superstition. However, it is way more complicated than that, because polytheistic societies like Greece and Egypt, were in fact really monotheistic at core, which we see in Plato and Aristotle where they talk about God and the gods. It was assumed in those societies that there was a Godhead, and that all the gods were merely manifestations of that godhead. So it is not even true that Egypt and Greece were completely polytheistic because they understood well that there was one god behind the various manifestations of that reality behind the appearances of the gods. And so we could make a case for the fact that Greece and Egypt were monotheistic in a sense similar to that of the Semites up until the second destruction of the temple. After that second destruction Judaism purified its Monotheism and that is when radical monotheism with one god and no others entered the scene. But before then it was always assumed that beyond polytheism there was a deeper monotheism. Same is true in Hinduism. Polytheism is itself not pure, but a kind of Monotheism that allows differentiation into gods who manifest the powers of the hidden single Godhead (Brahman) behind all the phenomena of its manifestation in the world as separate powers and attributes which explains why the world is such a mess, where evil came from etc.

So I think this is a question that could have several competing answers and it would be hard to disentangle what the true precedents are for science. Monotheism in this deeper sense can be one of them, but it is not clearly the case.

http://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-to-write-the-first-draft-of-a-book

I wrote the first draft of my dissertation Emergent Design at http://emergentdesign.net in six weeks. Then it took ten or eleven months to rework it so that the english was acceptable with my wife as my editor. We argued over every sentence. After I was done I did a diff between the original draft and the final passed dissertation, there were a few words that went untouched, like I noticed that the phrase “In other words, . . . ” on one page remained untouched throughout the editing process. Not sure how those words were spared.

I am a prolific writer. Prolific does not necessarily mean a good writer, as my wife keeps reminding me. But there is a certain point when one begins to be able to just set down and start writing. Taking that stream of consciousness and making it into something worth reading is then a lot of work, which I do not do except for things that are published. So I have a lot of very doubtful writings on my web sites and what is available (over 10,000 pages) is just the tip of the iceburg of what exists off line or in manuscript form. Writing is my way of thinking things through. I learned to write working papers in college, and never stopped. I also learned to do diagrams as the basis of my thinking. When you combine that with a lot of reading, almost ten years sitting in the British Museum reading everything in Philosophy and myriad other subjects I could get my hands on, and almost every book that existed was available there, then eventually you think you might have something to say.

I know, I know that is all illusory. But it keeps me going, now writing answers on Quora, as an advertisement of my more serious works available on my web sites. I tried going to conferences but that did not work, so here I am slaving away answering questions on Quora in hopes that someone out there will find Special Systems and Emergent Meta-systems interesting.

At a certain point I became fluent in my writing. And after that all I had to do was sit down and start writing. As I write I discover things that I did not know before, and that gives me the elevated interest and really fascination or thrill of discovery that leads me to read on in the myriad subjects of my interest, which is fairly wide. I will never forget after I received approval for my Ph.D. in England which took about nine years, all my Advisor had to say was, now you have a general education. In other words he was saying, you are just beginning, and you now have the basis for going further and doing your own research on your own. One thing leads to another and after a while you have read a lot of pages and written a lot of pages in response to what you have read. And years have gone by. Some parts of life you missed out on, myriad parties I suppose. But on the other hand when all is said and done, a little knowledge goes a long way. My favorite book along these lines as I have mentioned previously is Knowledge Painfully Acquired by Lo Chin Shun.

There is someone who spent their whole life thinking very deeply, who came to a conclusion after myriad avenues explored, and set his conclusions down succinctly as a guide to others. Being prolific but not being a very good writer has many disadvantages, one of which is that your work does not get read even if it deserves to be read. So my advice is to learn your lessons well, and then strive to become prolific after becoming proficient. Those who become prolific prior to becoming proficient are doomed to fail even if their ideas are very good.

However, failure in terms of getting attention should not be counted as overall failure. The actual reward is in the discovery process itself. The thrill of the chase in to a territory never visited by anyone else, not mapped out, and with no beaten tracks. It may be rare in the earth, but in the landscape of ideas there are still many continents left to discover, and there the local inhabitants do not mind.

http://www.quora.com/Continental-Philosophy/Do-Continental-philosophers-resent-their-lack-of-mathematical-ability

This is a silly question. This is the kind of Question that we should not answer. If we were to not answer questions like this then perhaps questions would improve here on Quora, where there are many silly questions and the only reason that quora is worth reading is the fact that good people who know something take time to answer these silly questions.

But since I don’t want my complaint about this silly question, whose author cannot be serious about, I will offer an answer myself, even though it is against my better judgement.

First of all Continental Philosophy is just the Western tradition carrying on. It is Analytic Philosophy in England and the USA following suit which branches off into Realistic Empiricism, Language Critique, and Language Games, mostly specialized argument for arguments sake.

Since Math is the basis of all philosophy, Continental Philosophers are at home in it as any western intellectual and their work is meant to deepen our knowledge of science, just as analytical philosophers do. Neither specialize in Mathematics, because Philosophy is more fundamental than mathematics in many ways. Plato said that mathematics was a pre-requisite for learning about philosophy, and Continental Philosophers take that just as seriously today. First of all we must realize that education in Europe is superior to education here in the USA. So they know more math on average than equivalent philosophy students in the USA. So the whole premise of the question is just silly. And is a joke, and thus we should not take such questions seriously. When we say this we are denigrating Europeans in general when in fact their standards are higher than ours in many cases, and their students certainly know more than ours at given levels of education. Their Ph.D. degrees are more valuable than those in the USA because they have higher standards of scholarship in many cases.

So now to the serious answers that have been made to this question. Mention is made of Badiou’s interest in Set Theory as the basis of Being, and Deleuze’s use of Calculus as a reference in his philosophy. Of these the case made by Badiou is the most interesting. However, it is Deleuze’s philosophy which is deeper of the two, which would be the case whether or not he used Calculus as a grounding for some of his ideas. Badiou’s idea is interesting because of its extremity. But also because his argument centers on Cohen’s Forcing argument within set theory. Badiou makes a clever generalization of Cohen’s argument. I made a lot of progress in my dissertation research by showing why Badiou’s argument is incomplete. Let me mention just one way.

Badiou says Set Theory is Being. The one thing I can identify with in this idea is that Set Theory is based on axioms and the axioms are fragmented as shown by Cohen’s argument and so that generally shows that Being is fragmented which is a position I have held for a long time, which is contra to the Idea that Badiou criticizes of Deleuze that Being is Univocal despite its embrace of heterogeneity. Identity and difference are the two sides of one aspect of Being. There are three others: Reality, Truth and Presence with their anti-aspects. Deleuze squarely stays within the perview of ontology by claiming that Being is Difference but has a de-totalized totality (to borrow a phrase from Sartre) that is univocal and thus conferring unity of a sort to Being. What Badiou is missing is that there are many claimants to the throne of being the basis for Mathematics and Set Theory is only one of them. We have to consider the others, like Category Theory for instance, or Mereology, etc. But beyond this there is another deeper problem. Sets have a dual, which are Masses. Masses appear in our language as non-count nouns as opposed to count nouns. Non-count nouns are things like furniture or grass, we say as piece of furniture or a blade of grass, i.e. we have to have a counter to refer to a part of the mass. Masses cannot be counted unless there is a counting term. Now from a Category Theory point of view the anti-set you get when you reverse the arrows are also just sets. So something more than merely reversing the arrows of the category Set is needed, and I call this an inverse dual. Dual would just be reversing the arrows, but also some properties have to be inverted as well. For instance the emergent part of the set is the particular within the set not the set itself. On the other hand for Masses the emergent part is the whole mass and not the instances that make up the mass and exist within its vocabulary. But more importantly Sets have Syllogistic Logic while Masses have Pervasion Logics like that developed by G. Spencer-Brown in Laws of Form which was clarified by N. Hellerstein in Diamond and Delta Logics. So when Badiou goes on to describe Worlds in terms of Logic, we can be sure that he is talking about syllogistic logic which is the only one we know here in the West. But pervasion logics were the more prevalent in India and China. And so although I have not read the second volume of his study yet, I will bet that he does not deal with Pervasion Logics just like he did not deal with Masses. So this is a major flaw in his attribution to Set theory of all the trappings of Being itself, because there are obviously masses with Being as well as particulars that can be placed in Sets. So it is clear that Badiou is wrong, in general, but the fact that he uses higher set theory as the basis for his analysis really does raise the bar on theories of Being, because there is a sense in which what he says is true. That is Set Theory has some key characteristics that are of necessity the same as those of Being like perdurence. But of course this perdurence is bought at a price and that price is the fact that it occurs in a void, where there are no particulars yet in the sets but the sets are pure projections with the null set and empty set acting as marked and unmarked signs. The appearance of the first particular he calls the Ultra One. Prior to this are two principles: The Event, and the Multiple. These prior grounds of the Set as empty projection are prior to One arising, so the Multiple comes before One and Many. It is what Badiou calls true heterogeneity and difference (unlike that of Deleuze) without reference to the One either as totality or unity.

What I learned from Badiou’s use of Cohen’s forcing briefly is that a transcendental is the same across an entire immanence and that is why it is an invisible, because it is something that does not set up a difference within the immanence. Forcing does outside the immanence and forces a transcendental on it to see if there is a difference generated. It there is no difference generated then it is the same transcendental, if there is a different difference generated then it is not the same transcendental. This may be a wrong interpretation but this is what I got out of what he was saying generalizing on Cohen’s work and seeing ontological significance in it. It has long been assumed that transcendentals are infinite. But in Cantor’s theory we can only really tell the difference between the countable and uncountable (real number) infinitudes. What is strange is that cardinal infinities are not at set distances from each other beyond aleph. This I think shocked Cantor and others once they got use to there being different infinities. We are used to numbers being about the same distance from each other in normal math. When suddenly we don’t know the distance between them then we really don’t know what it means when we count to higher infinities. It more or less makes the exercise fruitles.

If a transcendence is an infinity, and then we try to go to the next higher infinity level to get a higher transcendence, if that movement does not make a difference within our immanence then really we have the same transcendence as we started with. As we expand the Universe of coverage by transcendences then we are forcing certain properties on the immanent realm that is being immersed in the larger space. If this forcing does not produce a difference within the immanent range then there is no difference that makes a difference by the introduction of the new transcendence, and really all we have is the old transcendence in a new guise.

This is my understanding. I stand ready to be corrected. If I got anywhere close to the right answer I am happy because this is one of the most esoteric ideas I have run into. But it allows us to know that the Continuum Hypothesis is independent of the ZF axioms, which means the fragmentation is real between the ZFC axioms.

For me this was important for my research into Schemas Theory because after formulating General Schemas Theory I thought I had to then formulate a worlds theory in order to know its context. General Schemas Theory gives the context of Systems Theory, or the theories of the other schemas. But what I realized is that I did not have to give the context of General Schemas Theory if the world theory did not produce any difference at the level of schemas. For instance we produce General Schemas Theory so we do not disturb the meanings of lower level Schemas like facet, monad, pattern, form, system, meta-system or domain, etc. If the world theory we introduced affected the structure of Schemas Theory, or if Schemas Theory produced a difference in systems theory then we would think it was an anomaly and would try another approach toward producing a theory that was truly general.

Once I realized that any World theory I created would not change general schemas theory, I stopped trying to find a context for Schemas theory. It saves us from needless foundational searches such as I was engaged in. It does not matter which world we are in if it does not change our schemas, and it does not matter which schmatization we have if it does not change the various schemas that are covered by the generic schematization. This turns out to be a good test of generality of a theory. We don’t want ad hoc changes by introducing a new level of transcendental.

This turns out to be an important metaphysical consideration. And we should give Badiou credit for understanding that there was a metaphysical equivalent to forcing.

Mathematics is odd. Analysis banned infintesimals, and this gave rise to non-standard analysis. Yet Mathematics accepted Cantor’s paradise. And we justify our Idealist aspirations by the fact that we can understand infinities as processes, even if we cannot understand them in terms of Pure Being, as a frozen fully present reality. There is something strange going on here, which also implicates the split between intuitionist or constructionist mathematics and traditional mathematics that subscribes to excluded middle. The mathematical universe is not symmetrical. For instance we only have topology and geometry as mass maths while almost all of the rest of our math is set based, and that is why we might be fooled into thinking that Set Theory is all we need to ground mathematics. Husserl developed his entire phenomenology in order to answer the question “What is a number?”. When we see the complexity of consciousness seen from a Phenomenological perspective it is amazing that we can do math at all.

I have shown in other writings that there are various forms of math associated with the Meta-levels of Being.

Pure Being = Calculus
Process Being = Probability
Hyper Being = Fuzzy Possibilities
Wild Being = Chaotic Propensities
Ultra Being = Singularities in Catastrophe Theory (Rene Thom).

But when we look at mathematics what we see is that it is really all Present-At-Hand or inscribed in Pure Being. Even Probability theory is described in terms of functions. So I have hypothesized not only that there are mathematical forms at each meta-level of Being, but also that these should be split, perhaps asymmetrically between Set-based and Mass-based Categories. However the current asymmetry strikes me as being too great.

Fundamentally I think that Constructivism and Intuitionism is more correct than Traditional Excluded Middle mathematical argumentation because it is precisely the excluded middle that bans non-duality.

I am putting my money on Surreal Numbers as the more basic kind of mathematics based on Game Theory. From it you get all the kinds of numbers that otherwise have to be constructed based on the limitations of each earlier kind of number. Surreal numbers gives us all the various kinds of numbers, along with both Infinities and Infintessimals. But unfortunately it is meta-systemic and thus the numbers have holes in them, and you can calculate with the holes. It as the void prior to the arising of the progressive bisection of the number, and then there is the emptiness between the braches of the number tree where a specific number is approximated by the up and down arrows that represent the moves of the game within the field of all possible moves.

Plato says that all who enter his academy should know geometry. Mathematics is the bar that is placed at the entry that must be passed to get to the real work of understanding the Platonic Forms. And there is no greater example of the representable Forms than all the various categories of mathematics discovered in the last century which has been a renaissance for mathematics. Who would have thought that we could finally prove that we had come to the end of the sporadic groups. Who would have thought we would have come up with not just category theory but n-category theory, or topoi, or discovered that the fourth dimension had no stable topology (Donaldson). The list goes on and on as the new mathematical categories have overwhelmed us as if we were caught in an avalanche of representable intelligibles. But what progress have we made on the representable intelligibles? Not really very much. Analytical Philosophy spent much of its time trying to prove that philosophy itself was just a bunch of mistakes following the language philosophers and Wittgenstein. My favorite of the lot was Schlick who sponsored Wittgenstein as the spokesman for the Vienna movement (Notice this was on the Continent.) Frege (who also lived on the Continent, and) who criticized Husserl’s early phenomenology and who changed his position based on Frege’s critique of his dissertation. Yet Husserl is forgotten by the Analytical Philosophers. Funny how Analytical Philosophers have such a bad memory. They cannot seem to remember anyone after Frege who lived on the Continent except Wittgenstein. Then suddenly everyone from then on lived in England or the USA. Meanwhile back in Europe, Europeans carried on Philosophy as they always had remembering Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and all those in the Phenomenological Tradition after Husserl, like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Deleuze, Derrida, Lacan etc. Continental Philosophers are just plain old Philosophers, while Analytic Philosophers are actually the ones with the resentament. First of all their arguments are isolated among themselves and have no bearing on Philosophy (Continental Philosophers are superstars in their own land compared to American or British philosophers, mainly because what continental Philosophers have to say are normally relevant to what is going on within society, culture, contemporary events, politics, etc.) And as I have shown in other posts Analytical Philosophy is dying while Continental Philosophy is thriving even if philosophers in general are not doing so well of late. So if you are in a field where you have to send out letters to students that say there is no chance you will ever get a job if you do a Ph.D. in Philosophy, which is irrelevant to contemporary society or culture, and which is being mentioned less and less in books, then that is the real case for resentment. Especially if you know that your continental friends are better educated and their Ph.D. programs are more rigorous than those in the USA. Do we sense in the animosity of the Analytical Philosophers some chagrin at being part of a dying field while Continental Philosophy has been adopted as the saviors of English Departments, giving them something worth while to talk about finally. And there are just so many more English students and departments than there are those in philosophy. And the whole sale adoption of Continental Philosophy by English Departments as their basis for the criticism of literature of all kinds, means that there is an unstoppable expansion under way for Continental Philosophy. They do not tell their students that they will not be able to get jobs as English majors. They tell them that they can write books and become famous authors and make lots of money or get a cushy job in any number of schools, colleges and universities that all teach English, even as a Second Language. In other words Continental Philosophy is taking over the world and becoming a dominant paradigm for looking at our own society, culture, literature, media, politics, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, etc. Analytic Philosophy the child of McCarthyism is fading away slowly but surely, because they have nothing interesting to say beyond their own clique. The only really interesting Analytic Philosophers are those who study or take as their starting point Continental Philosophy like Dreyfus and Taylor.

Since Philosophers here in America are less educated than their Continental counterparts, and that includes in math, I think the resentment runs in the other direction. Of course, there are a few Analytical Philosophers whose work actually is about Philosophy of Math or Philosophy of Science and we presume that they know their stuff. But if there subjects of study are not math and science it is an odd thing to presume that that they know more math than their Continental Counter parts who actually know some math and science from their schooling. Just look at the ranking of kids with respect to math and science in Europe or even Asia in relation to America. We cannot fall behind like we have for years on end and expect to keep our place as the preeminent source of education within the Western world for third world societies.

I know, says one teaparty republican to another, we can solve the problem by cutting more from education. Global corporations shall solve the problem by getting their scientists and engineers from societies that believe in education and invest in it.

http://www.quora.com/Why-is-Literary-Theory-so-hard-to-understand?q=critical+theory

Because it is mainly based on Continental Philosophy, and if you don’t know something about Philosophy normally it is very easy to get lost. Another thing is that it has been taken up by English teachers who are not philosophers themselves and thus they get a lot of it wrong, which is unfortunate. Continental Philosophers use Literature as a basic testing ground for their theories as well as PsychoAnalysis, History, Politics, Society and Culture in general (See Zizek as the best known recent example). Basically, if you don’t know Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Lacan, Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Bataille, etc you are going to be lost. The works of these philosophers are themselves very difficult, and then when you try to apply one of them to something in literature you are going to get something very arcane, obscure and esoteric. But many times the works being used to leverage as theory are not well understood by the English graduate students and even teaching academics who have gotten their Ph.D.s and so this results in a lot of confusion for English students who are asked to master two disciplines at least in order to pursue their love of literature if they are going to understand Literary Theory. In America and England the number of students studying Continental Philosophy is small but growing while Analytical Philosophy is fading. Analytical Philosophy is only really interested in its own specialized internal arguments. So there are not a lot of academics in Philosophy helping, however many of those who exist are very good. I would like to mention John Sallis and especially his book Being and Logos.

This is as good a place to start as any. Sallis is a fine scholar who has learned to read Plato’s dialogues as if they were theater, where the setting and characters are as important as the philosophy. And from that we find that Plato is continually undercutting his own message. Plato is not just ironic, his is indicating what he believes by a kind of dissimulation of his own positions. For instance, we are continually told that Socrates is a real philosopher and his enemies the sophists are not real philosophers. The main difference is that the Sophists are foreigners, and they take money to teach what from Socrates’ point of view something they do not know themselves but think they know. But as we look deeper and deeper into it it becomes harder and harder to tell the difference between Socrates and the Sophists that he berates. Here in the work of Sallis we get the intersection between Literature and Philosophy with respect to Plato’s dialogues. And we can think of this intersection growing over time instead of specializing to the point of inanity which is what seems to have happened in literature and philosophy both, but which is not endemic to either approach to writings from either the past or present. If you take Sallis as a model and the way that Plato himself blends narrative, philosophy and mythology then we can see that it is not necessary to separate them out from each other and in fact they can inform each other to give us access to deeper meanings both in literature and philosophy.

http://www.quora.com/Homers-Odyssey/What-can-an-adult-do-to-understand-Homers-Odyssey-better

The Iliad should be read with its lesser sister epic about the rest of the Trojan War called the PostHomerica by Quintus of Smyrna (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posthomerica) which attempts to give a summary of the rest of the Epic cycle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Cycle). Otherwise you only get half of the story begun by the Iliad and you do not get the background set up information for the Odyssey.

That said what we need to concentrate on in the Odyssey is completely different from the subject matter we talked about in the Iliad. However, because of the constant reference back to the Iliad by the Odyssey, it is necessary to understand the Iliad very well in order to get this references to the earlier epic. Of course, the whole of the Epic cycle is the true context but we do not have all of that to refer to. But it is enough for us that we have the Iliad and the Odyssey which because of their antiquity in comparison with the Mahabharata really gives us some fundamental insights into what the proto-epic cycle must have been like.

The narrative of the Odyssey is quite complex and more sophisticated than that of the more archaic Iliad. Therefore we are even more reliant on commentaries in the reading of this epic due to its complexity of reference and its own internal structure that has a kind of sublime quality to it that is hard to imagine a human being writing. The greatest question that we can pursue the answer to in this respect is how did Homer do it? How did he come up with a narrative and his scenes and characters interacting in those scenes to give such archetypal primal images of our worldview that are so succinct and perfectly formed that almost everyone who reads this text is entranced by it. It has a perfection that no other text I know of can boast. And we can see that in the wealth of commentaries and all the subtle points about this book that they point out and that we continue to discover with each new generation of scholars. We are so lucky to have this book as the foundation of our culture. And we know that the Greeks themselves appreciated it, and its precursor because they had reading contests where it was recited, and they never tired of hearing it spoken.

But what is so fascinating about this text is that it addresses a very fundamental question, which is about the structure of the Western worldview. It exists as a users manual to the worldview in which we live. And if we did not have this text we could hardly understand our own worldview, and to the extent that this text is no longer read and central to our education, we lose out because we do not have other sources of this kind of knowledge about the constitution of the Indo-European worldview in general and the Western worldview in specifics. So the Odyssey is a marvel. It is deeply philosophical while at the same time being an entertaining story, and it builds up the tradition because it is always referring back to the Iliad as its primal ground, which it is reflexive about, more or less as the second half of Cervantes novel is, because in the mean time a fake version of the second half was published which he could make fun of along the way. The Odyssey has this kind of reflexiveness where it is kind of a joke concerning its relation to the Iliad. As the bard told it he was playing on the knowledge of his audience of the earlier epic, and with a sly wit indeed. We don’t really get this kind of Humor again until Plato. Like in Plato, everything is ironic to some degree.

The story starts as I have said at the point where Athena (http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Mythology/AthenaGallery.html) is no longer angry at Odysseus, as he sits on an island in the middle of the Sea, stuck as a sex slave of a goddess who does not want to let him go. He wants to return to his family and gives up immortality in order to go home. Everyone says that it is to see Penelope but this is far from the truth. Who he longs to see is really his Father. Everything about the Iliad and Odyssey is about Fathers and Sons. The Odyssey is about his wanting to go home to see his Father, and his Son. This is because that is how the patriarchal line is maintained. So we have already noted that Odysseus was the scape goat for the sacrileges that were performed by the achaeans in the Sacking of Troy. Odysseus was the one by his Metis that came up with the ruse that allowed the Achaeans to take the city by trickery when they could not take it by arms. And this showed that ultimately they were not the great warriors that they pretended to be, because they were all dishonored by this ruse, but worse than that the gods had been afforded by their hubris in taking the city during the rape and pillage they violated temples where the women sought refuge, and also a icon of Athena was treated as if it were merry another prize to be stolen, so Athena became angry and due to her wrath the Achaeans had two responses. Menalaus fled with his ships and Agamemnon stayed on the beach making sacrifices. Notice how interesting this is that Agamemnon had to make a sacrifice of his daughter to get favorable winds to come to Troy, and at the end of the war he stands on the shore and makes sacrifice in order to get his men home safely. But although his men return safely, death at the hands of his own wife awaits him. He gets home first and is killed while Menelaus gets home last but gets eternal life with his faithless wife. Only Odysseus has a good homecoming, but much delayed by the anger of Athena toward him. Just as Artemis and her brother drove the story of the Iliad, so here it is Athena and Dionysus. And just like in the Iliad where Ares plays a major role, here it is Athena playing that major role helping Odysseus get home. And it seems that the reason she wants him to get home is for the sake of his Son, Telemachus, who she immediately goes to help while Hermes bears the message to Calypso that she must set Odysseus free. So the question is where is Dionysus who is in occultation within the story. And the answer is as has been said previously that Dionysus is there in the form of the Suitors, who in vying for Penelope protect her from each other, they are doing so as they party and get drunk and do all the things that the adherents to Dionysus do. Now the best commentary by far is called Archery in the Dark of the Moon. And that commentary revolves around the revenge of Odysseus against the suitors. But if you ask yourself where Dionysus is while Athena is looking out for Odysseus, he is with Telemachus and Penelope in spirit protecting Penelope and making Telemachus angry enough with his guests that he begins to assert himself as a man.

Telmachus and Penelope
http://hawkenodyssey2011.blogspot.com/

There is no way that I can do justice to the Odyssey in the shadow of this book. there are many good commentaries but this one actually does the text it is commenting on justice. So I suggest you stop reading this post and go read this book.

Artemis, Apollo, Leda
http://www.theoi.com/Gallery/T14.6.html

For those of you still around, after that aside, we can talk just between ourselves about precisely what is happening between the beginning and manifest with Athena and the end and unmanifest with Dionysus. These are the primary embodiments of the nihilistic opposites in Greek Society. Nietzsche talks about Apollo (to whom we have to add the mention of Artemis). What is forgotten when talking about Apollo is that he is a wolf God of initiations of Boys just as Artemis is a goddess of the initiation of girls usually as bears. Nietzsche does not seem to be aware that we must balance out the opposites of Apollo and Dionysus with their female counterparts. Apollo and Atriums are fraternal twins of Leda, but Dionysus and Athena are born directly out of the body of Zeus, the two faced god, one face dark and the other light.

Zeus before birth of Athena
http://www.goddess-athena.org/Museum/Paintings/Birth/Zeus_before_Birth_of_Athena_f.htm
http://www.utexas.edu/courses/larrymyth/7Athena2009.html
http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Mythology/AthenaBirthLouvreF32.html

Athena from the head of Zeus three versions http://wotantue.us/Greek/Comm.Week5

Athena with Aegis
http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Mythology/AthenaAegisCdMDeRidder254.html
Zeus (Baal) is the god who embodies the nihilism of the Western Worldview and what comes out of his body are embodiments of those artificial nihilistic extreme opposites, ie. Dionysus and Athena. These are the products of Zeus while Hera produces either monsters like the Typhoon or Hephaestus who is lame, and who she throws out of Olympus because she cannot bear to look at him, mainly because he is the maker of all things artificial, his miraculous devices for example, for instance the Box of Pandora and the Shield of Achilles, as well as the things he made that Odysseus encounters in Scheria. Dionysus comes out of the Thigh of Zeus while Athena comes out of his head, fully formed in her armor. Dionysus is the son of Semele (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semele) who asked to see Zeus in all his wonder and was smitten. So Zeus placed Dionysus in his thigh to gestate.
–

Zeus and Semele by Sebastiano Ricci
See http://www.oceansbridge.com/paintings/museums/uffizi-pitti-galleries/big/Sebastiano_RicciXXJove_and_Semele.jpg

Birth of Dionysus from the Thigh of Zeus
http://shelton.berkeley.edu/175c/list14.html
Dionysos
http://www.theoi.com/Olympios/Dionysos.html

Dionysos http://www.carnaval.com/silenus/

Dionysus is the only god to experience death because as a child he was torn apart by the Titans, and then like Osiris was reassembled, only to continue to exist and bring trouble where ever he went, as he drove everyone mad that came in touch with him, for instance Nietzsche who made the mistake of identifying with the god. In some of Nietzsche’s last cogent letters he signed the name Dionysus. We should say that Dionysus is Shiva, and Apollo is Brahma in Hindu mythology. So this allows us to call upon Hindu mythic sources to try to understand this pair that Nietzsche claimed were the fundamental dual perspectives of the Greek worldview. We make this duality seen by Nietzsche a bit more complex, but also more comprehensible by adding to this mix Athena and Artemis. The myth that draws all of these gods together is that if Ariadne and the journey to destroy the Minotaur. Ariadne is abandoned by her Apollonian hero, Theseus who unlike Oedipus passed through initiation without failure, on an island by her self. She marries Dionysus and is killed in the end by Artemis. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariadne). Theseus uses Ariadne’s Thread to defeat the minotaur with the Labyrinth, and then flees with Ariadne only to abandon her.

Dionysus & Ariadne
http://prometheuses.blogspot.com/2011/05/ariadne-and-bacchus.html
The fact that the epics are organized in a way in which the Iliad emphasizes Apollo and Artemis and the Odyssey emphasizes Athena and Dionysus, where the former gods in each pair are manifest and the second god in each pair is hidden is very significant because it helps us see how the Epics are organized around Nihilistic opposites. These opposites are what are inside of Zeus who has a dark and light face as a storm god with lightening too light and the clouds with thunder too dark, which also makes a differentiation between seeing and hearing in our relation to the gods. It is as if Athena and Dionysus are the nihilistic opposites that are inside of Zeus that when they appear out of the upper and lower parts of Zeus’s body are embodied. We said earlier in another answer that we have nihilistic opposites which collapse into each other and when they do that that it produces the two limits of paradox A yet B and B yet A. These paradoxes collapse into the same absurdity, and are composed of twin contradictions. Athena is a woman who acts masculine and Dionysus is a man who acts effeminate. This is part of their being limiting cases. Metis is the mother of Athena who Zeus consumes as Cronos does all his children, and Semele is the mother of Dionysus who asks to see his actual form and is obliterated. Metis is the type of cunning and practical wisdom that Odysseus exemplifies. Semele on the other hand is the one who wants to experience direct reality not the illusions of Zeus’ appearances. We can see how if we run the process of differentiation of Contradiction, Paradox and Absurdity backward, then we can see how Zeus can be seen as a synthesis of the embodied nihilistic opposites of his offspring but mediated by their mothers who represent cognition and intuition, in the Kantian sense. On the other hand it is clear that the Absurdity splits into nihilistic opposites which themselves embody contradictions. There is a space created by these nihilistic opposites but that space is held apart by the contradictions and paradoxes that we see in these four gods. Artemis is the initiator for girls into Bears which is the process seen in the lifecycle of Artemis. Apollo is the initiator for boys into Wolves and this process is seen in the initiation ceremonies of the boys where they learn how to be men who will protect their cities and be able to distinguish friend from foe. The girls are identified with nature in the initiation process even though they live in the cities and their houses like prisoners. The boys are identified with the city and its protection although their initiation takes place in the wild lands between the cities. Thus we see how the humans are cast in the role of the nihilistic opposites that tear them apart many times with cruel fates, but the gods are the contradictions, paradoxes and absurdities that appear when the nihilistic opposites collapse together as the double binds breakdown and destroy the humans that embody those double binds.

Absurdity

“Reclamation”

ROBERT & SHANA PARKEHARRISON
http://www.parkeharrison.com/index.html

Further fine exmaples of Absurdity
http://www.jondo.com/blog/satire-through-theatrical-absurdity
http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2011/04/04/134925211/surreal-scenes-make-big-environmental-statements?ft=1&f=1143
http://www.parkeharrison.com/slides-architechsbrother/index.html
These photos appear in the book The Architect’s Brother, republished last year by Twin Palms Publishers

We are trying to develop this idea further within the context of the Odyssey. It is fascinating to think that the relation between humans and the gods (jinn) is one where humans are bound by constraints between nihilistic alternatives that place them into catastrophic double-binds. When these humans who are caught in the double binds realize their nihilistic nature the duals become appearances only one we see through them to the reality underneath. This insight leads to anomie as it did with Achilles when one sees through the nihilistic illusory appearances to the reality beyond them (The Achaeans are the same as the Trojans, therefore this war has not intrinsic meaning because what we objected to in them we do ourselves). But when this anagogic swerve or insight occurs that allows us to see through the nihilistic situation, then in effect the nihilistic opposites collapse together and we see the absurdity of the situation. But this in turn produces an equal and opposite reaction in which the paradoxical limits arise and those limits are seen as the gods. In the case of the Iliad and Odyssey we go from one paradoxical limit being emphasized to the other, we go from Artemis and Apollo being at the root of the difficulty, Achilles took a devotee of Artemis prisoner in a raid and gave her to Agamemnon and then took Briseis for himself. But when Agamemnon had to give up his war prise because Apollo demanded it for the sake of Artemis, then he took the war prize of Achilles, and this in a kind of domino effect showed that the Achaean King and leader of the expedition was just like Paris who had taken Helen. So why are we spending 9 years in siege and battling over a principle that we do not keep ourselves? Now Artemis and Apollo are born from Leda, and their actions are in reaction to the thoughtless and transgressive action of Achilles himself. So these actions of the gods have a karmic aspect to them. Achilles grabbed the wrong girl who was worshiping Artemis and was the daughter of the priest of Apollo. Thus Achilles crime was against the pair of them and for that Achilles had to suffer the shame of having is own prize taken by the king to make up for what the king lost. Due to this Achilles realized the nihilistic reality of the War itself because Agamemnon is no better than Paris but what is not realized is that it was Achilles himself who took Agamemnon’s war prize in the first place as booty in a raid on outlying areas around Troy, so when we look deeper we see that Achilles is actually no better than Agamemnon and Paris. The gods in this case are the limits from which the karmic action bounces back, because they take action to protect their own, their worshipers and priests. These limits are encountered when the paradoxes of the double-binds collapse into absurdity, and then the limits are produced within which the action occurs in the space opened by the paradoxical limits that in turn produce the contradictory limits. And in the space of these limits the mortals experience the intensification of nihilism as we move to the next deeper set of double binds.

Now the same principle is at work in the Odyssey, but with a fundamental difference. First of all Odysseus has no realization of nihilism, he really thinks only of survival and his stomach and other passions. He is completely who he is unselfconsciously. But who he is IS an absurd combination of the Hero King and Pharmakon like Oedipus. On the one hand he is very clever, but on the other hand he is only thinking of his own survival and justifying why he did not return with his crew, that it was not his fault, they brought their fate upon themselves, because he was conveniently asleep when all the transgressions occurred. The Odyssey opens with the counter to this charge, and the whole tale is meant to justify Odysseus returning alone.

Paradox

Géraldine Javier
The Absurdity of Being (2007) http://paperimages.tumblr.com/tagged/G%C3%A9raldine_Javier

http://www.weirdwarp.com/2009/08/paradox-or-not/

Now we need to go on to another subject which is the whole question of who is the Pharmakon and who is the King. It has been discovered that some primate populations are for the most part bi-modal. One mode has an alpha male with his harem of females (which is the matriarchal scene). The Beta males who are probably his own offspring try to take the territory he has marked and the harem of females that represent the reproductive resource pool away from the Alpha male. But hour side the power structure there are also another mode of the population which is made up of independent Males and independent females who are outcasts and live in the margins of the power structures of various boundary marking Alpha Males. Since when the beta-males take over the harem they will kill the offspring of the deposed Alpha male. So these females have liaisons with free and independent outcast males so that they have somewhere to go with their offspring in case a coup occurs. So there is a build in escape mechanism where females have liaisons with outcast males, and this is no different from the fact that the Beta and Alpha males will have relations with the outcast females, so illicit affairs are built in from the beginning. Elicit affairs keeps the genome mixed up which is a necessary condition of avoiding the problems that come with inbreeding. Now in this mammalian scenario the pharmakon is the outcast from the outcasts, he is the one that even the outcasts cast out, beyond the pale and beyond the borders of interaction. But if the pharmakon can take some of the outcast females with him then he can set himself up as an alpha male in a new territory. Thus the pharmakon is pushed out into new territories, but this just leads to the expansion of the cells of territories within which there are alpha males. So the pharmakon can easily become a king, and vice versa as we see with Oedipus the king can become a pharmakon. And interestingly it is Oedipus who becomes the one who initiates the sons of Theseus.

Contradiction

Lyubomir Sergeev
From http://paperimages.tumblr.com/
http://paperimages.tumblr.com/post/8107108606/lyubomir-sergeev

So in the Odyssey we are seeing this dynamic of the Kingly Hero who becomes pharmakon and then becomes King again. In many ways the whole purpose of the Odyssey is to how how this circulation occurs. Odysseus is pushing out to new territories beyond his worldview in his travels but eventually he comes back home to become King again through a series of recognition steps. But in this case, just like the four limits of Apollo, Artemis, Dionysus, Athena define the limits of human experience in a nihilistic landscape and as such show us what is inside of Zeus in terms of his self-production and his other production of offspring. Zeus himself holds the nihilistic light and dark faces together but when they are embodied outside himself they become these four limits. So to the places projected as being outside the Greek Worldview turn out to be an unfolding of the inward structure of the Western worldview. Thus if we pay close attention we can read off or see through to the underlying structure of the Western worldview through the panoply of structural opposites we are presented in the narrative, all seemingly unrelated but producing a field, which implies a certain structure to the worldview itself.

So if someone embedded in the Western wordview wanted to understand the world itself, made up of Heaven/Earth & Mortals/Immortals as Socrates said then we would use the Odyssey along with the Iliad and their mutual reflections as our guide. Many of these points have already been made in my electronic book The Fragmentation of Being and the Path Beyond the Void which is at http://works.bepress.com/kent_palmer. That is a story of the primal scene of the Indo-European worldview and how that scene permutes and moves into Greek Philosophy and eventually into Plato and the interesting relation of Aristophanes with Plato where in we discover the Negative Fourfold and its relation to the positive fourfold. The world appears between Heaven and Earth and between Mortals and Immortals. but within that world is the continuous production of nihilistic extreme opposites which collapse together occasionally and produce absurdity that in turn produces the limits of human experience that the Gods represent and embody.

Calypso
http://www.maicar.com/GML/Calypso3.html

Ok. We cannot do a whole commentary here to prove the point, but we need an example that is clear. Now as an example we have already shown how the Iliad embodies the negative metaphysical fourfold, and its reversal as well as the positive metaphysical fourfold. So where are these elements in the Odyssey? We will look at Chapter 1 of Part 2 http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/homer/aoo/aoo24.htm. Here all of the aspects of the Negative Fourfold converge on Odysseus, in his passage from the Island of Calipso to Scheria. There Poseidon finds Odysseus in his own medium the Sea unprotected so he sends a raging storm against Odysseus in attempt to drown him. So the storms sent against Odysseus are the Chaos. The Abyss is the depths of the sea itself which Odysseus would enter if he drowned. The covering comes from a nymph Ino who takes pity on Odysseus and gives him a veil of hers to wear which like a life jacket will prevent him from drowning. And the point is that this nymph comes out of the sea to give him a Veil, a very unlikely Deus ex Machina event. And a great point is made that Odysseus has to swim night and day to get to the shore. When he gets to Scheria there are rocks, and he has to entrust himself to the river to whom he prays for help. He makes it to shore, and finds refuge beside to olive trees entwined wild and tame. These olive trees of course stand for Athena which combines male and female traits, and thus the wildness of each and the tameness of each. So all the parts of the Negative Fourfold appear in this journey from Calipso’s isle to Scheria, even a veil comes out of nowhere to complete the picture of the negative fourfold. And according to Aristophanes what is born from the negative fourfold is Eros, and thus young girls are discovered doing their laundry adjacent to where Odysseus slept the night naked under the branches of the dual olive trees that mark the structural distinction between wild and tame, between the wilds that Odysseus have crossed and the tameness of the ultra-civilization of Scheria (a proto-Atlantis). You will notice that Calypso’s Isle is right at the center of the ocean. When he departs from that he goes into an imaginary high technology world of the Scherians, a sort of Utopia of those who live close to the Gods. But they are also descendants of Poseidon, Odysseus’ enemy among the gods. But between the entrapment in the center of the ocean as a sex slave to Calypso, the ultimate degradation for a hero, it is when he leaves this island that he encounters Poseidon’s wrath and the negative fourfold gets thrown at him. But on the other side of Calypso’s island is Carbides, which is a gigantic whirlpool, so it is a chaotic vortex, it is an abyss that the wanter is pouring into. Odysseus when his ship and men were lost clung to the mast and keel lashed together, and the mast has sails on it which are coverings that catch the wind. And Odysseus floated all night towards Charybdis. And when Charybdis swallowed his raft Odysseus hung on a branch of a tree above the whirlpool, for a long time because the influx and outflux from the whirlpool occured three times a day. So he waited hanging in the air with his feet above the whirlpool for some time before he regained his raft and then nine days later was able to make it to the Island of Calypso. Charybdis has covered up the raft for the time that Odysseus is hanging from the fig tree in a groundless state. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charybdis)

http://fuckyeahoddities.tumblr.com/post/1535061503

http://crazytopics.blogspot.com/2007/02/water-vortex-sculpture.html

So let us notice that there are versions of the negative fourfold before and after his entrapment on the island of Calypso. On the one had we have groundlessness where Odysseus is hanging over an abyss. His raft is covered up by being engorged by the whirlpool. Night has no special significance other than being the prelude to meeting Charybdis at sunrise. Chaos appears as the storm in which the ship goes down with all his men which also is a prelude, and it appears as the whrilpool and the engorging of the water three times a day. But it seems the real emphasis here is on groundlessness.

On the other hand with respect to the attempt of Poseidon to kill him with a storm the emphasis is on the miracle of a sea nymph helping Odysseus survive by her giving him a veil, or scarf of hers, which is one of the highly enigmatic events in the story. It is a or covering that allows him to survive because it acts as a lifejacket and prevents him from drowning when he has lost his raft.

In both encounters with the Negative Fourfold Odysseus loses his raft, but in one case he is saved by a well placed fig tree, from which he hangs groundless, and in the other case he uses a veil to survive being drowned in the depths where he would be covered over by the sea. So going into Calypso’s island there is groundlessness, between attaining and regaining his raft. Coming out of Calypso’s island the emphasis is on the Veil given deus ex machina that saved him from Poseidon’s wrath through a veil given to him by a nymph.

Posiedon
http://www.timelessmyths.com/classical/olympians.html
http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Arts/Poseidon.ht
http://www.travelpod.com/travel-photo/songwillie/2/1179504659/poseidon.jpg/tpod.html

Calypso’s realm is a timeless place, and if Odysseus stayed there he would gain immortality with Calypso. But the entry and exit into this timeless realm is through the negative fourfold. Going in there is the experience of groundlessness hanging over a whirlpool. Going out there is the experience of veiling or covering.

In both cases there are storms, one which destroys the ship and his men, and the other directed at him by poseidon. In both cases there is night as the period just before the encounter with Charybdis, and as an interlude in his swimming as well as the time of rest once he reaches land where he is close to the twin olive trees. Interestingly there is a saving quality to a tree in each of the scenes related to the negative fourfold. These are of course manifestations of the WorldTree which is part of the primal Indo-European scene of the Well and the Tree (cf Paul C. Bauschatz).

Nausikaa
http://people.clarkson.edu/~astaiger/LS195/Odyssey%20Book%205to8.htm

Calypso’s isle is central and there Odysseus is making love to the goddess, which is a manifestation of Eros. In the account of Aristophanes Eros is born out of the Negative Fourfold first. So here Eros and timelessness (immortality) is bracketed with the two encounters with the Negative Fourfold. But Odysseus is not happy on the island and with the prospects of immortality, because he wants to see his father, his son and by the way his wife.

In the Iliad within the war falling into the Abyss of Death and Chaos of the Battlefield were background elements while the Night Raid and the Veiling of Paris by Aphrodite were specific incidents. So the emphasis in the Iliad is on Night and Veiling with Abyss and Chaos being background elements.

In the Odessey, Abyss (Groundlessness) and Veiling are called out specifically and Night and Chaos are in the background.

So there is an asymmetry here. Veiling is important to both sagas of the aspects of negative fourfold that are embodied in them. Then Iliad emphasizes Night, while Odyssey emphasizes Abyss and Chaos is deemphasized as a background condition in both. So unexpectedly the two epics introduce an order into the Negative Fourfold which becomes a lattice where veiling is emphasized by both, Abyss and Night are emphasized in each, and Chaos is a precondition in each but is not emphasized.

So now we have some structurally significant information about the negative fourfold within the Western worldview that we did not have previously. The fact that Veiling is the most significant for both aligns with the emphasis placed on it by Heidegger in relation to Alethia, the uncovering truth which is also emphasized in the Oedipus myth. But the fact that Night characterizes the Iliad and Groundlessness characterizes the Odyssey is very interesting, and that Chaos is pushed to the background in both is also of interest. Night is of course reversed to become Light and Light is associated with Glory which is the crux of the Iliad. Glory is obtained by acts of valor in the chaos of War. It is the too light nihilistic dual on the background of the too dark element of chaos. On the other hand within the Odyssey there is an emphasis on covering, the veil which is shared by the two. In one case it is the covering of Paris with a mist so he can escape the battle field to see Helen. On other hand it is Odysseus being given the saving veil by the sea nymph that acts as flotation device. But what the Odessey itself emphasizes is groundlessnes, the opposite of which is finding a ground. Odysseus finds a ground, which is the island in the center of the sea where Calypso lives. that ground gives Odysseus the promise of immortality. But Odysseus instead weeps because he cannot return to his finite family and retain his own finitude. So after the experience of Groundlessness, Odysseus obtains groundedness, i.e. a foundation at the center of the ocean, but he forsakes it for finitude, and thus has to encounter the four fold again where instead of groundlessness he is saved by being veiled. And what follows on from this is a series of recognition scenes though which he gains his old position as King of Ithica he had before he left for the war and thus ceases to become an outcast. So this means that as Pharmakon Odysseus must experience his groundlessenss, and then find a ground where immortality is possible, but then must come back out of that grounding to embrace the veil in order to be recognized as King again step by step as he is recognized by the various people he meets as who he really is.

So the Odyssey at very least is giving us information on how one is transformed from a Pharmakon into a King (alpha male) and that is through a twice encounter with the negative fourfold and then an encounter with eros on the island at the center of the sea which has the possibility of immortality which is then rejected in favor of finitude.

All of this tells us in no uncertain terms about the nature of the Western Worldview in which the Negative Fourfold gives us more insight into the worldview than the Positive Fourfold of Heaven/Earth//Mortals/Immortals. Note that at the central island where Odysseus is a captive he is in a direct erotic relation with a goddess. And the only he can be freed of this is by the intervention of Zeus via Hermes. But what does this tell us. Odysseus wants to go home. But why. And one thing we might say is that he somehow as recognized the nihilism of the possibility of eternal life with the gods, i.e. something that Menelaus has attained which was denied to his brother Agamemnon. In other words both the relationship where the Patriarch is killed by his wife, probably because Agamemnon killed her prior husband and their daughter, is just as nihilistic as the relationship that goes on forever, but is never completely satisfying. Odysseus has a full relationship with his wife in which they are both clever in their own ways, and they take a stand together against their enemies and they take a stand together with their friends. This middle course between the failed marriage because of patriarchal violence, or due to the fact that the wife is not faithful, so that Menelaus has to live with that unfaithfulness forever, is defined as a non-nihilistic distinction between the two nihilistic alternatives. This weeping of Odysseus for his family and his wanting to return even though it will mean his eventual death is as close as we come in the Odyssey to self-consciousness and the realization of the nihilism of the other alternatives. But the self-conscious recognition of Nihilism is not as pronounced and directly portrayed as it is with Achilles. But this orientation toward finitude and its positive features in relation to the alternatives as embodied in a good marriage is something we would not have expected to find at the center of the Odyssey.

Menelaus and Helen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Helen_Menelaus_Louvre_G424.jpg

Agamemnon sacrificing Iphigenia with Clytemnestra looking on.
http://www.prometheustrust.co.uk/assets/images/Iphig.jpg

w.quora.com/Is-there-any-actual-historical-basis-to-the-Trojan-Horse-or-is-it-pure-mythology

The Trojan Horse is pure Mythology, but that is something deep and not superficial, but there are many examples of War machines in the history of ancient and modern warfare. But the idea that the Trojan Horse could exist as a means of tricking a city into the loss of a war as is portrayed in the Epics is ludicrous. Can you imagine bringing something like that in which had forty men inside (the traditional number). Just the weight of the thing in disproportion to its building materials, presumably wood is enough to bring suspicion. And Helen actually spoke to each man in the voice of his wife in order to trick them into revealing themselves, so she had a woman’s intuition of what was inside. First thing that would have happened is that the thing would be dismantled, before it is brought inside the city. So the whole idea that people would bring it inside willingly without checking it our, without posting a guard on it, even if there was a man who had given lie to what caused the horse to be built and given to the Trojans by the, it does not make sense that they were that gullible. But of course people do some very stupid things and so who is to tell. But personally I think it was clearly meant as a joke by the Poet. And it was a joke of a very peculiar kind because it pointed to something much deeper.

In Aristophanes comedies there is a Parabasis which are interludes where the author speaks directly to the audience, mostly to ask them to vote for his play over the others at the competition. Aristophanes is in Plato’s symposium and delivers an important speech about how lovers were glued together at one time being of one body. Plato has an interesting relation with Aristophanes because it was he who wrote the Clouds which was some of the propaganda that was antecedent to Socrates’ execution by his fellow citizens. Aristophanes portrayed Socrates as a natural philosopher, which he was in his youth. So on the one hand Aristophanes can be partially blamed for Socrates death, and on the other hand he is given an important speech in the Symposium. But more importantly many of Plato’s wilder ideas were also portrayed in Aristophanes plays and so they shared many ideas some put forward as if they were serious proposals and the other mean to only be jokes. Thus by adopting the ideas of Aristophanes is warning us not to take the substance of the ideas that are proposed too seriously, because after all they were plagiarizer from comedies. But on the other hand Aristophanes makes the claim in his Parabasis that he is giving the city wisdom. I started reading the plays carefully looking for some hint of wisdom hidden by the bawdy jokes and finally found some in the Birds where Aristophanes offers a alternative theogony to that of Hesiod. In that theogony there is not just one primordial entity, i.e. Gaia but four. And these four are Abyss, Covering, Night, and Chaos. These are all associated with the feminine just as the positive fourfold enunciated by Socrates, and taken up by Heidegger which is Heaven/Earth and Mortal/Immortal. This fourfold is the outward fourfold that describes the world. But the negative fourfold of Aristophanes describes the worlds sources in four female primeval deities. When we reverse these female deities then we get their male equivalents which is much more revealing than the fourfold of Socrates which are Light, Grounding, Uncovering (Alethia) and Order. Once we know about this other positive fourfold which is the reversal of the negative fourfold ascribed to women then we can more deeply appreciate the structure of our worldview. And so this is part of the Wisdom that Aristophanes gives us in his play the Birds. Out of this fourfold arises Eros, and then the Birds, and then the Gods, thus the Birds (according to the Birds) come before the creation of the Gods.

Now once we have this piece of information we can look for this pattern in other parts of Greek myth, and it turns out to be in the Iliad. Night is the Night Raid of Odysseus where he retrieves his grandfathers armor, but also where he breaks the rules of war. Covering is when Aphrodite covers Paris so he can return to Helen rather than having to face his enemies on the battle field. Abyss is the death that each pair of warriors face when they confront each other, and recite their genealogies and then one falls into the abyss of death. The Iliad is full of these vignettes. Chaos is obviously the battle field itself. But interestingly in order to fight you need to muster your troops into ranks and ordering them for war. In the Battle there is the uncovering of Glory where some men gain it and others lose it or are lost in oblivion of death. War is to be fought by Daylight, and it is the realm of light where glory is to be seized on the battlefield for all to see. Grounding is the reasoning that calls for the pursuit of war, that makes the loss of life palatable because the significance of what is at stake in the conflict is great. Unfortunately Achilles is disillusioned with this because of the actions of Agamemnon and thus at one point he withdraws from the battle. The battle rages between Heaven and Earth, and is participated in by both mortals and immortals as seen in the Epic. The war is a conflagration that resounds in the heavens and in the earth, and mirrors the war between the different generations of the gods, Titans and Olympians. The Titans were like the Trojans and the Olympians were like the Achaeans in the battle for the heavens. Men who battle for earth, or earthly things reflect the dissensions of the gods and goddesses. In this case the dissension is between the goddesses who were spurned by Paris in the Beauty contest at the wedding of Thetis and Peleus who gave rise to Achilles, but it was also born of a patriarchal agreement between the brothers Poseidon, Hades, and Zeus who split up the realms of the earth not to engage in sex with Thetis because it was rumored that her son would be greater than his father, and the patriarchal gods did not want an upstart taking the kingdom from them as they had taken it from their parents. So they decided to marry Thetis to Peleus against her will which was the way of most marriages in those days where the patriarchs determine the fate of women. So there is agreement among the males and dissension among the females resulting from a decision as to who to give the golden apple to that Eris had placed among the wedding goers for spite since she as strife was not invited. She turned up anyway and sewed the seed of the Trojan war by that apple which said on it for the most beautiful. It was decided to pick a random shepherd which was Paris. Each goddess tried to bribe him, and he settled for the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen despite the inconvenience that she was already married to Menelaus. Such were the seeds of the Trojan war in the agreements and disagreements of the gods which then implicated humans in that strife caused by the desire for a golden apple. Golden apples were extremely rare, and we only know about one place where they come from which is at the entrance to the underworld in the West where Hercules found them guarded by a dragon.

Eris: http://pstevensfhs.wikispaces.com/file/view/Eris4

The Apple said “for the most beautiful” and Paris chose for himself the goddess Aphrodite who offered the most beautiful. In other words there is a reflexive relationship around that phrase between the quandary set for Paris, which goddess was the most beautiful, and the outcome which was his choice of Helen. That apple which shines with reflexiveness due to its golden nature, as nontarnishable, like human glory itself, is a bit of quintessence. Quintessence here is very apropos because Quintessence means five sides and the structure inside an apple is fivefold where the seeds lie. Quintessence is when the Aspects of Being which are Presence, Truth, Reality and Identity and their opposites are all true of something. That something would later be called the Philosophers Stone, or Prime Matter. This is the opposite of Existence which is that which is neither Truth or Fiction, Reality or Illusion, Presence or Absence, Identity or Difference. Existence if seen as Empty or Void is interpreted to be under the sign of the non-existence of the aspects. The aspects are shared by Being and Existence, but because Existence is non-Being by Parmenides reckoning it must be the non-existence of the aspects or their opposites that is the primary characteristic of nondual existence.

Now in another post I have likened the Trojan Horse to an emergent event. And I have shown that it has all the meta-levels of Being inscribed within it so that it is a face of the world to the Trojans who did not recognize its danger. They let it inside the city, and in effect they let the war within their city which had been held out for so long. The Trojan Horse is a sign for all Emergent Events within our worldview. And it corresponds to the scene in the Mahabharata of the Dice game where Draupadi was disrobed, but a miracle occurred and she could not be disrobed completely but the cloth merely kept on coming off of her until they gave up attempting to disrobe her after she was lost in the dice game, after her husband had already lost his brothers (her other husbands) and himself. So she opined that he could not have lost her if he had already lost himself. A paradox in private property when it is applied to human beings as well. In the Mahabharata there is a black swan event, i.e. a miracle that saved Draupadi. Emergent events are black swan events, they are so rare we do not expect to see them in our lifetimes, but then they seem to happen more often than they should and that is because our risk calculations overlap each other and the completely orthogonal risk categories are not kept separate. Draupadi is married to five husbands, and it is rumored that Helen has had five lovers all heroes involved in the war to rescue her. Helen is almost a goddess herself, and is a sign of fertility. The most beautiful is the most average as we see if we take photos of women and overlay them, eventually they reach an archetypal level where they become beautiful to us. Thus the fact that Helen could call to each of the men in the Trojan horse with the voice of their wives shows that she was an embodiment of the archetype of beauty made from the overlay of the features of many women, in fact all who were involved in the war to take her back from Troy.

The inscribed golden apple (For the most beautiful … is Helen) was a sign pointing to Helen and the rivalry over her as a fertility goddess, and a sign of the fertility of the land and the people. She was an archetype of beauty among human women and thus the object of desire. For Lacan this means that jouissance enters the picture which is overweening desire. Just like “Repetition” for Deleuze is that which does not repeat, so to “jouissance” is “the desire that cannot be fulfilled”, which is romantic love, love for the one you cannot have, and that is precisely the kind of Love that exists between Paris and Helen (urged on by Aphrodite). And this ideal of “Repetition” and jouissance is represented by the sign of quintessence which is the golden apple which refers to Helen, and Aphrodite. Aphrodite is the Symbol of desire, the written on apple is the sign, and Helen is the object of desire. This is what Peirce would later call the structure of the sign, which is three fold, and is represented in the triangles of the Patriarchs who agreed about Thetis, and the female Goddesses who coveted the prize for being the most beautiful and thus elicited the choice from Paris. Paris saw the object of desire (Helen) through the Symbol of desire based on the agreement between them in the sign of desire.

Hesperides: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Herakles/apples.html
The quintessence of the Golden inscribed Apple is the key to the whole conflict because it is the first emergent, that precedes the Trojan Horse as the emergent event for the Trojans, that through which they let Chaos into their city. The primal scene of the Golden Apples occurs in the Labors of Hercules where he goes to the furthest western land and there finds a tree of golden apples guarded by a dragon. Hercules defeats the dragon and takes the golden apples. Presumably Eris came into possession of one of those apples, or took one previously. The place where the apples are kept by the dragon are at the gates of Hades. Hercules defeats the dog with many heads (Cerberus) that guards that entrance and enters Hades and lives to tell the tale. Every thing is set up in the myth of the beginning of the war so we can understand what the precursor of the emergent event is and its relation to nihilism. But here there are only nuances, because things are still small and the conflict is only between guests playing a beauty agent game at a marriage festival spurred on by Eris the only goddess not invited, the sister of Ares, the God of War.

Ares: http://www.foundationhellenicculture.com/gods

War is the great leveler of men sending many to their deaths to dwell as shades in Hades. But also in War is glory. And there are many reports from Antiquity where warriors saw Athena out in front of them leading them on into battle. Of course, these men fought for their wives and lovers at home who were like Hera and Aphrodite. But it was the man like Athena, a women like Joan of Arc who wore armor that led them into battle. So the great pain and suffering and death of war also called out the best in men defending their loved ones back in their city, as Hector did, was thus balanced by the possibilities of performing feats that would make ones name live on indefinitely, or as long as there was a scop that would tell the tale of one’s exploits. So war is nihilistic leading to the black holes of falling into oblivion and death, and the miracles of glorious deeds against all odds. But sometimes war or a feud or a local temporary conflict starts due to something someone says at a dinner party. And this is the case here. What is a trifle for the gods who say that they are immortal, is a determination of fate for men who find themselves in the midst of great strife for almost no reason that they themselves can think of as being something that would cause them to fight. Odysseus pretended to be mad when they came to get him to participate in the war. He was a rock strewn field sowing it with salt instead of grain, until they threw Telemachus down before his horses, who he avoided thus showing that he was sane.

ERIS: http://www.theoi.com/Daimon/Eris.html

It is significant that the Apple the primordial emergent, let us call it the “novum”, is a sign of the type posited by Peirce. The apple is rolled into the circle of guests by Eris (strife), just as the Trojan horse enters the city of men as a deception. The apple is golden and there fore it does not perish and thus it has Pure Being (present-at-hand) but it rolls into the circle of the Mortals and Immortals, thus having a dynamic character which comes from its ready-to-hand characteristic of being signifying equipment thus reminding us of Process Being. And then the reference on the Apple is ambiguous, and slippery, because we do not know whether its reference is to the Symbol of Desire which is Aphrodite, or the object of Desire which is Helen that it has reference to. Paris picks the one which will deliver the most beautiful one to him, thus taking beauty himself from the one he calls beautiful, the symbol of desire, Aphrodite.

Out of the Four primordial female principles that Aristophanes tells us about in his alternative theogony, is Eros. Eros is the male counterpart to Aphrodite, later called cupid. It is Eros that is born as male from the four primordial female deities that make up the negative fourfold.

What ever is presented in the circle of the Gods has been given pure presence, because the gods themselves are pure presences, always absent to humans who work for them and worship them from afar hoping to avoid their wrath. The Golden Apple which is inscribed enters that circle of pure presence before the gods, by rolling as a process, and presents an enigmatic sign that calls for interpretation, by a mere human like Paris, a shepherd on a hill outside Troy. What enters the circle of pure presence to all the gods is the quintessence which is both present and absent, true and fictitious, real and illusory, identical yet different. And the gods are fascinated by it because its nontarnishability reflects their own imperishable essence. But golden apples are guarded by dragons, and they never lose that shadow of the dragon lurking near. Dragons like Phython and Typhoon (destroyed by Apollo and Zeus) are monsters beyond the pale of experience. The Python existed at Delphi. Delphi is a meteor site where Heaven and Earth met. It became an oracle site and housed the rock which was the core of the world: the Omphalos (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphalos). Plato in the Laws refers to a rock from which all the boundary stones were measured but which as not on a boundary. The sculpture that stood in for the Omphalous is covered in knots within a net like. It is interesting that the net of knots covers the surface of the Omphalos because that net is like the boundary lines between the boundary stones. But the “navel” of the world is not on any boundary. The grounding of the net needs to be off the grid so to speak. We talked about grounding as being significant in the Worldview, as the opposite of the abyss of groundlessness. Philosophy after Godel is in the process of accepting its inherent groundlessness. But for the ancients the point of grounding was the meteor site where heaven meets earth. In other words it is a place decided by fate as the origin of what ever grids or nets we project onto the landscape in order to align our maps with that landscape. And those grids and nets are represented on the Omphalos itself that was unearthed at Delphi, where Apollo killed the Python and set up the oracle.
Omphalos

We could identify the Omphalos with the Golden Apple in as much as the golden apples are also guarded by a dragon. In as much as there is a vent with fumes at Delphi that comes out of the ground, and is thus an opening to the underworld. In as much as the golden apples are at the extreme western point in the world, and the golden fleece is at the extreme eastern part of the world. Hercules went to the extreme West to fetch the Golden apples, and Jason and his crew went to the extreme east of the world to fetch his the fleece. At the center point of the world is Delphi. These are the places where new things come into our world. Something can either come from the extremity or the center. An emergent event can either be a new hither to unknown phenomena or it can be something that arrives from far away through the furthest boundary of our world. Emergence can either occur from the inside or outside. So as the Fleece is at the extreme east, and the apples are at the center so to the Omphalos is at the center. And those things that appear from the earth are oracles, saying picked up by the Pythoness priestess or sayer, that are interpreted to men but never made perfectly clear. The saying that Thetis will have a son greater than her father, or that Achilles will have a choice between a long uneventful life and a short glorious one are all oracle statements from Delphi.

Herakles & Hesperides: http://0.tqn.com/d/ancienthistory/1/0/m/g/2/788px-Herakles_Hesperides_Louvre_M11.jpg

Once we understand how the golden apple was brought from the border of the world in the West to the marriage by Eris then we know that it is an emergent event that comes from the West, which is different from those that come from the east and the rising sun. The golden apple is a quintessence that represents the last of things rather than the first of things. It is not a source but a sink. So the earlier Epic of Jason had to do with the source of things, while these epics of the Iliad and Odyssey have to do with the end of things. The sign of the end appears at the marriage of Peleus and Thetis as a beginning of covetousness among the goddesses and the decision to preserve the order of the power structure by avoiding a god marrying Thetis. Covetousness is the nature of Baal, the Ugritic Zeus.

Because the apple comes from the west near the opening to Hades we know that it is Hades that is preeminent, and that is why the war will claim so many men for such a petty goal as recovering one woman. But if we realize that this woman represents fertility, then it is understandable why such a prolonged war should be justified. Without fertility there would be no sons to carry on the name of the fathers and thus sustain the patriarchy. Hades and Aphrodite are prominent, i.e. Love and Death.

Hesperides: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesperides See also http://www.kingsgalleries.com/imagebank/artists/marino-vasallo/twilight-(41854).jpg

Into the circle of the gods and goddesses at the wedding Eris the excluded on rolls the golden apple and thus produces strive in a scene where for once all the major patriarchal gods are in agreement. Discord occurs among the female gods over a superficial thing like Beauty, and so a human is asked to judge. That human Paris makes a fateful decision by choosing Aphrodite. Over Wisdom and Wealth/Power he chooses what is most Beautiful. Plato says that the Beautiful is the most accessible way to approach the source forms. So in Plato Beauty and the Eros that it inspires plays a key role in human motivation.

When the fateful choice is made, then things begin to unfold in unexpected ways, Paris travels to the home of Menelaus and Helen prompted by Aphrodite runs off with him, and the Achaeans pursue them and the Trojan war itself follows. But all this strife and conflict has its origins in the seemingly simple act of rolling the golden apple into the circle of the sun with its special sign. The ambiguity of that sign pointing to X (which every goddess thinks is herself) reminds us of the ambiguity of the oracles of Delphi. But out of the ambiguity and its being made clear by the choice of Paris, then things take their own course and it ends in War that lasts ten years and ends with the destruction of a city, Troy. Key in the fall of troy was the trick of the Trojan Horse. But the precursor to the entry of the movable horse sculpture into the city, was the entry of the quintessential signifying apple into the circle of the gods from the excluded one, Eris, strife.

Jason returns with the golden Fleece on an Apulian red-figure calyx krater, ca. 340–330 BC
http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definitions/Golden+Fleece?cx=partner-pub-0939450753529744%3Av0qd01-tdlq&cof=FORID%3A9&ie=UTF-8&q=Golden+Fleece&sa=Search#922

So the mythology is telling us that there is a complete parallel here between the golden apple entering the circle of gods and the Trojan horse entering the city. The Omphalos is hollow, the Golden Fleece is just a skin, the apples have a core which is hollow. The Trojan horse is hollow and contains men who will do the city harm once they are unleashed. The apple has seeds from which future trees will spring in the next iteration of the day and night cycle. The golden fleece preserves a remnant of the Golden ram who miraculously appeared to save the children of Nephele, the simulacrum of Hera.
http://www.thefullwiki.org/Athamas

This suggests that there is an emergent meta-system at work here. At the west there are the gates of hell, and the golden apples produces the seeds that will go into the abyss at the end of the world. In the dark of the underworld there is a creative object, a golden child who assures the arising of beings again. When those things appear at the dawn with Eos where there appears the skin of the flying ram that saved Nephele’s children. Zeus made Nephele to trick someone who wanted to make love to Hera, she was a simulacrum, but once her role as decoy was over it was inconvenient to have a duplicate of Hera around, so Hera married her off to human who later fell for another woman and they attempted to kill her children who just managed to escape by the appearance of a winged ram who could speak with a golden fleece. They preserved that fleece at the furthest east point on the eastern shore of the black sea. The fleece preserves only the outward aspect of things, which is what you see on the horizon when the emergent event appears, this is analogous to the mutual action of monads in the Emergent Meta-system. Their creation from sources are mysterious, but when they appear we are interested in their outward appearance and mutual action. However as they move toward the moment of the viewpoint in the Emergent Meta-system cycle we want to find the right perspective on this new phenomena via an anagogic swerve. And that view point has to be comprehensive and a priori. So this global viewpoint occurs at the Omphalos. It is the point which is off the map boundaries from which the map boundaries are measured. It is represented by a hollow globe with a knotted net showing its comprehensive nature as a filter for reality. On this basis of the ground in the omphalos at the point were heaven, earth and underworld meet there can be a schematization of the new phenomena and its quintessence recognized producing the final stage where we return to the golden apple at the end of the world, beside the dragon, and near the entrance to Hades. There are dragons associated with each step on this journey of the Sun. This puts into perspective why we found the golden boy Pluto in the underworld as the son of Persephone and Dionysus. He is called in Hindu Mythology the Hiranyagarbha (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiranyagarbha) which is the basis for ideas of the Alayavijana and the tatagata gharba. In other word it is what holds the quasi-causal (Deleuze) seeds of Karmic causality which operates regardless of having no substance to depend upon. This can occur because karmic action has no beginning nor end but is in constant circulation as the emergent meta-system.

But what we see here is that these myths are very precisely structured and contain deep thoughts, like the idea that the Emergent Event for the Human Community has a precursor among the Gods. For the Gods it is quintessence that is golden. And there is a cycle from the Golden Boy who is rumored to be born from Dionysus and Persephone, to the Golden Fleece, i.e. manifest in the outward as pure presence, to the Omphalus which gives a global picture or viewpoint on phenomena, to the Golden apple that provides the seeds to be planted in the abyss of Hades and then spawns the Golden Boy. This set of objects relate to the Abyss in that the abyss of death in Hades is the fate of all men and its entrance is in the West because that is where the sun sets. The Golden Boy is in this in the eternal night of Hades. The Golden Fleece is a covering taken from a miraculous Ram which had wings. The Omphaos is the point that heaven and earth meet in the meteor crash site which produces chaos, and a wild point which is an origin from which all other boundary stones are measured. The knotted net on the Omphalos is like the grid of the boundary stones and boundary lines cast across the landscape but also across the surface of the Omphalos, where the map and the territory are different. Who is to say that these four manifestations of Quintessence do not produce the emergent event and form a quadralectic such as was found to be the basis of Design.

Thus the Trojan Horse in being mythic is no less real than anything else in the Western worldview. Being Mythic means that the four dimensional time moment is still in tact and has not gone though the symmetry breaking of the transition from mythopoietic to metaphysical yet. These mythical representations are strong and deep and tell us things we never would have guessed on our own if we take them seriously. To the extent we have not gotten the message of the Epics and do not understand the worldview we are doomed to inhabit as we dree our wyrd then we are comparable to the shades of the underworld ourselves, caught in an illusion we do not understand. The Trojan horse is the embodiment of the Emergent Event in the Iliad, but that emergent event points to a deeper event that took place among the Gods at the Wedding of Peleus and Thetis before the birth of Achilles.

Homer’s Odyssey: What can an adult do to understand Homer’s Odyssey better?

http://www.quora.com/What-can-an-adult-do-to-understand-Homers-Iliad-better

In other questions we have been a talking about Achilles and how his life is a study in the various ways that we confront nihilism within the Western worldview. But this worldview also mixes nihilism with its nihilistic opposite which is emergence. And the example of emergence in the Iliad is the Trojan Horse, whose appearance is an emergent event for the Trojans, and which is the ruse which is a product of the guile and Metis of the trickster Odysseus. So the Nihilism of the situation as experienced by Achilles is balanced by the Emergence produced by Odysseus with his clever subterfuge.

http://www.williebester.co.za/index.htm
http://www.robertbowman.com/artist?artist_id=116&gallery=modern
http://www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=39073&int_modo=1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Horse

The Trojan Horse is a war machine, something the Indo-Europeans have been particularly good at devising. Archimedes was famous for his war machines as was Leonardo, and other geniuses with our tradition. But what is interesting about this war machine is that it has all the different kinds of Being within it, and thus gives us a map of the emergent event itself, which is always a face of the world containing all the various kinds of Being in a singular concrescence. So the Trojan Horse is a static sculpture of a horse, but it was possible to move it and it probably was on wheels. So the Pure Being static Parmedian aspect is its sculptural for which is that of a horse. The dynamic part of it which is Heraclitian is that it can move from  the outside to the inside of the city easily and this shows its connection with Process Being. The Hyper Being aspect is brought our by Helen when she talks to Telemachus, Far War, and describes her imitation of the wives of the those hiding inside the horse. She imitates the voice the different wives as if she knew who was inside the horse. And the men inside the horse almost reveal themselves but do not. This slipping from voice to voice of the wives of those inside the hiding inside the horse is a representation of Hyper Being, what Plato calls the Third kind of Being. Helen’s trickery is almost as good as that of Odysseus, and she was suspicious of the Greeks leaving gifts. Wild Being is the breaking out of the men within the horse at night from which chaos follows within the surprised city. Ultra Being is the Acheaens going too far and taking women from the sanctuary of Athena, and the defacement of the image of Athena in the city. Because of the hubris of the Acheaens when they took the city, breaking the sacred bounds in their looting and pillage and rape of the cities women when they took refuge in the temple of Athena they brought down the wrath of Athena on themselves. In reaction to the anger of the Goddess Agamemnon decided to do sacrifices on the beach, but Menelaus decided to flee. Odysseus first went with Menelaus but then turned back only to miss the sacrifice on the beach by Agamemnon. Odysseus who was blamed the most by Athena because it was his trick that allowed the city to be taken, became lost between the reactions of Menelaus and his brother and took the longest to get home, but on the other hand only he had a wife that was true to him. It is precisely at the point where Athena’s anger against Odysseus begins to soften that the Odyssey begins much later. Now a good source to look at to understand the violations by the Acheaens is Oedipus, Philosopher by Gaux.

He explains that Oedipus has failed the hero’s initiation which includes three parts, sexual, intellectual, and sacred. The intellectual part for Odysseus was the trick, the sexual part was the taking of the women from the sanctuary, and the sacred violation was the taking of the image of Athena from the alter. By this we get an insight into Odysseus, he is a combination of Oedipus, the failed initiate and the Hero, the successful initiate. He passed through his own initiation with his grandfather as the scar on his thigh shows, but he failed at the pinnacle of the battle by winning though an underhanded means that led to the violation of the sacred limits though the hubris of the the Acheaens. It is because he is a synthesis of the pharmakon,  like Oedipus, and a kingly hero that Oedipus has such an interesting personality in the Odyssey. The weakness of Odysseus is his stomach or his tendency to fall asleep at odd times. Odysseus is the hero as Pharmakon who wanders due to the wrath of Athena, and then is saved due to the softening of Athena’s anger toward him. He passed the initiation, but failed to reign in his cleverness in battle and resorted to trickery to take what could not be taken valiantly, and because of his invention of the primordial war machine he became an outcast who was doomed to roam the seas of the Worldview and ultimately come home last. Oedipus supplies the answer to the Sphinx which is his intellectual accomplishment.

His sexual accomplishment is to marry his mother, rather than another woman. His hubris was to kill his father at the crossroads when he demanded that Oedipus give way to him which broke his connection with his fathers genealogy. And that is why he started his own genealogy with his mother again. The family tree was pared then grafted. Odysseus created the archetypal war machine as a deception. Odysseus was responsible for the sacking of Troy and the hubris that violated the temples and the images of the Gods of Troy. For that Odysseus was punished by being made a sex slave to a goddess Calypso much the way Hercules had to serve as the slave of a woman. The proof he was a slave was that he could not leave at will, without the help of Hermes. He had to suffer the hubris of his men which occurred every time he went to sleep. Hercules had to carry out his various challenges because of his hubris and had to serve a master he despised and do his bidding, and who tried to get rid of him by giving Hercules impossible tasks. And this hubris of his men prevented him from returning easily and for bringing his men home with him alive. He had to suffer the wrath of Poseidon alone and naked in the sea. He had to suffer the indignity of not being recognized when he returned home, and he had to play the role of a beggar. Where he created the deception of the Trojan Horse in which his men hid to take the city of Troy by deceit, he was foolhardy enough to enter the cave of the Cyclopes from which he almost did not escape, and then he was foolish enough to reveal his name after escaping so that the Cyclopes could call on Poseidon for revenge  on Odysseus. In other words we see how many of the adventures of Odysseus were punishments aligned to his crimes.

However, for all this punishment by the Gods in which the nihilistic extremes are revealed, and also the nondual within the Western worldview is manifest, there is an unfolding of an emergent event and by that the structure of the Western worldview itself. The Emergent Event is unfolded by the lost journey home of Odysseus. And that emergent event has the structure of the meta-levels of Being which all emergent events have intrinsically. So we get the entire structure of the Western worldview in two Epics. Achilles sets the problematic of the recognition of nihilism, and Odysseus gives the answer to that nihilism in the form of the Emergent event of the advent of the archetypal war machine which from that time on made us wary of Indo-Europeans bearing gifts.
Edo Period: http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2128.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Japan#Seclusion
Seclusion of Japan: http://www.wfu.edu/~watts/w03_Japancl.html

A trader from Holland told the Shogun of Japan that first the foreigners send priests then they send their army. The Shogun banned Christianity and closed Japan to all foreigners for a long enough time to avoid the fate of China at the hands of the Europeans. For that bit of advice the merchants from Holland were able to come and trade in Tokyo bay once a year. But no other foreigners were allowed on the islands. Eventually the Americans sailed in to Japan with gun boats because they missed the party in China, for instance the part where the English enforced the sale of Opium which led to the Opium war which the Chinese lost.

From the first conquests based on the power of horses in prehistory, first by chariot and when the horses became large enough on horseback, the Indo-Europeans have been bringing dubious gifts to the rest of the world for a long time. Gifts like Colonialization and Globalization, which all have the Western worldview’s structure inscribed in them. This worldview that is dominant the world  over need to be understood. And our best chance for understanding it better ourselves is to look at these manuals that we were given by the ancients which explained the structure of the worldview called the Epics. Fortunately we have both the Ramayana/Mahabharata and the Iliad/Odyssey which look at the same primal scene from two different directions. If we can decode that primal scene then perhaps we can have better self-understanding, and be better understood by the rest of humanity to whom we bear our suspicious gifts like Technology, leading with the technology of War which makes us unrivaled on the world stage. But we have to realize that the world stage is environmentally fragile, and it is a general economy in which no restricted economy can dominate. We have to understand how the nihilistic opposites of emergence and nihilism arise within the global general economy as miracles and blackholes and how their dynamic creates singularities as well as the black swan events that we have become familiar with lately. As adults we need to understand ourselves more deeply following the maxims of Apollo: Know thyself and Nothing to excess. We need to understand ourselves better so that we can explain our worldview better to our children who inherit it unknowingly, and live within its constraints their whole lives without once having the realization of the nihilism of the worldview that Achilles had when Agamemnon took his war prize Briseis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Briseisfrom him. The key is Chryseis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chryseis who Apollo forced Agamemnon to give up. Her real name was Astynome:

“ASTYNOME ΑΣΤΥΝΟΜΗ

1. The daughter of Chryses (whence she is also called Chryseis), a priest of Apollo. She was taken prisoner by Achilles in the Hypoplacian Thebe or in Lyrnessus, whither she had been sent by her father for protection, or, according to others, to attend the celebration of a festival of Artemis. In the distribution of the booty she was given to Agamemnon, who, however, was obliged to restore her to her father, to soothe the anger of Apollo. (Hom. Il. i. 378; Eustath. ad Hom. pp. 77, 118; Dictys Cret. ii. 17.)” http://www.mythindex.com/greek-mythology/A/Astynome.html

http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Mythology/ChrysesAgamemnonLouvreK1.html

If Astynome was at a festival of Artemis, then Achilles violated sacred limits when he took her prisoner. And it just so happened that her father was a priest of Apollo the brother of Artemis. Apollo and Artemis are opposites born of the same mother to Zeus as fraternal twins.
Apollo & Artimis: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c7/Apollo_Artemis_Brygos_Louvre_G151.jpg/610px-Apollo_Artemis_Brygos_Louvre_G151.jpg

These are the duals of Dionysus and Athena which were born from Zeus’s body directly. Thus Apollo/Artemis//Dionysus/Athena are a fourfold. Nietzsche famously wrote about the dualism in Greek culture represented by Apollo and Dionysus. Nietzsche identified with Dionysus, which was probably a mistake because Dionysus tends to drive everyone mad, and in fact Nietzsche went mad, (or so they say). Achilles then violated someone who was in devotion to Artemis, and so that was the original mistake. He was killed by an arrow from Paris which Apollo allowed to hit his weak spot on the heel.

“As predicted by Hector with his dying breath, Achilles was thereafter killed by Paris with an arrow (to the heel according to Statius). In some versions, the god Apollo guided Paris’ arrow. Some retellings also state that Achilles was scaling the gates of Troy and was hit with a poisoned arrow.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achilles

“When the Greeks left for the Trojan War, they accidentally stopped in Mysia, ruled by King Telephus. In the resulting battle, Achilles gave Telephus a wound that would not heal; Telephus consulted an oracle, who stated that “he that wounded shall heal”. Guided by the oracle, he arrived at Argos, where Achilles healed him in order that he became their guide for the voyage to Troy.”  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achilles

“According to other reports in Euripides’ lost play about Telephus, he went to Aulis pretending to be a beggar and asked Achilles to heal his wound. Achilles refused, claiming to have no medical knowledge. Alternatively, Telephus held Orestes for ransom, the ransom being Achilles’ aid in healing the wound. Odysseus reasoned that the spear had inflicted the wound; therefore, the spear must be able to heal it. Pieces of the spear were scraped off onto the wound and Telephus was healed.”  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achilles

So Achilles gave Telephus a wound that would not heal. And the oracle gave him the word that Achilles who made the wound must heal it. Achilles on the other hand had his weakness where his mother held him either in a fire or in the river Styx by which she tried to make him immortal. A similar interrupted scene appears in the story of Demeter which is significant. It is by that weak place in his Heel that Apollo causes him to be killed by Paris a coward with a poisoned arrow, i.e. from a distance.

So wounding and wounded are opposites that play a role here in the story of Achilles who was almost immortal except for a small place where he was vulnerable where by the luck of the gods could be struck by a lesser man from a distance. And that man happened to be the one who stole Helen and caused the war in the first place. So Achilles was killed by his nihilistic opposite, one who stole a woman to cause the war to occur who was a coward and who struck from afar by a poisoned arrow. But Paris could not have done that without the help of Apollo who guided that arrow. It was Apollo who caused Agamemnon’s female war prize to be taken away so he as a side effect would seize the female war prize of Achilles.

Apollo is a wolf god, who is the god of initiation. And during initiation the young boy is given a wound which you see in the would of Odysseus during his initiation given to him by a wild boar. Achilles is wounds others such that their wounds do not heal and is wounded himself by a poisoned arrow in his vulnerable spot. He must heal the wound he makes, which is the first sign of his reflexivity. Apollo is on the both sides of Achilles downfall because he forces Agamemnon to give up A so that he will take B and thus produce the realization of nihilism in Achilles that leads to Achilles nihilistic reactions. And he is there guiding the arrow of paris the nihilistic opposite of Achilles home and making the revenge of his sister Artemis complete.
Apollo & Artimis: http://www.toptenz.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Apollo_Artemis_Brygos_Louvre_G151.jpg

Thus Artimis and Apollo play a key role in the Iliad while the key roles in the Odyssey are played by Dionysus and Athena. Artimis is hidden and Apollo is manifest in the Iliad, and Dionysus is hidden and Athena is manifest in the Odyssey. Dionysus is hidden in the Hydra of the suitors who protect Penelope from each other by their vying to marry her when Odysseus is too late home. So in one case the hidden cause of the action is female and the other the hidden cause of the action is male and vice versa with the apparent cause of the action. Thus the nihilistic opposites of Apollo and Artemis, the initiators of males and females who cause them to appear through initiation as adults in society and the opposites of Dionysus and Athena who are themselves the self-productions of the nihilistic two faced storm god Zeus (Baal in Ugritic mythology) whose faces were too light and too dark.
Athena: http://sawiggins.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/douris-athena.jpg

Dionysus is a male that acts like a feminine and Athena is a female who acts like a masculine. Apollo and Artemis are the natural best representatives of Masculine and Feminine primordial virtues and thus are the gods of the boys (wolves) and girls (bears).

Dionysus: http://natzoo.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/dionysus.jpg

All these complex dualities that play themselves out in Greek myth that are expressed in the epics cannot be accidental. They are all precisely worked out so that we can understand the duality of our worldview.