The Lotus Eaters Episode 6: Psyches [unlocked]

Very Bad Wizards

David and Tamler explore Books 11 and 12 of Homer's Odyssey, focusing on Odysseus's journey to the underworld, his encounters with the dead,

Key takeaways

• The Greek conception of Hades as a realm of pale shades without moral judgment laid foundational ideas for later Western notions of the afterlife.
• Odysseus's emotional struggle with his mother's shade highlights the primal grief and psychological depth embedded in the epic.

Main topics

• Odysseus's journey to Hades
• The Greek afterlife and its influence on Judaism and Christianity

Notable quotes

"It's about love. It was a love story all along."

Conclusion

The episode concludes that Books 11 and 12 mark a pivotal psychological and narrative turning point in The

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Dear listeners, thank you for joining us on our voyage into Homer's Odyssey. You're listening to The Lotus Eaters, a 12-part series on Homer's Odyssey that was funded by our generous supporters over at patreon.com. It's because of that support that we're able to release this series for everyone. If you'd like to join them in supporting us, please head over to patreon.com slash verybadwizards. One of the benefits will be that you'd get access to all of The Lotus Eaters at once rather than having to wait every week for a new episode. episode to drop, but you'd also get access to hundreds of hours of other bonus content and Zeus would smile down upon you for your generosity in supporting us. So thank you for listening. Let's get to the episode. Speaker 2 (1:25) Welcome to another episode of The Lotus Eaters. The Lotus Eaters. Today we are going to be talking about books 11 and 12 of The Odyssey. These are the final two books where Odysseus relates his journeys from Troy all the way until he gets to Calypso's Island. So it's kind of a flashback, even though he's telling it in the present, as we're reminded at one point. Speaker 1 (1:53) Yeah, I had forgotten. All of a sudden I'm like, oh yeah, that's where he is right now. Speaker 2 (1:57) Yeah, these are... equally iconic to the last two, if not more so, because he visits Hades. He visits the land of the dead. He talks with a bunch of fallen Trojan war heroes. He meets Elpenor. That's nice. He sees his mother. And then just a slew of, you know, famous mythic figures like Sisyphus and Heracles and Dariadne and Phaedra, Oedipus's mom, Epikaste, as they They call her here. And, you know, this and Tantalus, like a lot of these myths are born here. That's how like I don't think anybody knew about Sisyphus. This is all. Yeah, Speaker 1 (2:38) I looked it up. This is the first mention. And Speaker 2 (2:40) I think Oedipus, too, at least as far as anyone knows. I Speaker 1 (2:43) guess anything that appears here would be the first time it appears. Speaker 2 (2:47) I mean, I'm sure these stories have been going on for a long time, but it's just, you know, for the Greek tragedians, this. book is like, it gave them, you know, 70 years of glorious theater. And it's kind of, yeah, it's really amazing that way. And then... Would Speaker 1 (3:04) you say this is like the peak of the action, like the end of the rising action sequence, maybe? Speaker 2 (3:09) I would say we're going to take a step back action-wise over the next few books. Yeah. And in some ways, book 12 and going through with Scala and... I don't know how to pronounce any. Carabith is, I think, just an absolute action climax. Like it doesn't get any better than that. Even the Cyclops, I think, isn't as kind of vividly told as that. So, yeah, definitely. It's like it's the end of the first half of the book. Speaker 2 (3:39) I think between going to the land of the dead, where there's not a lot of action in one sense, but in another sense, all the themes kind of come clashing together in that book. And then you go to book 12, and you can see Nolan being pretty excited about getting to film some of that. And yeah, I don't know how they're going to do it. And he likes to use practical effects. So it could be awesome. It could be amazing. mess we'll see Speaker 1 (4:10) he's really just gonna breed monsters yeah so that he can use them yeah i Speaker 2 (4:16) was actually thinking i was sort of wishing for these books to have someone who's a little more surreal you know like it doesn't have to be like a lynchian perspective into it but even someone like a denis villeneuve or someone who could capture the scale of it but is a little more impressionistic with how he handles this yeah Speaker 1 (4:37) Although we'll see, you know, maybe Nolan's maturing in some aspect. And this is his swan song, his siren song. Yeah. Speaker 2 (4:45) Yeah, we'll see. I mean, I think he recognizes that this can't be told realistically. So, all right, should we get started? Yeah, Speaker 1 (4:53) let's dive in. I was really excited about the underworld. Not just because you get all this like, it's like the red carpet of like the afterlife. You get all these mentions, like names dropping. but also because like the Greek conception of what the afterlife is, is kind of fascinating. And it ends up just like having, you know, like a large influence on both Jewish and Christian notions of what the afterlife is because of the Hellenizing of Jewishness and then works its way sort of into Christianity. Cause like there really is no fleshed out conception of an afterlife like Hades or any of the other things that came after in. Judaism, let alone Christianity. It was like really the Greek and Romans that they were in control of the Jews at that time. And so you get a lot of these Greek ideas working their way into the theology. And you can see it kind of happening in the New Testament where like in the early gospels, like you have even just the concept of torment, which isn't fleshed out here. fully yet, but you have some instances of people who are just being eternally punished in a way that just really kind of rears its head in the New Testament a couple of times. Speaker 2 (6:05) Yeah, right. Like, I wonder how much Revelations or something is influenced by Speaker 1 (6:10) that. Speaker 2 (6:10) Yeah, Revelation Speaker 1 (6:10) name drops Hades. Speaker 2 (6:13) Yeah. Like, Speaker 1 (6:14) it actually says, you know, the lake of fire and Hades follows. And it's like, all right, like by that time, they're really unifying these traditions. you know, a Greek tradition that had already been fleshed out more than in the Odyssey at that point. Speaker 2 (6:28) And maybe it's not explicitly laid out the torment, but we see these graphic images, like the two vultures chewing on a Tantalus's liver. Yes. And the guy is buried up in water up to his neck, but he can't actually get the water. Speaker 1 (6:43) Yeah. And I think that Tantalus and Sisyphus are... in this like river in hades that's called tartarus yeah Speaker 2 (6:52) and Speaker 1 (6:53) that tartarus that notion is like getting us close to like the christian notion of hell yeah but like as of now for the greeks it's still only like this little corner section but you can see dante you know building on all that shit Speaker 2 (7:04) totally yeah it's actually i'm looking at my notes it's tantalus who is uh up to his chin And it's Titius or Titius who is getting his liver. Oh, whose liver is Speaker 1 (7:17) eaten. Yeah, yeah. Tantalus is the one tantalizing, right? Yes. He's trying really hard to get the fruit, can't get the fruit. He's trying really hard to reach down for whatever and can't get the water. That's where that comes from. I Speaker 2 (7:27) never, yeah, that never Speaker 1 (7:28) occurred Speaker 2 (7:30) to me all the times I've read this. That never once occurred to me. Speaker 1 (7:33) I assume. I didn't look up whether that was. So anyway, I was really like digging this whole thing. And it's so haunting to me. The notion of the dead, you know, here it's just everybody. It's just the land of the dead. It's not like people go there to be rewarded or punished yet. But it is. They're all just these like pale like shadows of what they were when they were alive. And that, for some reason, is just like super creepy. Speaker 2 (7:57) Yeah. You know, there's a heartbreaking scene, which I want to like read when we go to it of Odysseus trying to hug his mother. But she's Speaker 1 (8:04) a Speaker 2 (8:04) shade. She's a phantom. They can't hug. And they try three times. Speaker 1 (8:09) And he doesn't understand. He's like a kid who's like, why won't my mom, why can't I hug her? You know, it's like so fucking sad. Speaker 2 (8:14) Yeah. And also so primal, I think. Like, Speaker 1 (8:18) I'm Speaker 2 (8:18) getting a lot of vibes of this being really a journey into Odysseus's psyche as much as it is like a journey of Odysseus trying to get home. Like, it really works on those parallel tracks in an interesting way. And here, I really do think you see some elements of that. Like... You know, the fact that Agamemnon comes out and we've heard the story now of Agamemnon story like four times already up till now. And still we hear it again. And it's from Agamemnon. It's it feels like this constant reminder, you Speaker 1 (8:52) know, Speaker 2 (8:52) you don't know what Penelope is doing right now. There's no trusting women anymore. That's what Agamemnon said. It's so bad. No, not all of us married whores. Speaker 1 (9:04) It's so funny that you said this. I hadn't really put it together, but when you said it's like a trip into his own psyche. Like psyche is the word for those, like the souls that are down there are called psyches. The Greek word for those shades of the spirits, sometimes it's translated as soul, sometimes it's breath. Speaker 2 (9:21) Yeah, interesting. We also, we didn't even mention the sirens, which is just the vernacular. Like in the vernacular, it's like the first real commitment device. Oh, Speaker 1 (9:32) yeah. I had a question for you about this. Speaker 2 (9:34) Yeah. You're Speaker 1 (9:35) my resident expert. Jason is mentioned here in the Argonauts. And they say here that like, oh, by the way, the only people who really have made it out through the first path is Jason. But the story of Jason and the Argonauts is told where? Like where is that most famously told? Speaker 2 (9:52) In Medea. So, well, that's one of them anyway, is Jason. Isn't that a Speaker 1 (9:57) Tyler Perry movie? Yeah, Speaker 2 (9:59) it's the Tyler Perry. That's the first time it's mentioned again. Yeah, no, it's like the whole reason Medea ends up killing her own children is out of revenge against Jason because she is the wife of Jason. He wants to divorce her with some new slut. And so she kills the kids. uh does something very bad to him if not kill him and kills his wife too you do not with medea that's one of the main takeaways uh i got from reading all the greek tragedy that i've read is you do not with medea like if you're if you want to marry medea you're staying with medea Speaker 1 (10:37) yeah Speaker 2 (10:39) great couple of books let's dive in yeah Speaker 1 (10:42) they Speaker 2 (10:42) start out weeping they i think they ended the last book weeping and they start out weeping But they ended up, they go, and I love that they go to the limits of the ocean. It's like they go to the end of the world, pretty much, it seems like. Totally. Speaker 1 (10:56) And I was looking up, you know, ocean just referred to all of the water on the surface, I guess, which it is now. So they're just like. Very liminal journey, this one. Speaker 2 (11:06) Yeah. It's somewhere where the Cimmerans live and the sun just never rises. So it's all darkness there. And this is on the journey to Hades. They're getting to Hades. But yeah. Yeah. It sounds like Hades is like Norway. Speaker 1 (11:20) Probably somebody made it out there and back and was like, you guys. Yeah. In the Speaker 2 (11:25) winter. It's like, oh my God. I think I saw the sun for like 10 minutes. So they pour a lot of libations, wine and honey, and they get a pool of black blood from their sacrifices. So I don't exactly get the rules, but it seems like as soon as you do that, just all the shades start streaming out. Just like streams. They're attracted Speaker 1 (11:48) to the blood. Yeah. Speaker 2 (11:49) Yeah. And he has to keep them away so that they don't touch the blood before he wants them to. Yeah. Speaker 1 (11:55) Because he's just trying to get the profit. Teresius? Yeah, Speaker 2 (11:58) to get Teresius to tell him how to get home. Speaker 1 (12:02) Exactly, yeah. And so, yeah, he basically puts on his gear and is protecting the blood, which in a way that I just don't quite understand. If he can't hug his mom, what's he going to do with his sword? I had that same Speaker 2 (12:14) question. Why are they scared of a sword? They're all dead. They can't be touched. And they know that. We know from the mom. So it's funny. But you can picture it still that they're like, oh, when he weighs the sword, you know. Speaker 1 (12:26) Yeah, it's pretty eerie. From every side, they crowded around the pit with eerie cries. Pale fear took hold of me. Speaker 2 (12:32) Yeah. But then he sees Elpenor, which is a nice little moment. Like, I couldn't tell if he... even knew that he was a ghost. But he does say the spirit of my man Elpenor. But then he's like, how did you come here? You came on foot more quickly than I sailed. But I guess he knows. So Elpenor replies and he says, I had just had bad luck from some God and too much wine. And I lay upstairs. I forgot to use the ladder and climb down from the roof. I fell headfirst. My neck was broken from the spine. My spirit came down to Hades. What I like about this is It's like you're calling it bad luck, but you got shit-faced and then forgot about the latter because you're a bit of a shit for brains. And so it's kind of like Zeus is right in the book one of the Odyssey. The men blame me Speaker 1 (13:24) for Speaker 2 (13:24) the gods for the shit that they do. Very Speaker 1 (13:29) on theme kind Speaker 2 (13:31) of human. Speaker 1 (13:32) One of the things that's just so touching to me is like, and this is for me, the... theme that stood out the most in this book was people want to be remembered and so he this like character that i don't even remember if his name had been mentioned before like he was just no name like all of a sudden he's introduced to us and he's like like i beg you he says when you sail from hades and you dock your ship again at aia please my lord remember me yeah don't leave me there i'm buried and it's like the dead want to be remembered in a special way right And the role that Odysseus is playing Speaker 2 (14:05) throughout so much of this book is he is bearing witness to them. And he's telling their stories. And we're reading their stories like 3,000 years later. So it's kind of like it worked. It worked, Speaker 1 (14:17) yeah. But you're right, though, that this works well as a metaphor. The way that we cherish the dead is in our memory, you know? And so what he's doing is he's taking the time to remember all of those who died. Speaker 2 (14:30) Yeah, and who might not have someone to remember them. And so, yeah, he is a witness. He's bearing witness to the misfortunes and sorrows and just plain fuck-ups like even Elpenor. Speaker 1 (14:43) One Speaker 2 (14:43) curious thing, he says, you know, he asks him to swear to... Bury him, like you said. And he says, swear by your wife and father who brought you up from babyhood