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Marissabidilla: The Man of Many Wiles

Vase painting depicting Odysseus killing the suitors. Photo from mlahanas.de

I wanted to take a real old-school liberal-artsy class before leaving Vassar, so I registered for English 320, "The Heroic Tradition." The professor calls us Mr. and Ms. (and this makes me sit up straighter, take more notice) and is fond of saying things like "Remember that scene in The Faerie Queene where..." or "Remember the wonderful first sonnet of Astrophel and Stella," ignoring the fact that none of us have read these works. Our reading this semester will remedy some of the gaps in our knowledge: it includes The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Paradise Lost, and other canonical texts.

We're halfway through The Aeneid right now--this is the first time I've read it, as opposed to The Odyssey, which I've read 2.5 times. I read the whole thing freshman year of high school, then the central books (5-12, Odysseus' journeys) freshman year of college for a class called "Wandering in Literature."

It feels good to do this, to revisit a fundamental text. It feels right. (Though I wonder why no one assigns The Iliad.) Each time I notice new and different elements--and isn't that how you distinguish great literature from the merely good? This semester, I was reading The Odyssey at the same time I had to read Mason Weems' The Life of Washington for my history class--this is the hagiography of George Washington that contains the original version of the cherry-tree story. I was very amused to discover that Weems steals elements of The Odyssey and uses them to underline Washington's heroism. He claims that Washington's father had a big gun that only he and his son could lift--obviously recalling Odysseus' bow that only he can string. There are even epic similes (the only time I have ever seen these in a prose narrative) comparing Washington to a lion, the same simile often used for Odysseus.

Of course, Weems' biography takes place in a clearly ordered moral universe where Washington is a great, pious, noble man who "could not tell a lie." Whereas the moral universe of The Odyssey is completely chaotic--it has very little internal logic, and I find that fascinating. The men who killed Agamemnon by ambushing him are denounced as cowards, but Odysseus ambushes and kills people at least twice: from the Trojan horse, and when he returns to Ithaka. Odysseus is a deceiver, boastful, always needing to assert his identity and get to his home. Due to his complexity, I find him much more interesting than I do Aeneas, at least so far.

I have also learned that there are myriad ways to study something like The Odyssey, even in the context of a class called "The Heroic Tradition." For instance, last year I took a class on fairy tales with a Jungian prof. Her version of a "Heroic Tradition" course would probably involve much work on archetypes and Joseph Campbell mythography. Campbell would surely have a lot to say about the section where Odysseus travels to Hades, as a reflection of "the hero's journey to the underworld and return with newfound knowledge." Conversely, my current prof said that the Hades scene is the one section of The Odyssey we are allowed to skip.

Instead, this year, we perform close readings that examine word choice (especially etymology), patterns of images, the characters' attitudes toward heroism and the author's attitude toward his characters, and any passages that seem especially thorny. Naturally, we focus a lot on the Homeric similes--I've done that before with Homer, but not to the extent of noticing how weird some of them are. There's a passage where Odysseus, weeping as he hears a bard recount the story of his victory over Troy, is compared to a defeated Trojan woman weeping over the death of her husband, presumably killed by Odysseus' band of Greeks... Just another example of that moral confusion that complicates The Odyssey.

Each of my 3 times reading The Odyssey, I have had to buy a new edition/translation. In high school we used Allen Mandelbaum's version. All I remember about this one was that Telemachus kept telling the suitors "Stop your brouhaha," which struck me a ludicrous word choice. Also it was a cheap mass-market paperback that was hard to hold. I did have to memorize the first 15 lines of this translation, which are full of interesting sonorities, alliterations, half-rhymes ("Muse, tell me of the man of many wiles / the man who wandered many paths of exile / after he sacked Troy's sacred citadel"). But I don't believe Mandelbaum is able to keep this up through all 24 books.

I got rid of the Mandelbaum version after getting Robert Fagles' translation three years ago. It is an attractive deckle-edged edition and Fagles is really trendy in academia--I read so many of his translations that year and thought they were all pretty good. This year, I read the Richmond Lattimore version (a nice trade paperback with good margins) and enjoyed it very much. Though the translation is from the '60s, it doesn't seem too dated or colloquial, and strikes me as being very faithful to the original Greek--for instance, using just as much repetition as Homer did, rather than trying to vary things for a modern reader. Twice over the course of two pages, Lattimore's version introduces Athene's speech with the lines: "Then in turn the gray-eyed goddess Athene answered him." Fagles tries to jazz this up by having the first instance read "And sparkling-eyed Athena drove the matter home," and the second, "Athena, her eyes flashing bright, exulted." Maybe this makes things more lively for a casual reader, but when you have to examine the text as closely as my prof demands--and, I would argue, The Odyssey gains so much by close examination--Lattimore's seems like the best choice.

Srini at the Movies: Troy(2004)

What a waste. Happy lives, blossoming relationships, bright futures, potential prosperity. All razed to the ground by a tornado of bravado, courage, chivalry, love and manhood.

The bane of human existence has been the desire to self-destruct. No other species fights with itself as much as ours does. The desire to conquer the world, to be known for all times, to be immortal has caused us to act against each other. Going by Darwin's theory, elements of a species tend to be competitive. That is quite acceptable with survival as a motive. But, when it comes to sacrificing the future of your people for the sake of your private love life, it is only man who is capable of doing it.

How else can one explain embracing the risk of waging war against the Greeks just after drinking to eternal peace with them, for the sake of a prince's love? For thousands of years, the fates of kingdoms and countries have been directed by the dreams of their rulers. Some of these dreams have brought prosperity, while some of them have been utterly self-centered and ultimately self-destructive.

Probably one cannot fault Paris of Troy and Helen of Sparta, already a wife of another man, for having fallen in love with each other and even having decided to give themselves up to the Greeks to save Troy. But you would definitely fault a brother and a father who were so much in love with their kin that they were willing to play with danger that could mean doom to an entire generation of their people. For what it gave the King of Greece was an opportunity to attack Troy and make it a part of his growing empire. Troy was a prized catch.

As the King of Troy proudly proclaimed this as a war fought for love and the Prince of Troy prepared to face the consequences of the same, there was yet another on the opposite side, who knew nothing of love, bore no allegiance to a king, but nevertheless wanted to fight this battle for the sake of immortality. Achilles was a killing machine. A double edged sword, who could win battles single handedly for the Greeks, but who actually won them only for himself. He was a man torn between a destiny of greatness and a desire for peace, which heightened with every passing night, where he met the men he had killed, in his dreams.

What ensued was a battle which never should have taken place, deaths which never should have befallen people and disaster which should never have been a part of a country's destiny.

Wolfgang Peterson brings Homer's poetry to life by creating a beautiful canvas of Greece, Sparta and Troy with vast landscapes, realistic imagery and vivid frames. He uses the sweeping camera to great effect to show the sheer spectacle that was the battle of Troy. The walls of Troy truly look like the ones which cannot be crushed. The battle scenes, especially the ones between Achilles and Hector have been shot beautifully, with a unique style and chilling intensity.

The film does not have standout performances from any of its actors, which prevent it from entering the pantheon of epics, which it richly deserved to. Brad Pitt as Achilles proves to be an excellent physical depiction of the man, but fails to show the inner conflict that afflicted him and which ultimately led to his death. Eric Bana as Hector, Prince of Troy does a better job of depicting a man who had to fight a war for the sake of his love-stricken brother and give up his own and his country's in the process. Orlando Bloom as the madly-in-love-with-Helen, Prince of Troy just passes muster. Helen of Troy played by Diane Kruger is every bit a woman whom men would die for, which they eventually did. She is exquisitely beautiful. Peter 'O Toole as Priam, the King of Troy is very convincing as an old man who is torn between the love for his son and the love for his country.

Although the narrative does indicate it, the film is very conscious not pass explicit judgment on whether it was ultimately the victory of love or, of the craving for immortality.

In either case, it was a pyrrhic one.

History Lessons: Ancient Sparta (Part I) - Frodology - Religious ...

I’ve decided to try out a new type of article. It dawned on me that there are three things that everyone loves: history, ice cream, and things that comes in threes (sorry about the padding). Not only does everyone love history, but combined with a bit of creative re-imagining, it can serve to inspire and lead by its own example.

So today we’ll be hitting the history books and going back to Ancient Sparta, and hopefully, if we’re lucky, taking one or two lessons home with us. Think of it like a trip to the Creation Museum.

Since Frodology has recently experienced an influx of SMRTies who may not be used to the evidenceless-based learning we engage in here, this could be a great place to start. So, again, a trip to the Creation Museum.

Humble beginnings

In its earliest days, Sparta’s politics were dominated by the softer sex, but it wasn’t long before women muscled their way into power and set the militaristic tone of government by which it would forever be remembered.

This fun new policy of fighting kicked off with the Trojan War, a protracted conflict for which we should actually credit the Mycenaeans, the Spartans' progenitors.

Fun fact! ‘Progenitor’ means ‘in favor of genitals’ in English.

Legend has it that the war started when Prince Paris of Troy eloped with Helen of Sparta, the betrothed of its King Menelaus. Apparently she was comely enough to warrant the launching of 1,000 ships, though this was likely inflated by hyperbole, not be confused with a hyperbola, a really bad case of Ebola; or with Hyperbowl, my local 10-pin lanes.

The Spartan army landed on the beach outside Troy and promptly fell in love with the scenery, quickly forgetting all about Helen. With the Spartans stuck outside the city gates for the better part of a decade, Troy looked impregnable, unlike the bitchin' hot Helen. Unfortunately, the dispute flared up again following a quarrel with a greedy Trojan beach vendor. Things quickly went sour for Troy when a seer in the employ of King Priam prophesized that Paris would be portrayed by the particularly effeminate Orlando Bloom in a retelling of the event three millennia later.

The news must have been shocking, because the Trojan troops opened the city gates to the Mycenaean army, captained by a large, wheeled stray horse, in a bid to hasten their own destruction and end the ignominy. The city was promptly sacked and its population enslaved.

Fun fact! The term ‘sacking’ originates from the ancient practice of placing an entire captured city inside a burlap sack as plunder. Of course, cities were much smaller then.

A version of the story has survived in the form of the Biblical telling of the Rape of Dinah. There are of course some differences, the chief one being that Dinah is thought to have been far more attractive than Helen, as thousands of adult men were willing to be circumcised merely to live in the same city as her.

Gender bender

Sparta was quick to incorporate its hard-earned lessons into a largely pragmatic legal system. They rightly concluded that the conflict was entirely the fault of the harlot Helen, and absolutely nothing to do with trade routes, greed and geopolitics.

This conclusion led to the curious marriage ritual of shaving the bride’s head and dressing her in a man’s tunic, obviously an attempt to ensure no escaping woman would be worth chasing after. This tradition has survived today, in the sense that Greek women still aren't attractive enough to be put on film. When attractive foreign actresses aren’t available, movies about Greece simply aren’t made.

Fun fact! The beautiful women in these films were not Greek: Alexander, Troy, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, The 300, For Your Eyes Only, Mamma Mia!

Sad fact! My Big Fat Greek Wedding had dozens of Greek women.

Family life

In Sparta, military service took precedence over all other areas of life. While men married around age 20, they stayed in barracks until they could live with their families at age 30. Frodologists call this “not having to live with your family until age 30.” The difference is subtle, but telling.

From an early age, Spartan boys took part in vigorous military training, called the agoge. As far as historians can determine, this was just a funny-sounded word with no actual meaning. The training was long and grueling, and if you were going to depict it in a film, I imagine you’d make an uncomfortable-to-watch montage of half-clothed boys, caked in mud and soaked with sweat, tumbling with each other on a river bank. To round out the queasy vision of youthful innocence, everyone would look like male versions of Dakota Fanning.

Oscar-worthy stuff.

But it wasn’t all hard work. Spartans knew how to love too…

Pederasty

Military philosophers of the time believed that a bond of love between an experienced warrior and a novice would make soldiers far more willing to fight for each other (known as “giving”), and also prepared to take a fatal blow meant for the other (“receiving”). It also engendered trust, a vital ingredient in hoplite warfare, as each man was responsible for protecting the man to his left with his own shield (known as a “reach around”).

Fun fact! Sparta’s impressive phalanxes were easily wiped out when tackled from left to right

The reach around leaves your flank exposed

Blog reader attention spans being what they are, I'm going to stop here for today. Check back in a couple of days to learn more about exciting events which may have (but probably didn't) happen, and the juicy details of 5th Century BC agricultural reform.

Carry on to Part II...

Barack Obama's Teleprompter's Blog: Short and Sweet

I'm pretty excited, because I got a new hard drive today. Big Guy and I had been using my old one for about 18 months, and given the amount of usage, a weekly defragmentation wasn't helping. Big Guy has so much to say, and only so much time to say it, and my slower scroll just wasn't helping.

So Rahm approved the $1.5 million request for my new hard drive. That said, Big Guy understood what this last hard drive meant to him. After all, it saw us through Iowa and the other caucuses we won, and the primaries we lost. It saw us through numerous chats on the phone with supporters when Big Guy couldn't think of a thing to say, and those date nights with Lady M when Big Guy was too exhausted to think of anything clever to say.

So we brought our White House end of life counselor around to sit with the hard drive to talk about the cost of adding new memory and upgrading its peripherals. Now, granted, doing all of that would have cost the taxpayer about $572.45. But the paperwork was much more complicated than the RFP for a new hard drive. So Big Guy did the only thing he could do; after all, what was good enough for his grandmother is good enough for his hard drive.

I just wish he hadn't sent Toes to pull the plug; he enjoys doing that a little too much.

DEFENDER PUBLISHING: PART NINETEEN: Read It Before It Is Banned By ...

Editor's note: All notations will be cited when this series of articles have concluded. The information is based on research contained in Tom Horn's upcoming new book:

APOLLYON RISING 2012
The Lost Symbol Found And The Final Mystery Of The Great Seal Revealed
A Terrifying And Prophetic Cipher, Hidden From The World By The U.S. Government For Over 200 Years Is Here

THE LUCIFERIAN SCIENCE OF DEITY RESURRECTION

“Osiris will rise in splendor from the dead and rule the world through those sages and philosophers in whom wisdom has become incarnate.”—Manly P. Hall, 33rd Degree Freemason

“The World will soon come to us for its Sovereigns and Pontiffs. We shall constitute the equilibrium of the Universe, and be rulers over the Masters of the World.” Albert Pike, Sovereign Grand Commander of the Scottish Rite Freemasonry

“I am Yesterday and I am Today; and I have the power to be born a second time.” Statement of Osiris from the Egyptian Book of the Dead

To understand how the pagan god of death and destruction so cleverly hidden in the Great Seal of the United States could fulfill the Sibyl’s conjure and return with “the life of gods” with “Heroes and gods commingling,” we gaze into the distant past, when the forbidden science was initially used, and to the powerful beings that first developed it and that may be planning to use it again.

As far back as the beginning of time and within every major culture of the ancient world, the astonishingly consistent story is told of ‘gods’ that descended from heaven and materialized in bodies of flesh. From Rome, to Greece, and before that to Egypt, Persia, Assyria, Babylonia and Sumer, the earliest records of civilization tell of the era when powerful beings known to the Hebrews as Watchers and in the Book of Genesis as the Benei Ha-Elohim (Sons of God), mingled themselves with humans, giving birth to part-celestial, part-terrestrial hybrids known as Nephilim. The Bible says this happened when men began to increase on earth and daughters were born to them. When the Sons of God saw the women’s beauty, they took wives from among them to sire their unusual offspring. In Genesis 6:4 we read the following account:

“There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.”

When this scripture is compared with other ancient texts including Enoch, Jubilees, Baruch, Genesis Apocryphon, Philo, Josephus, Jasher and so on, it unfolds to some that the giants of the Old Testament, such as Goliath, were the part-human part-animal part-angelic offspring of a supernatural interruption into the divine order and natural evolution of the species. The Apocryphal Book of Enoch gives a name to the angels involved in this cosmic conspiracy, calling them Watchers. We read:

And I Enoch was blessing the Lord of majesty and the King of the ages, and lo! the Watchers called me—Enoch the scribe—and said to me: ‘Enoch, thou scribe of righteousness, go, declare to the Watchers of the heaven who have left the high heaven, the holy eternal place, and have defiled themselves with women, and have done as the children of earth do, and have taken unto themselves wives: “Ye have wrought great destruction on the earth: And ye shall have no peace nor forgiveness of sin: and inasmuch as they delight themselves in their children [the Nephilim], The murder of their beloved ones shall they see, and over the destruction of their children shall they lament, and shall make supplication unto eternity, but mercy and peace shall ye not attain” (1 Enoch 10:3-8).

According to Enoch, two hundred of these powerful angels departed ‘high heaven’ and used women (among other things) to extend their progeny into mankind’s plane of existence. The Interlinear Hebrew Bible has an interesting interpretation of Genesis 6:2 in this regard. Where the King James Bible says, “the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they [were] fair,” the IHN interprets this as, “The benei Elohim saw the daughters of Adam, that they were fit extensions.”

The term “fit extensions” seems applicable when the whole of the ancient record is understood to mean that the Watchers wanted to leave their proper sphere of existence in order to enter earth’s three-dimensional reality. They viewed women—or at least their genetic material—as part of the formula for accomplishing this task. Departing the proper habitation that God had assigned them was grievous to the Lord and led to divine penalization. Jude described it this way: The “angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day” (Jude 6).

Besides Apocryphal, Pseudepigraphic, and Jewish traditions related to the legend of the Watchers and the “Mighty Men” born of their union with humans, mythologized accounts tell the stories of ‘gods’ using humans to produce heroes or demigods (half-gods). When the ancient Greek version of the Hebrew Old Testament (the LXX or Septuagint) was made, the word “Nephilim”—referring to the part-human offspring of the Watchers—was translated “gegenes,” a word implying “earth born.” This same terminology was used to describe the Greek Titans and other legendary heroes of partly celestial and partly terrestrial origin, such as Hercules, born of Zeus and the mortal Alcmena, Achilles, the Trojan hero son of Thetis and Peleus, and Gilgamesh, the two-thirds god and one-third human child of Lugalbanda and Ninsun. These demigods were

likewise accompanied in texts and idol representation by half-animal and half-human creatures like Centaurs (the part-human part-horse offspring of Apollo’s son, Centaurus), Chimera’s, Furies, Satyrs, Gorgons, Nymphs, Minotaurs and other genetic aberrations. Historian Andrew Tomas believes these mythological records are “thought-fossils depicting the story of vanished cultures in symbols and allegories,” or, as Stephen Quayle in his book Genesis 6 Giants explains: “The collective memories in the form of myths, fables and fairy tales from various cultures and ages of mankind are overwhelming evidence that the Nephilim existed.” All of this indicates that the Watchers not only modified human DNA during the construction of Nephilim, but animals as well, a point the Book of Enoch supports, saying in the 7th chapter that the fallen angels “sinned” against animals as well as humans. Other books such as Jubilees add that this interspecies mingling eventually resulted in mutations among normal humans and animals whose “flesh” (genetic makeup) was “corrupted” by the activity, presumably through crossbreeding (see 5:1-5; 7:21-25). Even the Old Testament contains reference to the genetic mutations that developed among humans following this time frame, including ‘men’ of unusual size, physical strength, six fingers, six toes, animal appetite for blood and even lion-like features (2 Sam 21:20; 23:20). J. R. Church makes an interesting point that since this activity was satanic in nature, it refers to the ‘seed of the serpent’ that was at enmity with Christ. “The concept of a reptilian race continues throughout the Bible as a metaphoric symbol of the devil,” he wrote in his Prophecy in the News Magazine, February 2009. “Later Scriptures add the term ‘dragon,’ with the implication that these other-worldly creatures were designed with the DNA code of a reptilian race.” J.R. goes on to state how some of these satanic creatures were depicted as “bat-like gargoyles, or winged dragons” in ancient art and that we should not be surprised that “a humanoid-type reptilian race could cohabit with human women and produce a race of giants.”

But of all the ancient records, the most telling extra-biblical script is from the book of Jasher, a mostly forgotten text referred to in the Bible in Joshua 10:13 and Second Samuel 1:18. Jasher records the familiar story of the fall of the Watchers then adds an exceptional detail that none of the other texts are as unequivocal about, something that can only be understood in modern language to mean advanced biotechnology, genetic engineering or ‘transgenic modification’ of species. After the Watchers had instructed humans “in the secrets of heaven,” note what Jasher says occurred:

“[Then] the sons of men [began teaching] the mixture of animals of one species with the other, in order therewith to provoke the Lord” (Jasher 4:18).

The phrase “the mixture of animals of one species with the other” does not mean Watchers had taught men hybridization, as this would not have “provoked the Lord.” God made like-animals of different breeds capable of reproducing. For example horses can propagate with other mammals of the Equidae classification (the taxonomic ‘horse family’) including donkeys and zebras. It would not have “provoked the Lord” for this type animal breeding to have taken place, as God himself made the animals able to do this.

If, on the other hand, the Watchers were crossing species boundaries by mixing incompatible animals “of one species with the other” such as a horse with a human (a Centaur), this would have been a different matter and may cast light on the numerous ancient stories of mythical beings of variant-species manufacturing that fits perfectly within the records of what the Watchers were accomplishing. Understandably, this kind of chimera-making would have “provoked the Lord” and raises the serious question of why the Watchers would have risked eternal damnation by ‘tinkering’ with God’s creation in this way. Yahweh placed boundaries between the species and strictly ordered that “each kind” reproduce only after its “own kind.” Was the motive of the Watchers to break these rules simply the desire to rebel, to assault God’s creative genius through biologically altering what He had made? Or was something of deeper significance behind the activity?

Some believe the corruption of antediluvian DNA by Watchers was an effort to cut off the birth line of the Messiah. This theory posits that Satan understood the protoevangelium—the promise in Genesis ३:15 that a savior would be born, the seed of the woman, and that He would destroy the fallen angel’s power. Satan’s followers therefore intermingled with the human race in a conspiracy to stop the birth of Christ according to this line of thought. If human DNA could be universally corrupted or ‘demonized’ they reasoned, no savior would be born and mankind would be lost forever. Those who support this theory believe this is why God Ordered a pure human bloodline to be maintained and for His followers not to intermarry with the other nations. When men breached this command and the mutated DNA began rapidly spreading among humans and animals, God instructed Noah to build an ark and to prepare for a flood that would destroy every living thing. That God had to send such a universal fiat like the flood illustrates how widespread the altered DNA eventually became. In fact, the Bible says in Genesis 6:9 that only Noah, and therefore by extension his children, were found ‘perfect’ in their generation. The Hebrew word for ‘perfect’ in this case is Tamiym and means ‘without blemish’ or ‘healthy,’ the same word used in Leviticus to describe an unblemished sacrificial lamb. The meaning was not that Noah was morally perfect, but that his physical makeup—his DNA—had not been contaminated with Nephilim descent, as apparently the rest of the world had become. In order to preserve mankind as He had made them, God destroyed all but Noah’s family in the flood. The ancient records including those of the Bible appear to agree with this theology, consistently describing the cause of the Flood as happening in response to “all flesh” having become “corrupted, both man and beast.”

While I believe this theory has merit, I want to propose an alternative or additional reasoning for this activity in the next entry.

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Monday, 21 September 2009

Marissabidilla: The Man of Many Wiles

Srini at the Movies: Troy(2004)

History Lessons: Ancient Sparta (Part I) - Frodology - Religious ...

Barack Obama's Teleprompter's Blog: Short and Sweet

DEFENDER PUBLISHING: PART NINETEEN: Read It Before It Is Banned By ...

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