image: Wikimedia commons (link).
The very opening lines of the ancient epic of the Iliad invoke the Muse and ask her inspiration to sing of the rage of the matchless warrior Achilles, and asking her to go back to the very inception of the conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon the king of Mycenae and (as head of the largest army among all the Achaeans) the acknowledged supreme commander of the Argives in their campaign against the city of Ilium (or Troy):
Rage -- Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles [ . . . ]The very next line asks:
Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed,
Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.
Book One, lines 1 - 8, translation by Robert Fagles, page 77.
What god drove them to fight with such a fury?The ancient verses tell us that all the ranks of the Achaean warriors cried out their assent and urged the king to accept the ransom offered by the holy man for the release of his daughter, Chryseis, but that Agamemnon (himself quite insecure in many ways, as we see throughout the rest of the epic) rejects the father's plea and sends him away "with a brutal order ringing in his ears" --
Apollo the son of Zeus and Leto. Incensed at the king
he swept a fatal plague through the army -- men were dying
and all because Agamemnon spurned Apollo's priest.
Yes, Chryses approached the Achaeans' fast ships
to win his daughter back, bringing a priceless ransom
and bearing high in hand, wound on a golden staff,
the wreaths of the god, the distant deadly Archer.
Book One, lines 9 - 16, pages 77 - 78.
"Never again, old man,
let me catch sight of you by the hollow ships!
Not loitering now, not slinking back tomorrow.
The staff and the wreaths of god will never save you then.
The girl -- I won't give up the girl. Long before that,
old age will overtake her in my house, in Argos,
far from her fatherland, slaving back and forth
at the loom, forced to share my bed! Now go,
don't tempt my wrath -- and you may depart alive!"
Book One, lines 29 - 37, page 78.
Terrified and heartbroken, the old man obeys the king and turns away, walking in silence along the shore where the waves are crashing against the beach. There, once safely away from the wrath of Agamemnon, Chryses utters a prayer to Apollo, god of music and of medicine, but also of the plague, and asks for his aid in punishing the king and returning Chryses' daughter from her cruel captor. The ancient poem tells us that Apollo is infuriated:
Down he strode from Olumpus' peaks, storming at heart
with his bow and hooded quiver slung across his shoulders.
The arrows clanged at his back as the god quaked with rage,
the god himself on the march and down he came like night.
Over against the ships he dropped to a knee, let fly a shaft
and a terrifying clash rang out from the great silver bow.
First he went for the mules and circling dogs but then,
launching a piercing shaft at the men themselves,
he cut them down in droves --
and the corpse-fires burned on, night and day, no end in sight.
Book One, lines 50 - 60, page 79.
This episode in the ancient myths clearly shows that the offenses against heaven which are perpetrated by the leaders of a nation can result in suffering and death even among those who oppose the injustices being committed by their leaders (the Iliad telling us specifically in Book One, lines 25 and 26 that "all ranks of Achaeans" cried out to Agamemnon to "Respect the priest, accept the shining ransom" and return Chryseis to her father).
For nine days the deadly arrows of Apollo bring plague and death to the Achaean warriors until on the tenth day Achilles calls all the ranks together, and addressing Agamemnon tells the king that the war is lost and they must sail home (perhaps not even escaping the plague even then) -- unless they can summon "a holy man, a prophet, even a man skilled with dreams" (noting in an aside that "dreams can come our way from Zeus") and ask the seer what has angered the god and brought such destruction (Book One, lines 71 - 78, page 79).
If they can find out from the prophet what has angered Apollo, Achilles says, then perhaps they can address the issue, correct the offense, and appeal to the god to save them from the plague he has sent.
Then the poem tells us that the prophet Calchas steps forward -- "the clearest by far of all the seers who scan the flight of birds" (Book One, lines 80 - 81, page 79). He first addresses Achilles and requests that Achilles swear to protect him, since what he has to say will enrage a powerful man -- "a powerful man who lords it over all the Argives, one the Achaeans must obey" (meaning, of course, Agamemnon). Then, Calchas declares that the god Apollo is enraged because Agamemnon insulted Apollo's priest Chryses, refusing to release his daughter, and that the heavenly Archer will continue to inflict the ranks with inescapable plague until the girl is given back to her loving father, and a hundred bulls are given to Apollo.
As I first noted in this post from 2015 and subsequently on November 22 three years ago, author and scholar Peter Kingsley, who is himself a kind of a prophet, has pointed to this episode at the opening of the Iliad as illustrating the truth that:
Prophecy is not about the future. Prophets don't talk about the future. What they do is: they talk about the past -- which has been hidden. Things which have happened -- that have been covered over, and no longer clear. That is what the real prophets do: they speak about the past, but the past which has been forgotten.
And you can see this if you look: you can see, say, with Empedocles -- this man I'm so connected with. As a prophet, he tries to point out to people what they have forgotten, what has gone wrong, what is missing -- why they don't function in the world anymore, why there is so much suffering, disease, disharmony, misery: because we've forgotten our divine source. He traces it all back.
And you can see it also at the very beginning of Homer's Iliad, when there is a whole plague. The soldiers are devastated, by sickness and plague. They're suffering; they're dying. And what happens, in this case? They find a prophet, and they ask him what's going wrong. And he says: "Apollo -- these are the arrows of Apollo. He's shot these arrows of plague, into the troops, because you did something wrong, you offended Apollo." And then it all becomes very simple. Because you see, once you know what's wrong, then you can sort it out -- you can make amends. It's very, very precise. That is what prophecy is. [From a lecture by Peter Kingsley in the series entitled The Elders].
The ancient wisdom given to humanity shows us very clearly and tells us very explicitly that we must go back to the source in order to fix our problems, and to correct the suffering and dysfunction with which we are afflicted. In the very opening words of the Iliad itself, the poem invokes the goddess and asks her to begin at the very source of everything which then unfolds throughout the rest of the entire epic.
This truth applies at both the individual level and at the wider societal and cultural level, as the above-cited episode from the Iliad implies: the suffering of the Achaeans who die from the plague sent by Apollo does not come from their own offense against heaven but rather that of Agamemnon. And, as another modern prophet, the healer and best-selling author Dr. Gabor Mate, explains the two are connected: the dysfunction and trauma expressed at a societal level will inevitably lead to suffering and dysfunction on an individual level, and if we want to address our own self-damaging behaviors and addictions, we must go back to the source, just as the ancient traditions of the world show us in the ancient myths.
In another of his extremely worthwhile podcast interviews, this one a conversation with Sam Lawrence of the Grow Big Always podcast published on August 22, 2016, Dr. Mate explains (beginning at 0:33:30 in the interview):
If I'm right, and I don't doubt that I am, that the first question is not "why the addiction?" but "why the pain?" -- you cannot heal addiction by looking at it as a behavior problem or simply as a disease. You have to deal with the pain that's underlying it. And the essence of trauma -- just as with your self-acknowledged discomfort with your self -- is exactly that: a discomfort with the self, a disconnection from the self. And so just focusing on the disease aspects of it, or on the behavior aspects of it, without reconnecting with our true selves, is not sufficient.
A few minutes earlier in the same interview, beginning at about 0:24:26 in the audio clip, Dr. Mate explains the connection between the dysfunction in the wider society and the trauma which separates an individual from his or her essential self, leading to lifelong patterns of addiction and self-sabotaging behavior:
So that's on the individual level -- but then on the societal level, you have a society which (as we said earlier) isolates people, breaks down communities, destroys connection, and stresses people tremendously: stresses them by economic insecurity, by loss of control, by cultural dislocation. And so now you have highly-stressed parents raising kids. The more stressed the parents are, the less emotionally-available they are to their kids -- so what you've got is a multi-generational and cultural transmission of pain -- that's what's going on. And it's not a question of blaming individual parents: it's a question of seeing how this culture induces the stress on people, how that stress affects individual families, and then how, in those individual families, individual human beings then grow up with the sense of isolation and pain which then the addiction is there to soothe somehow. So you can't separate. One of the great teachings of traditional spiritual teaching, but also modern science, is: "You can't separate individuals from their environment." So they're all products in a sense of our societal and cultural environment. So, individual health if you will is not an individual issue: it's a societal and a cultural issue.
And as the quotation from Peter Kingsley cited above tells us, and as the episode from the Iliad recounted earlier shows us, and as Dr. Mate himself declares directly in the same interview, we cannot correct the dysfunction until we become aware of the origin or source of the problem -- but once we become aware of and acknowledge the actual source of the issue, then we have taken the most important first step and can begin to address it.
At 0:41:42 towards the end of the conversation with Sam Lawrence, Dr. Mate says:
It has to begin with an awareness that this is going on, and, "Yes -- I've been affected by these patterns, and this is how they show up in my life, and this is how they show up in my relationship with my spouse, and my children, and my work, and how I deal with the internet" and all that, you know? In other words, there's got to be an awareness and an acceptance that this is how it is. And then, depending on where you are, who you are, what resources are available to you -- yes, you might see a counsellor. I highly recommend, perhaps self-servingly but not purely, that people read my books: a lot of people have found them helpful. But lots of other books, lots of other great teaching out there. Spiritual teachers, like Eckhard Tolle, I find very powerful guides; A. H. Almaas, very powerful guide, spiritually- and psychologically-speaking. Individual counseling, Yoga, meditation, mindful awareness practices, bodywork, EMDR, Emotional Freedom Technique, somatic experiencing, Peter Levine's work on trauma, Bessel van der Kolk's work on trauma, Daniel Siegel's work on the development of the mind and mindful awareness, Jack Kornfield and his mindful awareness Buddhist work: there's just so much out there. And it begins with a recognition, and I suppose an unflinching dedication that when issues and problems arise, we don't see them as problems to be fixed, but we see them as growth opportunities: that each time a problem arises it's another opportunity for us to grow and to learn. And that takes constant dedication -- and I don't mean a grim, negative despair -- but I mean a dedication to awareness and a dedication to expansion, and expansion means letting go of restrictive ideas and self-judgments and patterns and behaviors.
These are extremely helpful perspectives for each of us dealing with issues on an individual level.
But as the quotations from the interview cited above clearly assert, and as the episode from the Iliad dramatically demonstrates, dysfunction at a societal level and (in the case of Agamemnon) a disdain for the will of the gods leads directly to trauma and suffering among the ranks of the individuals within that society. Thus, in addition to identifying and acknowledging and addressing our own deeper issues which resulted in our own personal disconnection from our self, we must as a society uncover those "the past which has been hidden: things which have happened that have been covered over, and no longer clear" (in the words of Peter Kingsley) and which are leading to "so much suffering, disease, disharmony, misery."
The verses of the ancient epic of the Iliad are not about persons far removed from us, fighting in some regional conflict that happened thousands of years in the past. Indeed, as I make very clear in the analysis presented in Star Myths of the World, Volume Two: Myths of Ancient Greece (2016), the characters and episodes described in that ancient poem can be shown to be based on celestial metaphor, and not on literal or historical events at all.
Indeed, the scene shown at the top of this post is from a vase on display at the Louvre and attributed to the "Athens 1714 Painter," thought to have been made around 360 BC. The artwork depicts Chryses approaching Agamemnon on his knees and entreating the king to release his captive daughter. Longtime readers of my writing and those familiar with my arguments may perceive that the ancient artist has very clearly based this scene upon a very specific region of the night sky, with each of the figures depicted corresponding to constellations in the proper position relative to one another to indicate that this mythological scene from the Iliad is in fact a celestial scene.
The diagram below shows the scene from the ancient vase juxtaposed with a star-chart with labels indicating which figure corresponds to which constellation in the heavens, specifically Virgo (for Agamemnon) and Scorpio (for Chryses, on his knees entreating Agamemnon to give back his daughter), with the goddess Athena directly above Chryses (Athena with her spear and helmet corresponding to Ophiuchus, as I explain in many of my books and other writings), and even figures corresponding to Aquarius (on the left as we face the artwork) and Bootes (on the right as we face the artwork) included for additional context.
Clearly, at least some men and women in the ancient world understood that these stories are metaphors -- and that they are not actually about distant events and other people but rather they are about us, in this very present moment.
I would argue that much of the trauma and dysfunction which is now built into "western society" has its origin in the disconnection from the ancient wisdom given to every society in the ancient myths of their ancestors, ancient wisdom later stamped out by literalist reinterpretation of the stories in the Bible, which themselves can be shown to be based on this very same ancient world-wide system.
But, as the discussion above makes clear, healing is possible when we uncover and acknowledge the past which has been hidden, the trauma which has been covered over -- and not until we do.
