Return to the Goddess
The Iliad represents the male-oriented Indo-European world and Zeus, Apollo, and the Olympians in general figure in it the most prominently. Following The Iliad , we come to The Odyssey , where we have the return of the Goddess.
It was Samuel Butler who said that The Odyssey was probably written by a woman. The change in mode and mood from The Iliad and its male war- and achievement-oriented psychology to that of The Odyssey , where learning about life from the goddess, is very important. I want to tell the story of The Iliad and The Odyssey with a certain little inflection that’s all my own.
The Odyssey is the tale of Odysseus’s wanderings from the time of his fleet being blown about by the gods to his final return home, cast ashore asleep on Ithaca. In the first part of the story, he is dealing with human beings on the surface of the Earth. Once he lands in the Land of the Lotus Eaters, he’s in the world of myth and monsters, and the characters he meets are all mythological: the Cyclops, Scylla and Charybdis, Laestrygonians, monsters; Circe, Calypso, and Nausicaa, all nymphs. When finally he wakes up at home again and goes to his palace, he finds that during his absence his wife’s suitors have been usurping him, and then comes the conclusion—the routing of the suitors and the reunion with Penelope. This is obviously a mythological journey, and the principle transformative experiences are with these nymphs—that is to say, the female principle.