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CELESTIAL SEX, EARTHLY

DESTRUCTION,

AND DRAMATIC SUBLIMATION IN

HOMER'S ODYSSEY:

THE DISASTROUS LOVE

AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS

by

ALFRED DE GRAZIA

Metron Publications
Princeton, New Jersey

Notes on the printed version of this book:

This book was processed by the Princeton University

Computing Centre, using the processing language called

Script. Photocomposition, cover make-up, lay-out and

printing were accomplished by the Princeton University

Printing Services. The typeface employed throughout is

Caledonia.

The photograph on the front and back covers displays a

marble male figure, glancing to the skies and playing the

harp; it is of pre-Homeric Aegean origins and now

possessed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New

York.

ISBN: 0-940-268-09-4

Copyright 1984 by Alfred de Grazia

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of

America

Limited first edition.

Address: Metron Publications, P.O. Box 1213,

Princeton, N.J. 08542, U.S.A.

To

Immanuel Velikovsky
(1895-1979)

"Iron sharpens iron,

and one man sharpens another."

Proverbs, IV, 27.17

Q-CD vol. 8: Moon and Mars, Foreword                                            

FOREWORD

In this book, I extract a dreamy bedroom comedy from Homer's
Odyssey, analyze it as a dramatic form of myth, detect that it
might have a real astronomical origin, seek this origin in world
wide disasters, and assert that an unconscious parallel occurs
between astronomical events and artistic production.

The narrative is well suited to readers of venturesome tastes,
who may have a passing acquaintanceship with the history of
the theater and ancient Greece, with psychoanalysis, with
mythology and the ideas of catastrophism and astronomy.

The work was written and offered for publication over a decade
ago. Well-founded criticism from several British experts on
mythology, particularly Peter James, Malcolm Lowery, Brian
Moore and Martin Sieff, led me to withhold the manuscript,
despite the encouragement coming from other quarters to
publish it. I have indeed held it, to near the end of the
Quantavolution Series, and release it now, benefited, I believe,
by the amendments that my friends induced.

Thanks on this occasion go also to professor William Mullen of
St. John's College, whose advice extended from greek poetic
meter to the full ancient oecumene; to Eugene Vanderpool of
Athens, Greece, who was consistently sympathetic; to Dr.
Elizabeth Chesley-Baity, who discussed with me the archaeo
astronomical anthropology of dances, fire-rites, ballgames, and
sword ceremonies; to the late Dr. Zvi Rix of Israel, whose
enchanting letters on problems of mythology kept the book and
its author warm over the years of its hibernation; to George
English for his editorial advice and Jungian interpretations; to
my colleague, Professor Cyrus Gordon, for his appreciations of
the values in my approach; to the late Professor Livio C.
Stecchini, whose absence from the scene of ancient history and
science is sorely felt; and to Dr. Jay Lefer who responded
keenly to the questions here raised in the field of psychiatry.
Finally, I would acknowledge the inspiration afforded by my
friend, the late Immanuel Velikovsky, who designated the
Greek gods as sky-bodies threatening the Earth.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword
Introduction
Part One

Sacred Scandal and Disaster

I       An Athena Production
II      The Song of Love
III     The Love Affair as the Mask of Tragedy
IV      Catastrophe and Sublimation
V       Holy Dreamtime

Part Two

Gods, Planets, Madness

VI      The Rape of Helen
VII     Crazy Heroes of Dark Times                        
VIII  The Two Faces of Love
IX      The Ruined Face of a Classic Beauty
X       He Who Shines by Day
Appendix to X: Logic of Identifying Relations
XI      The Blasted Career of the Mighty Swordsman
XII     The Laughing Gods
XIII  How the Gods Fly

Part Three

Therapy for Group Fear

XIV  The Uses of Language
XV  The Birth and Death of Memory
XVI  The Transfiguration of Trauma
XVII  Settled Sky and Unsettled Mind

Appendix: Characters of the Book

Q-CD vol. 8: Moon and Mars, Introduction                                        

INTRODUCTION

The theory to be expressed here is hardly believable. We
discern behind a famous Homeric scenario about the
misconduct of the gods the shadow of a second scenario of
astronomical catastrophe. By pursuing the connection
relentlessly, many reasons are uncovered to suspect that the
human drama is unconsciously imitating what the human eye
witnessed as a prior catastrophe in the skies. Chant and
catastrophe, dance and disaster seem to be historically linked.

Can a dance and poem be a piece of astronomical history,
tightly, not vaguely, related? If they are, then an idea that many
psychologists have considered: that humans have a tendency to
suppress the memory of terrible events, but also are somehow
compelled by unconscious psychic forces to reenact the events 
this idea is supported by our theory.

It appears that the reenactment may take place through religious
rites, through wars, through literature, through individual and
group behavior of many kinds. Here it is through the sublimated
medium of poetry and dance. I think that such a process is
occurring in the story of the Love Affair of Venus and Mars. If
my readers will agree, then we shall begin to shape a consensus
on a matter of great importance to several fields of science and
the humanities.

The literature referred to is a brief lyric of a hundred lines, sung
in Book VIII of the Odyssey. It tells how the bright-crowned
goddess Aphrodite loved Ares, god of battle, and how they met
repeatedly to make love "in the home of fire," until they were
entrapped in a marvelous net made by her outraged consort, the
god Hephaestus, and released only when Ares pledged to
reform his conduct.

The lyric tells of a much longer opera ballet sung and directed
by the sightless bard, Demodocus, who, some say, is Homer's
self-image. The recital plays to a fascinated audience at the
palace of Alcinous and to his guest, Odysseus, or Ulysses, hero
of the War against Troy.

Q-CD vol. 8: Moon and Mars, Introduction                                        

The frank sexuality is Homer's, no matter how often it has been
translated vaguely. The story is the archetype of the adulterous
love triangle, as neat a plot and piece as anyone has ever com
posed, and a model for a thousand imitations. But it may also
be the masking of a catastrophe visited upon the Greeks from
the skies.

I studied the lines and read some translations of them. I ren
dered them in something like the original epic hexameter, and
shall present them below (Chapter 2) in that form. Still,
examining the words was but the beginning of an investigation
that carried me on odyssean wanderings into various fields of
knowledge.

I asked myself what spirit breathed into Homer and saw that it
was the goddess Pallas Athena. Athena moved the Homeric
Age. She led the Greeks in the Iliad and guided Odysseus
through his many adventures of the Odyssey. I found her
everywhere. She dominated the skies as a phenomenon, and
human strife on Earth.

I concerned myself with the context of the song and discovered
that it was a Holy Dreamtime song, not a sacrilegious
burlesque. It was presented as an opera-ballet, meant to take
place among the gods in heaven. The same art form exists today
among the aborigines of Australia.

I asked myself how such holy songs could arise, and found an
answer in the modern theory of catastrophism. Precedents and
parallels from many countries and cultures justify searching for
catastrophism behind the lines of the love song of Demodocus.
Greek culture was badly damaged by natural disasters of the
eight and seventh centuries before this era, and Homer's poetry
(which I place later than is usual) shows both the effects of the
disasters and the ways in which the Greeks recovered from
them.

The song of the love affair of Aphrodite and Ares is to be
stripped of its facade. It is to be considered as a song about
planetary gods doing violence to the world. I assign this
Aphrodite of Homer to the Moon, with reservations that I
believe are fully explained herein, rather than to the planet

Q-CD vol. 8: Moon and Mars, Introduction                                        

Venus. Ares stands for planet Mars without doubt. Hephaestus
or Vulcan, though male, surprisingly stands for the planet
Venus in this episode. Sea-god Poseidon represents the worried
Earth, and persuades Hephaestus to release Aphrodite and Ares
from the invisible net by which he has trapped them. Poseidon
stands bond for Ares. All this suggests the unspeakable horror
of natural disasters brought by these planetary gods upon Earth
and humanity.

That Aphrodite was always a great goddess of the Moon is
maintained, again with reservations, for she may also have had
her name assigned to other sky-bodies, especially planet Venus
which the Greeks and Romans, following the Orientals, came to
call Aphrodite. We tell of how the Moon-Aphrodite received in
Homeric times the wanton, irresponsible, and imperturbable
character by which later ages came to know her. Aphrodite is
tied to Helen of Troy, and Helen to the Hellenes or Greeks. The
Trojan wars evolve psychically into campaigns to recapture the
Moon from planet Mars (Ares) by the followers of planet
Venus (Athena).

The stories of the Trojan wars thus use the historical and mu
ndane battles to play out on Earth the drama of the skies. The
skies of the Homeric age must be recent: 776 to 687 B.C. - or
so I calculate, taking up Velikovsky's chronology. Although
natural disasters had befallen the numerous settlements of Troy
(possibly Hisarlik) throughout its history, a final major
destruction by natural forces may well have occurred during
Homer's boyhood. It was an awesome tragedy to him and
others, which could not be recalled without pain, fear, and
distortion.

It is to be expected that the life of survivors of worldwide
natural catastrophes would be fearful and turbulent. Hence I
argue that the social psychology of the Homeric Greeks is
framed in a concept of mania and madness, rather than in the
conventional view of a primitive people gradually achieving a
higher culture.

Further, as on Earth so in heaven, there must be signs of the
cosmic disasters of the age. I examine the Moon, as the astro
nauts have seen and sampled it for evidences of recent disaster,

Q-CD vol. 8: Moon and Mars, Introduction                                        

and shall recite indications that it did experience torrid bouts in
the near past involving immense electro-gravitational stresses.

I do the same with the planet Mars, from the evidence of the
latest explorations. Mars has been the victim, it appears, of
recent abysmal ruptures and explosions; I explain how these
might have been caused by near encounters with Earth, Moon
and Venus. Planet Venus is played by Hephaestus in the love
Affair. He is a stand-in for Athena, director of the show, who is
more frequently identified with the planet Venus than he.
Venus is exceedingly hot, and marred beneath her dense
atmosphere by shallow surface craters of great diameter.

The other gods of the Love Affair introduce to the first modern
bedroom comedy its humor, which can be explained in
Freudian theory as yet another cover-up of the disaster. In
reality they too are heavenly bodies. The role of the Sun,
Helios, is shown to be secondary to that of the planetary gods
and responsive to their behavior, as it is pictured in the earliest
development of theology everywhere.

If the characters of the Love Affair are to be placed in heaven,
their motions too must be given meaning. The best explanation
lately offered has the Sun and planets forming an electric sys
tems, subordinate to and part of the galactic electrical system.
They act as charged bodies separated from an oppositely
charged space plasma by space-charge sheaths, the rupture of
which destroys a balance and creates havoc through discharges
among the bodies. These efforts seem to be discernible in the
special motions of the characters of the Love Affair.

We present physical and historical evidence in general
agreement with the love song sung by Demodocus. How the
human mind manages to react to such events in a way to
preserve its own balance, and to give forth its most beautiful
literary expressions, needs to be learned. An examination of the
language of the Love Affair, and of Homer generally, brings
forth a theory of myth: to succeed in telling the truth about an
unspeakable event, a myth must fail to convey the truth. This
fateful contradictory task is achieved successfully through the
Love Affair.

Q-CD vol. 8: Moon and Mars, Introduction                                        

10

Homer was probably an editor and publisher of such great
myths. He labored to write down in a fresh and convenient
alphabet what he thought should be sung. He was a bringer of
peace between gods and men, and the symbolizer of a unified
Greek culture.

Memory, I offer, is of traumatic origin. Human memory begins
in horror and the need to forget. To remember is to forget; to
forget is to remember. From the beginnings of true human
nature until now, no one has been exempted from the rules of
amnesia, not even the philosophers whose sublimation of the
terrors of becoming a creature of memory have seemed to carry
them very far from particular events.

Myth and dreams coincide, operating according to similar laws.
The conscious and unconscious parts of the mind exchange
with each other what is required for a sense of control to exist
so life can go on. Still the balance is scarcely a happy one.
Human nature is imprinted by a deeply buried, unresting, and
generalized great fear. The fear is reflected today and in the
earliest human institutions of religion, politics, sex, schools,
commerce, and war.

I concluded in the end that the hundred lines of the Love Affair
dramatize subconsciously the history of a catastrophic
encounter of the planets at or near 687 B.C. Further, the
mythical and literary transformations of the event mark a high
point in the development of the European mind and its culture.

I ask the reader - no matter that he may disbelieve me - to
pursue his disbelief through the pages to follow, and acquire, at
the least, a reasoned disbelief. To the reader who is familiar
with my ideas, I offer assurances that the revelations contained
in this introduction do not exhaust the surprises that he will
encounter, one after another, as he moves through these pages
upon his personal Odyssey.

11

PART ONE

SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 1: An Athena Production                       
12

CHAPTER ONE

AN ATHENA PRODUCTION

The Love Affair, as I shall call it, is a story of how the arrogant
god of war, Ares, made love to the Golden Goddess Aphrodite
in the bed she was supposed to share with her husband,
Hephaestus, the lame blacksmith god. Hearing of their adultery
from Helios, the sun-god, Hephaestus fashioned an invisible net
that trapped the pair in bed. Returning from a pretended trip, he
called upon the gods to witness their guilt and would release
them only on the promise of the sea-god, Poseidon, to stand bail
for the disreputable Ares.

Perhaps this was the first bedroom farce of literature. Its
producer, in a manner of speaking, was the Goddess Pallas
Athena, patron of the arts and crafts, daughter and favorite of
Zeus, father of the gods. She was born some centuries before
1500 B.C.[1] and was originally envisioned in the planet
Venus.

Athena was not only the producer of the 'Love Affair' but also
of the Iliad and the Odyssey, as I shall seek to show: so she was
not a novice in the field of dramaturgy. Her versatility was
proverbial. She probably inspired the magnificent setting of
Phaeacia and directed the scene closely. She sang it in the guise
of the god-inspired Demodocus. Like Shakespeare she acted in
her own plays: as herself, she planned the occasion for the
story, and in the person of Odysseus, was the honored member
of its audience. "I am Pallas Athene, Daughter of Zeus, who
always stands by your side and guards you through all your
adventures," she reminds Odysseus at one point.

Odysseus's name means "troublemaker" or better "the inveterate
troublemaker." Writes George Dimock, "In the Odyssey
odyssasthai means essentially `to cause pain (odynë) and to be
willing to do so.'"[2] In her unruffled and sanguine way, often

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 1: An Athena Production                       
13

behind the scenes, Athena is the world's greatest troublemaker,
as we shall soon learn.

Though she is a mistress of disguises, Athena permitted a
picture of her natural human form to develop over the centuries.
E. V. Rieu, who has provided one of the many translations of
the Odyssey that are available, writes that "we may think of her
as a tall and beautiful woman, with brilliant eyes, clad in the
white robe, with the aegis, a goatskin cloack, across her breast,
a crested helmet on her head, and a long spear in her hand."[3]
Sometimes an owl and a snake accompany her. However, we
would warn that Athena's appearance is as varied as her
characterizations, and her names are so many that some are still
to be unearthed.

"Most vivid and alive of Homer's gods," writes Rieu, "she
dominates the Odyssey. And this is true even though there are
moments when we are at a loss to say whether the poet means
us to imagine her actual presence or to understand only that his
characters are exercising the motherwit which she personifies."

The whole story of the Odyssey itself can be retold briefly here.
The saga begins with an assembly of the Gods. Athena catches
her father Zeus reminiscing on the just killing of an evil man,
and, taking advantage of the absence of Poseidon, reminds him
that the worthy Odysseus has still not reached home, although it
is the tenth year after the destruction of Troy; for seven years he
has been detained by the nymph Calypso on an island. And for
three years before then, he had wandered: he had sacked a
town, landed among the lotus-eaters who relished an amnesia
promoting vegetable, and had been captured by a giant man
eating Cyclops whom he blinded in order to escape.

This proved to be unfortunate. The Cyclops was a son of
Poseidon, whose enmity now marked Odysseus for unending
disasters.

The wanderers landed on the floating island of Aeolia where
they were treated royaly. Upon departing, Odysseus was given
a bag of rushing winds that was not to be opened, and granted a
fair breeze for home. But his crew, acting in the typically
greedy and impetuous manner that was to destroy them all
ultimately, opened the pouch in envy of its supposedly precious

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 1: An Athena Production                       
14

contents. The fierce winds escaped; the way was lost. A landing
among savage Laestrygonians brought a slaughter of many of
the company. Fleeing, they found the island of the witch, Circe.
After some difficulties (she changed a number of the men into
pigs for a time), they conciliated her and spent a luxurious year
at her palace.

Upon his departure, Circe gave Odysseus means of discovering
his own fate and reviewing the history of many a departed soul
through a visit to Hades and a talk with the seer Teiresias.
Pausing at Circe's island afterwards, Odysseus received further
instructions that would carry him past the seductive Sirens, and
through the narrow straits between Scylla, a grasping monster,
and Charybdis, a swallower of ships.

However, he is overruled by his men when he begs them to sail
past the Island of the Sun. They land, and are kept ashore by
storms until out of supplies. While Odysseus sleeps, the crew
seize and eat the fat cattle of Helios. The Sun protests to Zeus
(Jupiter) who destroys their ship and lets Odysseus drift alone
for nine days until washed up on the shore of Ogygia, the island
of Calypso. Seven years pass.

Then it is that, following upon Athena's plea, the order of Zeus
moves him on and he was sailing well until Poseidon, returning
from a visit among the Ethiopians, spied him and dashed his
little boat to pieces. The nymph Ino helped him to stay afloat
and Poseidon turned away, satisfied. Athena smoothed the
winds and seas so that he might survive, and arranged for him
to fall into the hands of the Phaeacians.

Now it is to the Phaeacian episode that I shall attend closely,
but a few words more will bring the story to an end. Odysseus
is transported from Phaeacia, with many gifts, and laid upon
Ithaca, asleep. Athena appears to him and advises him: his wife,
Penelope, still withholds her choice of a betrothed, though it is
demanded of her by her many suitors, who meanwhile feast at
the expense of the palace. His son, Telemachus, also faithful, is
young and indecisive. Odysseus is to go first in disguise among
his people, then to prepare his weapons, then, with the help of
his son and two loyal slaves, to challenge and slaughter the
suitors. So he does, and wins back his possessions and his wife.

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 1: An Athena Production                       
15

A final battle with the surviving opposition ensues but Athena
calls Odysseus off, for he is supported but warned by Zeus. "So
spoke Athene, and he obeyed, and was glad at heart. Then for
all time to come a solemn covenant betwixt the twain was made
by Pallas Athene, daughter of Zeus, who bears the aegis, in the
likeness of Mentor both in form and in voice" [4]. Thus ends
the Odyssey.

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 1: An Athena Production                       
16

Notes (Chapter 1: An Athena Production)

1.     William Mullen, "A Reading of the Pyramid Texts," III
Pensee No 1 (1973), 10; pp.13-4.

2.     George E. Dimock, Jr., "The Name of Odysseus," in
George Steiner and Robert Fagles, eds., Homer: A Collection of
Critical Essays, New York: Prentice Hall, 1962,p. 106.

3.     The Odyssey, Penguin edition, introduction.

4.     A. T. Murray, translator, Homer: The Odyssey, 2 vols.
(New- York: Putnam's Sons, 1919),II, 443. Mentor was the
lifetime guardian and advisor of Odysseus. He had been left
behind when Odysseus sailed for Troy. (All line references to
the Greek text will be to the Murray translation.)

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 2: The Song of Love                             

17

CHAPTER TWO

THE SONG OF LOVE

Here then is this song of love. It is presented fifth-hand: My
literal verse is based upon a number of translations of what is
ultimately a tenth century A.D. manuscript in Greek (the
earliest extant-as written down in the seventh-century B.C. and
reedited in the next century) of Homer's Odyssey, which reports
what was sung by a blind harpist, Demodocus, in a time and
place that have been debatable questions for over two thousand
years.

Alcinous the King announced the event:

Now, all and one of you dancers, Phaeacia's finest!

form in your corps de ballet so our stranger and guest can tell

all his

friends upon going back home, we're surpassing all manner of

mankind;

We are the paramount sailors on sea, and in running a foot

race,

singing of songs, and in dancing. So someone around us here

go,

go without loitering, bring to us here for Demodocus's

use, that precious harp that so clearly resounds; it's the lyre

carefully standing, it's somewhere, I know, within one of our

great halls."

Sacred commands of Alcinous! Quickly arose a herald,

seeking to find and to fetch him the resonant harp from its

palace place.

Rising as well were a chosen nine men who were Lords

Ceremonial,

publically called, whenever the people foregathered and needed

an ordering.

These cleared out space for the dancing to come; they

measured a broad ring.

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 2: The Song of Love                             

18

Meanwhile the herald returned; he carried the clear-intoned

lyre.

Taking the lyre in hand, Demodocus moved in the midst of the

young boys

standing there, all of them skilled in the dance though they

blossomed with fair youth.

Down stamped their feet on the floor made for beauteous

magical dances.

Spellbound Odysseus marveled as dancing feet twinkled in mid

air!

THE SONG LITERALLY RENDERED IN ENGLISH VERSE

Whereupon the song of the Love Affair begins.

Striking his masterly chords in the prelude to singing his sweet

song,

Demodocus charmingly told of Ares' love affair and Aphrodite,

Golden of Crown. In secret they lay in the home of Hephaestus.

Ares came carrying all manner of gifts to dishonor the Lord's

bed.

Straightaway then went with the news, of course, Helios, who'd

spotted them loving.

Shocked and dismayed was Hephaestus to hear of the painful

story.

Deep down below to the depth of his forge he proceeded; there,

placing a thunderbolt stone on the block of the anvil, he struck,

and

struck off unbreakable fetters that no one could hope to dis

solve, for

fixing the lovers in bondage, right where they loved, was his

fierce aim.

Then having fashioned his snare, imbued with a wrath against

Ares,

up to his chamber he went, by his bedstead of love, and all

over,

everywhere, round the four posts of the bed he moved,

spreading the ligaments,

dropping a number of them from above, from the beams to the

floor, too,

fine as the web of a spider, so fine that the Blessed Immortals,

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 2: The Song of Love                             

19

looking for them could not see them, such excellent craft was he

capable of.

Soon as the bonds had been stretched over all of the lovers'

trysting couch,

Hephaestus pretended to move on the way to his well-founded

Lemnos,

dearly loved island. Wherewith the unwavering gaze of the

Golden-bridled Ares

fixed without fail on Hephaestus, Most Famed among Artisans,

going

off. And Ares straight made his way to the house of the Famous

Hephaestus,

eager for love of Cytherean Aphrodite of the Bright Crown.

She had in fact come before him just now from her father,

mighty Son

of Kronos, and rested herself to await his arrival. Ares

entered directly the house, reached for her hands, and spoke

calling her name:

"Dearest one, come to bed now with me; let us together lie.

Hephaestus is no longer here or about and I do think he's gone.

Lemnos must have him; he's gone to his Sintians who speak like

barbarians."

He spoke like that, and she was quite thrilled to lie in his lean

arms.

Going to bed, they laid themselves together. But upon them

showered the bonds engineered by versatile Hephaestus, tight

drawn.

Try as they might, they couldn't remove their limbs or even

move them.

Then they did realize no way could be found to escape the close

bonds.

Nearing them now, having turned himself back before reaching

his Lemnos,

came close the Famous, the Strong-armed, the God with

Disabled Legs.

Helios had watched as before and again had delivered the

story.

So, to his mansion once more he returned, his heart so heavy.

Standing astride of the door he was seized by a wild anger.

Terrible cries went up; all of the Gods heard his shouting:

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 2: The Song of Love                             

20

"Zeus, my father and all of you Blessed Gods who are Eternal,

come down!

See for yourselves here a laughable matter, unyielding fact.

Aphrodite, the daughter of Zeus, has ever shunned my

lameness, but

loved Annihilator Ares who is handsome and straight-footed,

born to stumble that I am! Yet no one to blame save my parents.

Better had they not begotten me. Here you can see how this pair

climbed into my bed and twine around each other so lovingly.

I am torn apart by the sight. But believe me, their desire will

vanish.

However in love, their lust is gone, and an end to their

fornication.

Nevertheless, the trap and the net will not let them go free.

Gifts that I gave for the right to the bride, with her eyes of a

spaniel,

first must be paid back to me by her father; fair though his

daughter,

she is a wanton and reckless." So spoke Hephaestus,

seeing the Gods had now met at the house by its brazen bright

threshold.

Poseidon came, the Mover of Earth, and Hermes the Helper,

too.

Lord and Director of Far-removed Works, Apollo: he came.

(Goddesses were absent, they remained home, away from the

shameful scene.)

Standing around the door, then, were the Gods, the Givers of

Good Things.

Laughter arose from the Blessed Gods, inextinguishably gleeful

they were at the sight of Hephaestus' shrewd craft and cunning,

saying amongst themselves, glancing at each other, "Bad deeds

prosper poorly. The slow one can catch the most swift. See how

Hephaestus, though slow he may be, has caught up with Ares,

fastest of Gods who command high Olympus. Lame although he

be,

yet he has caught him by skill, so Ares must pay the just fine

owed by one in adultery." To each other they spoke in this

manner.

Apollo, Lord and the son of Great Zeus, said aside to God

Hermes,

Q-CD, vol 8: Moon and Mars, Ch. 2: The Song of Love                             

21

"Hermes, the son of Great Zeus, and our Messenger, Giver of

Good Things:

would you be willing, on oath, to wed with the Golden

Aphrodite,

even though trapped by strong bonds?" The Messenger God,

Slayer of Argus, retorted: "Would that this happened to myself!

Yes, O Master Apollo, Unfailing Marksman. If unbreakable

bindings of three times the number would fasten me down, yes,

and all of the goddesses were to be looking upon the two of us.

Would that it happened that I should be sleeping with Golden

Aphrodite!"

Speeches like this caused new laughter to rise from the

Heavenly Deities.

Poseidon laughed not at all; he besought on the contrary

Hephaestus, Supreme-of-all-Craftsmen, to let go of Ares,

speaking in winged words:

"Loose him, I promise, when ordered by you, to compel him to

pay you

all that is right, and I swear this before all these Gods, the

Immortals."

Famous and Strong-armed Hephaestus replied: "Do not ask

this.

Think! Poseidon, Earth-Surrounder. Bail for a reprobate!

How can I place you in bondage among the immortal gods,

granted that Ares will avoid both the debt and the bail and

depart."

Still the Shaker-of-Earth was insistent; Poseidon declared,

"Surely if Ares shall flee from his debt I shall pay you

Hephaestus."

Then the Famous, the Strong-armed Hephaestus conceded in

answer:

"I am not right to deny you, nor would such an action be

proper."

Suddenly, so saying, the Mighty Hephaestus unfastened the

bindings. Straightaway, freed from their powerful bonds, the

lovers sprang upwards.

Ares proceeded to Thrace, but Aphrodite, Lover of Laughter,

went on to Cyprus, to Paphos, her domain with her fragrant

smoke alter.

There she was bathed by the Graces, who salved her with oils

of immortals,

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ointment refulgent on Gods who are Deathless. And they

clothed her body.

Such was the beauty of raiment, the vision astonished the eyes.

HAPPY ENDING

The opera is over, its audience charmed and relaxed:

This was the song that the famous bard sang and Odysseus re

joiced;

glad in his heart was the guest while he listened; glad, too, the

Phaeacians,

men of the long oars, famed for their sea-going vessels.

Forthwith Alcinous bade Halius and Laodamas to dance by

themselves.

No one could match them. They grasped in their hands a

beautiful purple

ball that Polybus the Wise One had fashioned for them and

their dancing.

One would lean backwards and toss it up high towards the

shadowy clouds. His

brother would leap off the ground in the air, and skillfully catch

it,

even not touching the ground with his feet until holding it

firmly.

Showing their skill at casting the ball straight up high was a

prelude;

Now they began a new dance on the bounteous earth, flinging

the same ball

to and fro, to and fro, as other youths stood in the wings,

beating time.

Great was the din that arose! Odysseus then turned to Alcinous,

saying: "Lord and Renowned among mankind, you boasted of

your dancers;

best you had said that they be, and true are your words in our

full sight.

Looking upon them, amazement takes hold of me here."

Alcinous is gladdened by this praise. He impetuously ordains
that all manner of rich gifts be heaped up for the guest to carry
along home when he leaves Scheria.

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THE PHAEACIAN UTOPIA

The "Love Affair" stands as a complete story in itself. More
exactly, it is a summary of a long dramatic presentation which
will never be heard or seen. And this long story is of course part
of only one episode of the Phaeacian Adventure.

Phaeacia itself is a marvelous creation of Homer-Athena. If the
"Love Affair" as a literary genre can be called the first bedroom
farce, Phaeacia may be called the first Utopia, to be succeeded
by hundreds of utopias in the millennia to come. It has aspects
of More's Utopia, of Campanella's City of the Sun, of Defoe's
Robinson Crusoe, of Hilton's Shangri-la, of Skinner's Walden
II, and of many another.

Phaeacia means in Greek the "Shining Land". It is a new
community, now in its second generation. Its people were once
settled in Hypereia, probably far to the East, when they were
oppressed by savage giant neighbors, "a quarrelsome people
who took advantage of their greater strength to plague them",
says Homer.

Their first king, Nausithous, father of the present king, the
divine Alcinous, "made them migrate and settled them in
Scheria [probably a mythical name, like Phaeacia and
Hypereia], far from the busy haunts of men."

"There he laid out the walls of a new city, built them houses,
put up temples to the gods, and allotted the land for cultiva
tion." They have an abundance of food and water, and of
niceties of civilization. "We run fast and we are first-rate
seamen. But the things in which we take a perennial delight are
the feast, the lyre, the dance, clean linen in plenty, a hot bath,
and our beds." The wash is done in "the noble river with its
never-failing pools, in which there was enough clear water
always bubbling up and swirling by to clean the dirtiest
clothes."[1]

The beautiful princess, Nausicaa, is impelled by Athena to go
with attendants to the river banks to wash clothes and play
games, activities suggestive of the rites of Spring to at least one
authority, Emile Mireaux [2]. There she inevitably encounters
Odysseus, begrimed from his many days adrift but refreshed
from sleep. Her ball falls near the thicket where he lay, she

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meets him and he wins her trust. She in turn reassures her play
mates.

"Stop, my maids. Where are you flying to at the sight of a man?
Don's tell me you take him for an enemy, for there is no man on
earth, nor ever will be, who would dare set hostile feet on
Phaeacian soil. The gods are too fond of us for that.  Remote in
this sea-beaten home of ours, we are the outposts of mankind
and come in contact with no other people."[3]

A town square, marketing-place and meeting place, well-paved,
adjoins the Temple of Poseidon, chief of the gods favoring the
city, for he fathered king Nausithous. Poseidon is not always
pleased with his Phaeacians, because they are sometimes too
hospitable to travelers who have offended him, and it was fore
told by King Nausithous that Poseidon would be jealous enough
one day to petrify a vessel of theirs and swing about the
mountains behind them into a ring that would foreclose the sea.

Meanwhile they lived well and gave their energies to the
building and sailing of fleet ships. They held commerce, too, in
contempt. Neither grim warriors nor merchants, yet they
enjoyed all the good things of life.

The King's name of Alcinous (Alkynoos) is significant. The
central star of the Pleiades, the gate to Paradise and to the world
of spirits, is Alkyone. Alkyonic Lake is the waters of death
leading of Paradise. There has since time immemorial been a
worldwide knowledge, among tribes and great civilizations,
about the Pleiades, early November celebrations occur
centering upon them [4].

The palace of Alcinous, too, is shining and grand, "for a kind of
radiance, like that of the sun or moon, lit up the high-roofed
halls of the great king." The palace enjoys a large household of
retainers and its gardens extend into a bush-enclosed orchard.

Homer is as respectful of women as anyone in this age of brutal
male chauvinism. Queen Arete, mother of Nausicaa, "sits at the
hearth in the light of the fire, spinning the purple yarn, a
wonder to behold, leaning against a pillar and her hand maids
sit behind her,"[5] but she is a powerful factor in setting policy
for the realm. "If you secure her favor, Nausicaa tells Odysseus,

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you may hope to regain home and friends. "On mother's wishes
much depends."[6]

The places of public assembly can hold "many thousands": all
of the nobles, their families and the population. The king is be
loved, but ruler by consensus. Social and political functions are
performed by men chosen, perhaps elected, from the
aristocracy. For example, when the performance of "Love
Affair" was announced, a committee of nine official stewards
took matters in hand. "They were public servants who
supervised all the details on such occasions."

The Phaeacians are a well-organized community. They have a
public opinion. There are conventional moral standards: gossip,
respect, a time for marriage, a place for everyone and for
strangers: these seem all the more utopian as they seem real.

A peaceful people, we are induced to believe, a people beloved
by and respecting the gods, a people who lived serenely under
an ultimate belief that their special god, Poseidon, would take
away their sea, their precious sea-fairing way of life.

In the end, we are told, these beautiful people, hospitable, who
had sublimated all terrors to the arts and crafts, were punished
as Poseidon had promised: for their kindness to Odysseus, their
returning ship was frozen to stone and a range of mountains
was about to encircle them.

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Notes (Chapter 2: The Song of Love)

1.      Ibid., VI.

2.      Vol I, chap. X.

3.      Loc.cit.

4.      R. G. Halliburton, 25 Nature (Dec. 1, 1881) 100-1; E. B.
Tylor 25 Nature (Dec. 15, 1881) 150-1; R.G.H., 25 Nature
(Feb. 2, 1882) 317-8.

5.      A. T. Murray,op. cit., I, 229.

6.      Robert Fitzgerald, Homer: The Odyssey (New York:
Doubleday, 1961).

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27

CHAPTER THREE

THE LOVE AFFAIR AS THE MASK OF

TRAGEDY

The song is sung. The play is over. Now the question is, "What
does it represent?" It represents, I think, and I must take the rest
of this book to explain myself, a shocked spell amidst
conditions of horrifying natural disaster. The Greeks
experienced it, suppressed its memories, remembered it
subconsciously, and converted it ultimately into the symbolic
form of a comedy.

The Greeks assumed the Love Affair took place in the sky nor
could it have any other location. The gods move swiftly from
place to place, the Sun is one of the actors, some of the brilliant
imagery such as of "the brazen bright threshold" suggests the
heavens, the gods involved are all sky-gods, and the decor and
associated games are celestial. Hyginus is not alone in speaking
of the play as going on in the sky; speaking of Venus exciting
Mars, he writes that "since she inflamed him violently with
love, she called the star Pyroeis, indicating this fact."[1]

Hyginus' Poetica Astronomica also says that: When Vulcan
married Venus he watched so Mars could only follow but never
catch her.

This indicates the nature of the "love-affair" as a planetary
engagement and hints at prior close encounters of Vulcan with
Aphrodite and then a relationship such that Vulcan would
always be closer to Aphrodite than Mars could be.

Effective planetary encounters must be accompanied by grave
disasters.

Probably the primordial elements of The Love Affair were
composed of the incoherent, intense feelings of people in a
frenzy of despair and fright [2]. Words of today cannot express

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28

their feelings. The biblical prophets convey some impressions
of the state of mind in the throes of disaster. The mind of today,
developed in the imagery of nuclear bomb devastation, can
perhaps understand something of their feelings. Accounts of
historically experienced natural disasters such as Vesuvius,
Krakatoa, the Pestigo (Wisconsin) forest fire, and the great
Lisbon earthquake lend analogous material.

What had really happened had probably caused repeated surges
of disjoined symbols and thoughts. The poetry must have
sprung originally from a chaos of sounds, sights and human
babel and ejaculations, uttered by many tongues, over hours and
days of time. A "normal" adult would probably have been
reduced to bodies of expression such as follows:

The worst is happening... just as feared!... all

sacrifices failed... here it is... annihilator...

oracles... monster-body... war... death sun... red

dogs, blood...Aphrodite... sex... moon... darkness...

thunder...trumpets... golden... Ares... Zeus...

sword...stretched fireballs... moon rape... heat...

god, god...who... suffocation... stinks... stand still...

run...hide... don't move... a giant in the sky

calling... he was away... his flares are out... moon

is his... we give it... pray take it... all this can't

happen... we did not mean it... abah, awah, abah...

we are dying... glowers... shakes... where is he

going... where has she gone... din... deafness... the

sky and land are afire...Poseidon stop it... shake

them off... take everything...let us be... uh.

And so on.

But the horror once past paved the way for music and literature.
The state of mind of the audience of Demodocus can be recon
structed into a more coherent story in which the matching of a
new plot with the original real story is nicely achieved. The
original memories and anxieties are blended and smoothed over
by the new story so that they erupt under control. History
cannot be forgotten, but it can be made tolerate. The Song of
Love is telling something that only the collective unconscious
can understand, and which the unconscious rarely permits to be
verbalized. I shall try, nevertheless, to force to emerge some of

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the unexpressed and unconscious feelings of the people of
Phaeacia as the Love Affair is sung and played. To do so I may
resort to a rhetorical device.

AN ANCIENT PRIEST EXPLAINS

If an old priest of Delphi were to be instructing acolytes about
events of the song, we imagine that lecture-notes upon his dis
course would read as follows:

"We know these gods for what they are,

uncontrollable and primeval; we cannot say what

we think of them; we must not even say who they

are or where we first met them; we must not say

what they did to us or in any way accuse them; we

must not even remember too much lest we feel

agony and panic. The rhythms and the chords keep

our feeling under control, reinforcing the screen of

words alone. The story, as Demodocus signs it, is

familiar. Yet it contrives to excite and appease us.

We shall feel better afterwards. That is because

otherwise we might be compelled to confront the

true story, which is rather like what follows,

although we cannot be sure that it is more than a

terribly realistic dream."

THE HIDDEN STORY

Ares and Aphrodite are the planet Mars and the

Moon. The Planet Mars is ruddy and far away

now, but was then close to the Moon who was

bathed in her golden aura. Hephaestus is the

planet Venus. He is not married to Aphrodite. He

approached her on various occasions in times

past, and ourselves too, our Earth, and was

terribly destructive. And the Moon was disturbed

and drawn to him and then was drawn back, and

so we gave her in marriage, or rather Zeus gave

her in marriage, for how else could they be

legitimately coupled save by the ruler of the skies

and of humanity, who has for three thousands

years dominated us.

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Mars and Moon are not in love, nor do they make

true love. They are destroying each other and us.

Mars' huge body which once seemed like a flaming

sword interjects itself between Moon and Earth.

And the whole primal violence of extreme sexual

activity occurs on a world scale. The bed of Earth

shakes, the skies glare brilliantly, electricity is all

pervasive, the Moon disappears and reappears. A

massive rape is occurring. Hephaestus is far away.

It is night but for the brilliance of the scene, secret

night when sex flourishes and Aphrodite, the Dark

One, makes love. Perhaps if he would return, he

would divert the assailant Mars and spare us from

total destruction.  We would ourselves imitate this

orgy, if we were engaging in an alternate mood of

anxiety-therapy, or we would propitiate by

sacrificing ourselves or what belongs to us or

whatever and whomever we can lay our hands on.

We know what "gifts of Ares" are. They are

meteors. They are the steeds of Mars. They have

struck us and are showered upon Moon. When our

King Nausithous led us out of Hypereia, it was

because of the stone-giants which Mars and his

horde had hurled upon our land.

The secret will be exposed. Helios the Sun is

rising. He never takes part. He cannot rescue us.

But he will attract the attention of the Planet

Hephaestus and perhaps an intervention will

occur.

It does. Planet Hephaestus looms large, in blazing

anger, his immense arms and stunted legs making

him look like a comet. Then he disappears. He

does not approach the lovers closely. He goes to

the other side of Earth. We wonder whether he will

reappear. The destruction upon Earth is terrible.

Mars is twice the size of the Moon. We are struck

repeatedly by his "gifts"-gases, stones, quakes. The

waters are disturbed. The tides are high, the volca

nos are erupting. Will the other gods do nothing?

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Now the Moon and Mars are behind us, leaving us

rocking and quaking. But Hephaestus is once more

in sight. He is as large as Mars, brilliant, and

trailing electric sparks even against the gray sky.

But if his legs drag, not so his arms. His huge arms

flap as they hammer out the sparks. The whole sky

around him is brazen. He drops flashing clouds

over our heads and from the corner posts or

pillars of the sky.

But again he departs and again come Mars and

Moon. She had returned separately to the region of

Jupiter and comes back once again to meet Mars

who has come flying along parallel to us. Moon

attracts Mars once more. Great electric sparks

envelop them. They are perturbed. They pause and

move, pause and move. Now Moon appears in an

unusual phase or position, now she disappears

behind Mars and he moves ahead showing another

part of her. Mars is closely following the Moon,

which is to say that he is moving swiftly parallel to

the Earth.

But Hephaestus now approaches, even larger than

he was a few hours ago (who can measure such

agonizing time?) A thunderous noise fills the

heavens, like the enraged shouts of the cuckolded

husband. It is something to cause ugly laughter; it

is a tangible, an enormous, a highly visible fact,

this entanglement of the two.

We shall now witness the catastrophe, as we

Greeks call the end of an age and also that part of

a drama which brings the culmination of a plot.

"The Gods of the Sky must come!," says the

thunderous noise. The scene must attract them, for

it is their milieu. It is the end of the age, the end of

the world. They will be our salvation or our doom.

Hephaestus is lying. He knows he is not the son of

Zeus but was cast down by Jupiter and took his

strange misshapen form (compared with the other

Olympians) from the accident. The bed of

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Hephaestus is by the Moon, not as it is today, even

though he is often far away and invisible in the

northern sky.

But Mars has climbed upon this bed and is trapped

in the invisible electrical-gravitational net. The sex

bout has ended with the bodies suddenly largely

stilled. Our Earth also pauses.

Hephaestus  hovers in the sky, glowering, raging,

exchanging bolts with Mars. Mars tries to emerge

from the bed of the Moon. Hephaestus demands his

bride-price back from Jupiter. They are the same

"gifts" as Mars, which Hephaestus had showered

upon Moon in olden time, when the marriage was

first consummated and we have not recovered from

that marriage of the gods yet.

Jupiter stays away. He is retiring more and more.

He has claimed to set up the order of the skies,

such as it is.  He is scarcely responsible, it seems

to us, for he should return to strike Mars with

thunderbolts and drive him away. Instead of the

conflict being adjudicated, it will have to be

compromised.

Other gods gather. Actually they do not. But

memories of them do because of the terror of our

experience. New terrors pile upon the old and

explode them. Here we see Hermes and Apollo, the

lucky and the wise. What can we except from

them? Hermes is the helper. We say he is so,

because we hope he will help and because once

long ago he had been near us when we were going

through a similar crisis; he fled to safety and we

followed; so we say he led us.

But now he is tormenting us. Prompted by Apollo,

he tells the grim truth as a sexual joke; he is an old

lover of Moon too, and great is the ruin they

brought upon each other and ourselves but great

also is the attraction these gods of the sky have for

one another. They laugh at the tragedies of others

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because they suffered the same themselves and no

one consoled them.

The goddesses stayed away, "out of shame", we

sing. The goddesses are not ashamed; it is male

conceit. Their names are taken by the male gods

whenever they please. Artemis "is" Apollo. Hera

"was" Poseidon and "is" now Jupiter. And Athena?

Well, Athena "is" Hephaestus, the only planetary

female, so she is here in fact and deed.

Hephaestus-Venus will stay married to the Moon.

We know how it will end. The only question is

whether Mars should pay anything. Apollo

remains aloof and laughing. But for Earth and Sea

it is no laughing matter. Poseidon stands for Earth

when Mother Earth is absent, as well as for the

all-encircling seas and waters. He is The Earth

Shaker! He repeatedly beseeches the Planet Venus

on our behalf to uncouple Mars and Moon. Earth

is already paying its price and willing to pay more

if only the disasters will cease.

The tension is terrible to bear. Fortunately Venus

Hephaestus is about to move away. The disaster

cannot continue. He therefore accepts the offer of

the Earth-Shaker who may be growing tired of his

own exertions. More will be paid by Earth to the

Planet that shines in daytime. This bodes ill. More

songs, more dances, prayers, sacrifices, suffering

will be required in the future, from Venus as well

as from Mars.

So the two bodies are loosed and spring up and

away. Thank the Gods! The break happened fast.

As Venus withdrew, Mars speeded away in a new

orbit to the Northwest, propelled by the planets

Earth and Venus, and the Moon, violently abused,

flew Southwest where all smoke and fires were

quickly quenched and she emerged soon,

appearing as round and golden as she did before

but she now carries new pocks and scars. The

character of the Moon is unchanged.

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The Gods are uncontrollable; we must not offend

them; we must not pretend to be like them; but we

cannot help but sing and dance about them. It is

one of the few things we can do to prevent our

utter destruction in the future and suppress our

intolerable memories of the past.

And the old priest would conclude with a warning to the
acolytes: "Someday you will understand this, but what I have
told you must always remain a secret from everybody."

The song, the music, and the dancing are ended. The transition
to the ordinary frame of mind occurs. The sons of the good
King Alcinous perform a dance to lighten the minds and hearts
of the audience. They cast a beautiful purple ball far into the air,
leaping to catch it. It seems to reach the shadowy clouds. They
seem to touch the sky, to be as light as air. This heavenly sphere
has no counterparts on earth. Perhaps it is a stretched and
round-stitched bladder or skin filled with feathers, fashioned by
a master hand, or a round-shaped gourd ball. It makes contact
with the celestial spheres-Sun, Moon, Planets. They keep them
up and leap after them; all is done quickly; it is a trompe l'oeil,
a dazzling coda.

AUTHOR'S CODA

If the preceding replay of Demodocus' song as a representation
of the unconscious contains both a new "real" parallel plot and
a certain "madness," one need not be repelled or even surprised.
Literature was not invented by humankind out of boredom with
spending long nights in caves. It emerged as a method of
controlling psychological distress.

Both the "real" story and the "madness" will come in for more
lengthy discussion. One asks here simply for a beginning of
understanding. As the plot breaks down under analysis, it
should evidence some well-known psychoses of which the
mind is capable under stress. In its suffering and terror the mind
engages in many forms of delusional thought. An important
effect is the belief that the skies and the earth are alive with
beings who resemble oneself and are similarly motivated. This
anthropomorphism helps the transfiguration of the
uncontrollable and huge forces into the images of sex, social

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35

power, and property that the mind is accustomed to dealing
with.

Ambivalence to the gods erupts quickly, once the gods are born
out of nature. Hate is just as quickly suppressed and turned
upon oneself, for fear that one will be terribly punished if it
becomes known to the gods. A persecution complex occurs
instantly; one cannot evade the mighty punishers. Symptoms of
schizophrenia are abundant: attempts at shutting out the real
world; attempts at reconstructing quickly a new world of one's
own in which events are controlled only by the mind.

Forgetting and distortion proceed quickly. As soon as possible,
means will be invented to screen off both the real story and its
effects on the psyche. Literature, songs, and games will be
invented. Wars will be waged, for one must handle the urge to
punish oneself by moving out wildly and attacking others.
Temples and palaces for the provision of security and order
must be erected; these will celebrate, in a different screening
language, of course, the events of those days; they will see to it
that the right food is eaten and digested and the proper mating
and reproduction will occur.

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Notes (Chapter 3: The Love Affair as the Mask of Tragedy)

1.         Poetica Astronomica, II 42. The root "pyr" denotes
"fire."

2.         Alfred de Grazia, "The Palaetiology of Fear and
Memory," (Lethbridge, Canada: University of Lethbridge,
1976), Part I.

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CHAPTER FOUR

CATASTROPHE AND SUBLIMATION

One may dare to suppose that the Love Affair stands for a
tragedy of humanity if there is borne in mind a larger theory,
already considerably developed, even if not yet widely
employed. The larger theory, the modern scientific theory of
ancient catastrophes - quantavolution - functions as a kind of
general engineering scheme to guide the reconstruction of the
song of Demodocus. It is both chronological - telling what
happened when - and analytic - telling how it happened. As a
consequence of work done in quantavolution, many ancient and
recent discoveries have come together, attracted as if by a
magnet.

THE GENERAL THEORY OF CATASTROPHE

I state here the several components of the general theory of
ancient catastrophes and quantavolution, shaping it to present
needs to a degree, and illustrating it to the minimal extent
required for its comprehension. Ample documentation and
qualifications are to be found in the "Quantavolution Series"[1]
and other works - of a controversial nature, to be sure.

1. Grave catastrophes have befallen the planet Earth. The evi
dence of geology. oceanography, meteorology,
paleomagnetism, and archeology are continuously bringing
forward new evidence, and rediscovering old evidence, that in
times past the Earth suffered repeated devastation by quakes,
floods, fires and winds whose dimensions are fantastically
beyond any historical experience of the last 2700 years. The
surface of the Earth has been twisted and turned, sunk and
raised, scoured and ploughed on a continental scale. The orbit
of the Earth, the rotation of the Earth, and the axial inclination
of the Earth to the plane of the ecliptic have changed suddenly,
with frightful consequences.

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2. The catastrophes have been initiated in great part by
changes in the solar system. Planets have changed their orbits
and other motions, nearly collided, acquired or discarded
satellites, become heated and cooled, accumulated and
discharged electricity, and, on some of these occasions,
involved the Earth in their titanic activities. One planet, Venus,
may even have been newly created out of Jupiter. The number
of meteors that have struck Earth is large but responsible for
only a portion of the catastrophic damage, since atmospheric,
electrical, tidal and seismic disturbances can occur with or
without body impact.

3. Some catastrophes have had large effects upon mankind.
They have been allocated to past periods during which
hominids and humans lived, whether these are traced back
thousands or millions of years. The last ice age has been moved
up to a point where homo sapiens is readily recognizable, and
has been given by many geologists a huge, abrupt beginning
and/or conclusion. All agree that, on occasion, as far back as the
fossil record may carry and up to the dawn of history, many
species were quickly and concurrently wiped out or reduced to
a few survivors.

4. Some catastrophes have occurred at times within the
capacity of humanity to transmit their memories to successive

generations. All peoples have myths of chaos and creation, and
of the destruction of civilizations and their recreation, in a set of
cycles. As one moves from earlier to later catastrophes the
linkages between oral (and transcribed) myths and factual
reportage, recognizably modern in form, increase. Additional
corroboration comes from the developing science of myth
analysis, contributed to by classicists, anthropologists,
philologists, psychologists, and archaeologists. In addition,
archeology has disclosed periods of total and simultaneous
devastation of existing civilizations in areas stretching from the
Atlantic Ocean to China, and from Mexico to Peru.

5. Wherever symbolic and linguistic evidence is available, and
usually also where only oral traditions are preserved, the
catastrophes suffered on Earth and by humanity were attributed

to changes in the celestial system, and particularly to Ouranos
(the Sky), the planets Saturn, Jupiter, Apollo (now transmuted
beyond ready identification), Mercury, Venus, and Mars. The

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39

latest catastrophes are associated with the erratic and destruc
tive behavior of Mars in the years 776 to 687 B.C., ending that
is, 2662 years ago.  These precise years, which Velikovsky
initially proposed, cover the scenarios of this book, and in my
view are generally acceptable.

6. Putting aside the sudden destruction of many civilizations in
the course of thousands of years and granting that the sheer
survival of these species was all-important, retroactively con
sidered, and furthermore leaving to my book Homo Schizo I the
question whether a highly significant mutation took place
among proto-humans in a cerebral or endocrinal form that
contemporary paleophysiology can barely recognize, the
greatest effect upon humanity of the catastrophes was their

contribution to the making of the human mind and human

nature.

The exceedingly heavy experience of disaster from all forms of
elemental turbulence, with its associated disruption and
dissolution of human communities, caused widespread amnesia.
As much as they could and as quickly as possible, surviving
humans suppressed the memories of those times.

But the fear and the anxiety produced now by one and then by
another catastrophes could not be forgotten and surged
repeatedly to the surface of consciousness. The massive
collective anxiety was displaced onto many different subjects,

altered the ways in which these subjects were viewed and

treated, until finally our modern human nature emerged, replete
with a variety of sublimations, that is, the continuous and partly
controlled discharge of the never-to-be forgotten experiences
and fears of disaster [2].

THE DISPLACEMENT OF AFFECTS

The sublimations of catastrophic anxiety diffused into three
major areas: expressive communication; passive controls; and
active controls.

In the area of expressive communication, the primitive
language was expanded and grew more abstract and conceptual
to describe the behavior being observed in the skies. The astral
events were associated with prior experiences of the closest

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analogous types, especially sex and conflict, and humanized.
The terrific visible skyforces were understood then to be
human-like but superhuman to the nth power. ("The Lord made
the mountains skip like rams," recited the Hebrew psalmist.) All
manner of recounting the events was called for; no matter
which mode, it was bound to be loaded with anxious affect.

The different modes were sorted out, the most heavily charged
from the less, the most denotative from the more connotative.
Different formulas were worked out for handling the modes of
expression; those that were the most direct or challenging to the
superpowers had to be the most carefully licensed and
regulated. Little by little, songs, ballads and fables were
developed that could be granted more freedom of expression.
So began the history of literature, both liturgical and profane.

Passive controls include the incorporation of catastrophic anxie
ty into prescribed conduct, whether personal or social. The
governance of behavior by taboos, fixation of archetypes and
stereotypes, and the performance of rituals alone and in crowds
received so much impetus from the catastrophes and their after
maths that they practically may be said to have sprung from
them. If a word had to be chosen to represent the motivation for
all of these passive controls, it might be an obsession, which
may be defined as the inability to move one's conscious
attention from the centerpiece of one's anxiety without
enchaining the attention.

The greatest taboo of all is to forget the circumstances of
disaster. One freezes like death, like the possum, like the soldier
against a brilliant flare, like the humans who were turned into
statues by the Greek gods, like the Judaic sect whose members
immobilize at the first moment of the Sabbath, in the position
of the moment, until the Sabbath passes. A great proliferation
of ideas and customs can come from this attitude but they will
all be deductively connected to the primeval chaos and creation.
"Good" education comes to be making the young both as fearful
and as habituated as oneself. People think, "If I do something
new, it, the thing, nature, god, will do something new" and
therefore it isn't worthwhile; it is taboo in fact, to try to do so
[3].

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The third great area affected by catastrophe governs human ef
forts at active control of other people and the environment.
Here is included the sharp growth of the power motive (and
corresponding ability) in individuals that start up the centralized
kingdoms (and which prospers from the passive control
behavior just noted). The urge to wage destructive warfare is
enhanced, but also the proliferation of invention: all in imitation
of the celestial forces who hammered, shouted, put on dazzling
displays of light, showered down many types of materials and
objects, and changed many species of animals and plants. "For
the Spartans," wrote Lucian, "Lycurgus drew from the sky his
ordering of their whole polity."[4]

The Love Affair is an example of the first area of sublimation,
the expressive communication, and of one kind of myth, the
holy dreamtime song. But, as has become already apparent, the
words alone are an inadequate description of the event. It
dwells upon what was the last or nearly the last of the great
catastrophes. Every major element of the general theory of
ancient catastrophe put forward above is represented in the
song, its latent meaning, and its physical and social contexts. At
the same time, every element of the general theory of
catastrophe had happened before in earlier disasters, as in the
case of the repeated incursions of Venus upon the Earth's orbit,
which occurred between 1500 B.C. and the time of our story
and which have been described in detail by Velikovsky, by the
"Quantavolution Series," and in related works. And it all
happened again and again before 1500 B.C., which is a vast and
difficult history only now being told.

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Notes (Chapter 4: Catastrophe and Sublimation)

1.     The reader is referred to the volumes of my
Quantavolution Series (Metron Publications : Princeton, N.J.,
1981-4), especially Chaos and Creation and its bibliography.

2.     These matters are discussed at length in Homo Schizo I
and II.

3.     Cf., e.g., Eliade, Myth and Reality, pp. 6-7 et passim.

4.     From "Astrology," p. 367, Vol. V of Works (Loeb ed.,
Harvard University Press, 1936).

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CHAPTER FIVE

HOLY DREAMTIME

Before the Love Affair had been played and sung Odysseus was
reduced to tears by Demodocus' singing of the Trojan War.
And, later on, hours after the Love Affair has been played
Odysseus offers a gift to Demodocus and addressed him:

Demodocus I proclaim you the most distinguished of all
mortals. Either the Muse, daughter of Zeus, instructed you,
or Apollo you directly. For you chant the fate of the
Achaeans absolutely according to its proper ordering: What
they did and had done to them and what distress they
suffered - as if, in some way, you had been present yourself
or had heard it from someone who was there [1].

One may wonder whether, although Odysseus does not
recognize it, the Love Affair, too, is sung "absolutely according
to its proper ordering," and as if Demodocus "had been present"
himself "or had heard it from someone who was there."

Strange it is that Odysseus, when the song is ended, has been
transported and is joyfully at ease. One would imagine that the
story of an adulterous love triangle might have reminded him of
his own plight - long away from his palace and beset by rumors
of his wife's unfaithfulness. One might believe that the song
was in bad taste, or that afterwards he might gnash his teeth and
rend his garments. Not at all. Homer and he obviously did not
feel any such connection between the performance and his
plight.

When the singer, Demodocus , "struck the chords in prelude,"
his audience was already entranced. He himself is blind;
Homer, whose image he may reflect, is also called "the Blind."
He is Homer's "good minstrel, whom the Muse loves above all
other men, and gave him both good and evil; of his sight she
deprived him, but gave him the gift of sweet song."[2]

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There is a hint here that ancient bards were sometimes blinded,
as smiths were ritually lamed, and young singers castrated, to
heighten their symbolic role and competence. No god might
then envy the bard, especially not Apollo, and his blindness is
an assurance that he will not see what is divinely forbidden to
see. Athena, too, was known to play tricks with human sight
[3]. Furthermore, his audience will not be discomfitted at being
viewed in their musing mood by a sensibly alert musician. And,
of course, a blind man may develop epic powers of memory.
An alternative, less radical, would be to sing with eyes closed,
or blindfolded.

The audience is settled around as an organized community,
king and queen, nobles, council of state, the citizens and
retainers, and the Hero, Odysseus. The dancers continue their
movements, acting out the scenes of the sacred play. Those who
have competed in sports rest, their aggressiveness dissipated,
their minds relaxed to receive now a flow of aesthetic
communication.

The singer carries the melody; it is sung in long, measured
lines. His lyre was originally a gift of Mercury and Apollo, and
is a beautiful instrument; its strings are attuned to the heavenly
bodies, as Pythagoras will demonstrate mathematically a cen
tury hence. Although the earliest lyres held three strings, the
age of seven-stringed lyres may have already arrived. The
rhythms are supplied by the ballet who stress movements of the
opera.

The production is a drama, not a ballad or folk song. Its plot is
conventionally complete, perhaps the earliest of the dramatic
plots of what is to become the literary history of Classical
Greece, therefore a great invention, with a pair of protagonists,
an antagonist, the development of a line of conduct, its inter
ruption, a climax, a resolution, a disposition of participants and
values. All happens in a time span close to what Aristotle
discovered, centuries later, to be the ideal unity of dramatic
time.

One notes particularly, in the jargon of literary analysis em
ployed from the time of the early Greek tragedians, the "cata
strophe." The word means "the climax," "the point of
denouement;" in general, the word means "the turning-down

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point," and also "the end of a period of time." Yet it was
historical experience that lent itself to the definition of plot, not
plot of history. It was first an unconscious invention, then a
conscious one, that ordained the classical climax of drama. The
archetypical plot is that when the end of an age arrives, the gods
foregather, and societies turn abruptly downward, after which
the cycle begins once more. The Love Affair is a relic of the
end of the Mycenean Age of Greece.

THE SCANDALOUS LITTLE PIECE

What has been made of the Love Affair? It is at least a song, for
it was chanted to the chords of a lyre, to the accompaniment of
rhythmic dancing. Perhaps, first off, I should stress that its
'songness' has been variously imparted. In the version by the
famous Alexander Pope, one would sense a different spirit. The
bard, Demodokos,

The loves of Mars and Cytherea [4] sings;

How the stern god, enamour'd with her charms,

Clasp'd the gay panting goddess in his arms,

By bribes seduced

And as Hephaestus traps the lovers, Pope's Homer sings:

Stern Vulcan homeward treads the starry way:

Arrived, he sees, he grieves, with rage he burns:

Full horribly he roars, his voice all heaven returns.

"O Jove, (he cried) O all ye powers above,

See the lewd dalliance of the queen of love!

Me, the awkward me, she scorns; and yields her

charms

To that fair lecher, the strong god of arms."

Translation of the Odyssey are numerous. One that interested
me to the point of inquiry was by Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679,)
prepared when he was in his eighties. His long life as natural
philosopher and political scientist carried him through the
extensive revolutions and religious debates of the times and up
to Newton and Whiston. This was the Hobbes whose view of
mankind included the famous phrase that in a state of nature
man's life was "nasty, brutish, and short." Poetically, I must
agree with Pope, who said that Hobbes' version of Homer was

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"too mean for criticism."[5] But did he treat the Love Affair in
some unusual way? Not at all - though it contains a touch of
unwarranted political expertness:

And the judges rise

In number nine, who had elected been

By public-vote, of games to hold assize,

And order took for large room in the middle, And

made it to be planed well and even.[6]

But, as a I shall explain, even if beautifully rendered, the lines
of Homer must read as the pale representation of their original
pronouncement and context.

Experts upon Homer have generally denied serious
consideration to his song about a love affair. It seems to be
what Alexander Pope makes it out to be, burlesque
entertainment for a visiting sailor. One seems to hear the typical
commentator: "A bit scandalous, but then you know how lightly
the Greeks took their gods and goddesses!"

One translator, Professor Murray, indicates conscientiously that
"the whole passage was on moral grounds rejected by some
ancient critics."[7] Walter Otto tells us that "even in antiquity
many readers, Plato among them, found this story offensive,
and in modern times it is generally regarded as a frivolous
burlesque."[8] Professor Finely, an expert upon the society and
economy of Homeric Greece, speaks of "the little pieces, like
the myth of the adultery between Ares and Aphrodite"[9] that
infiltrate the Odyssey. George Sarton, the encyclopedic
historian of science regards the whole of the Odyssey, indeed,
as a story of peace, a gentle romance [10].  Such observations
can only reflect the nostalgia for one's school-days: the blood
and guts spilled in the Odyssey, and the terrors entailed, would
put to shame the authors of a typical evening of violence and
horror on American commercial television. T. B. L. Webster
mentions the possibility that "the light-hearted treatment of the
gods in some Egyptian stories may have influenced
Demodokos' lay of Ares and Aphrodite in the eight book of
Odyssey."[11] E. V. Rieu, introducing his translation of the
Odyssey, says that "in the famous Lay of Demodocus" Homer
provides "a treatment that we can only regard as humorous."
This merely betrays, he claims, "a very tolerant understanding

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of their motives and frailties," not an absence of respect for the
power and beauty of the gods [12].

But, then, the distinguished Robert Graves, premature women's
liberationist that he is, says: "though masquerading as an epic,
the Odyssey is the first Greek novel; and therefore wholly irre
sponsible where myths are concerned." Graves tends to agree
with Samuel Butler, author of the utopia, Erewhon, who, in
another book, Authoress of the Odyssey, ascribed the work to a
young and talented Sicilian noblewoman of the district of Eryx
[13].

Experts can be piled "Ossa upon Pelion" without reaching
heaven. Otto's elaborate concern over reason and respect
reminds one of a prude explaining why his sister is loitering on
a Piraeus street corner. "The story is naturally not a moralizing
sermon, but that does not make it frivolous. Its tone of lofty
humor removes it from both moralizing and frivolity." Ares is a
bloody savage, disliked by everyone. "All interest centers upon
the discreditable role played by Ares... And Aphrodite? If we
consider the story carefully we suddenly realize that she
receives no attention whatsoever." His final gaff regarding
Poseidon is monumental: "Poseidon is so touched by Ares'
situation that, unable to laugh, he prevails upon Hephaestus to
release his hapless victim and is so kindly as to provide a
guarantee for him."[14] This comment would perhaps have
made the surly Poseidon laugh for once.

BURLESQUE OR RELIGION?

One cannot be satisfied with these explanations: a little piece, a
casual ballad, a joke at the expense of the gods, or a pardonable
escapade. Suppose the passage is reread, beginning with the
paragraph before the song commences.

"Sacred commands of Alcinous." Do godlike kings incite
simple public pornography?

"Quickly arose a lithe herald, seeking to find and to fetch him
the resonant harp from its palace place." Are treasured instru
ments of music employed casually?

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"Rising as well were a chosen nine, men who were Lords
Ceremonial, publicly called, whenever the people foregathered
and needed an ordering." These are nobles. They are nine, the
magic number of days in the week may then have existed or
once existed in a 36-day or 27-day month [15]. They are chosen
representatives of the community, a council of ministers of
public order. Are these august personages activated for the sake
of a ditty?

"They cleared out space for the dancing to come; they measured
a broad ring." Is a large dancing ring being readied without
apprehension and excitement?

Demodocus "moved in the midst of the young boys." He is the
star performer, blind, revered, also godlike (of these qualities
we read in other passages). "All of them skilled in the dance
though they blossomed with fair youth." This is not to be
improvised. The performers know their places. They have all
achieved high competence.

"Down stamped their feet on the floor." The rhythms begin,
even before the lyre sounds. "Spellbound Odysseus marveled as
dancing feet twinkled in mid-air!" The little song is introduced,
it is clear, as a full court opera. The preliminaries portend a
significant event. Odysseus, and the rest of the audience, have
become transformed by the rhythm, flashing movements, and
apprehension into an unusual state of mind, a new mood.

The mood is not vulgar or profane. It is not lecherous.
Something more profound is to occur. The audience has
experienced it all before; their contagion affects Odysseus. The
incident, from its very beginnings, portends an affair of state,
not a moment of minstreling, a story of significance rather than
cocktail hour music. It is to be even rather sacred, I think.

Perhaps reassurance is needed. Is this behavior, this kind of
performance, unanalyzed in science? Not at all. It is universal
and has been generalized. Mircea Eliade, a distinguished religi
ous ethnologist, would lend his support:

All dances were originally sacred;... they had an
extrahuman model... The model may have been revealed by
a divinity (for example the pyrrhic, the martial dance

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created by Athena) or by a hero (cf. Theseus' dance in the
Labyrinth). The dance may be executed to acquire food, to
honor the dead, or to assure good order in the cosmos. It
may take place upon the occasion of initiations, of magico
religious ceremonies, of marriages, and so on... What is of
interest to us is its presumed extrahuman origin (for every
dance was created in illo tempore, in the mythical period,
by an ancestor, a totemic animal, a god, or a hero.)
Choreographic rhythms have their model outside of the
profane life of man; whether they reproduce the movements
of the totemic or emblematic animal, or the motions of the
stars; whether they themselves constitute rituals
(labyrinthine steps, leaps gestures, performed with
ceremonial instruments) - a dance always imitates an
archetypal gesture or commemorates a mythical moment.
In a word, it is a repetition, and consequently a reactualiza
tion, of illud tempus, `those days.'"[16]

The Love Affair appears then as a sacred song, not bawdy lyric;
or at least its context is unmistakably holy, putting aside its plot
and words. One cannot be sure of either its full context or
words, of course, because Demodocus tells of another,
apparently long operatic ballet that we are not privileged to
watch and hear.

THE PIOUS DRAMATIST

The Phaeacian audience is in illo tempore. It is in Holy Dream
time, a state of being in the past and in the present, where a
great event is happening and still away from it in the here and
now, in the presence of those who were involved in the action.
One cannot watch the Phaeacians as R. M. Berndt did the
aboriginal Australian Wonguri in a similar format and mood
[17], or as other anthropologists have observed primitive tribal
performances; one must imagine them with the aid of all the
evidence that can be brought to bear upon the scene. If one is
successful, it will be owing to another scholar, in this case
Giovanni Patroni, whose total immersion in ancient
Mediterranean sources has permitted him elaborately to
reconstruct the format of the song of Demodocus.  He says:

The most important observations that the singing of
Demodocus merits (and has too long awaited) concern the
generic type of the song, its aim and function in Homeric
and pre-Homeric society, the probable frequency and
importance of recitations analogous to that we see held in

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the agora of Scheria by Demodocus with the aid of a corps
de ballet or a chorus that will interpret the narrative of the
singer (but we do not mean exclusively) through the
medium of movements and dance figures.

This is not epic poetry. Nor is it a song, nor a fragment of a
song, nor an episode of an Achaean saga... Neither, for that
matter, notwithstanding that its subject concerns
exclusively the gods, a sacred hymn. If it is the last, it
reflects the higher personal, profound and polemical
religiousity of Homer; in this sense it should be entitled:
`The triumph of Mediterranean religion over the foolish
and sacrilegious heresy of Olympia.'"[18]

By this, Patroni means that Homer adores the ancient Great
Goddess, detests the single-minded destructive god Ares, and
upholds the peaceful sovereignty of the female principle that
antedated the barbarous incursions of the Achaeans into
Minoan and Mycenaean civilization.

In effect, says Patroni, the Song is not sacred poetry because
one could not come out openly and formally to the greater glory
of Aphrodite, even though the Song carried her through a
tedious trial at the hands of a repulsive husband and a mindless
warrior lover.

So Patroni classifies the cantata of Demodocus as "opera
theatre," midway between our ballet and melodrama with
dance, a musical satire perhaps.

But, in fact, Patroni goes beyond his own real interpretations, so
prejudiced for the archaic Mediterranean religion is he (and
alike to Robert Graves in this regard). We must insist that he
stay with his own judgement - it is sacred poetry even if in
fluenced by the personal religion of Homer. It is sacred enough,
as he points out immediately, to prompt extraordinary prepara
tions, measure the magic circle, place the venerated poet in the
center that is to be occupied many years later by an alter of
Dionysus, use the sacred instrument of religious and funereal
singing of the Minoans, and employ the incredible acrobatic
dancing of the bull-leapers of Tyrins and Knossos. The song, he
knows, is the abbreviation of a long performance, and takes
place in the halls of the prince.

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Indeed, such is the enthusiasm of Patroni for what he believes
must have occurred in the opera-theater of the Love Affair that
he uncovers ultimately the vast majority of criteria that for an
thropologists and psychologists denote the Holy Dreamtime.
And he forgets that he has for a moment faltered and said that
the hierarchs could not allow a religious character to be granted
the triumph of Aphrodite.

He gives, actually, a full set of stage directions for the pro
duction of the Disastrous Love Affair of Mars and Moon.
Dancers leap high into the sky. The Sun mandates a messenger
to Hephaestus (for the sun, reasons Patroni, cannot move from
its course). Direct quotations are sung by actors, the rest by
Demodocus. The climax brings together all of the actors to
determine the resolution of the plot, and the finale must be
beautiful and ecstatic; Ares is summarily dismissed, but Golden
Aphrodite, unabashed, flies to her island where she is
perfumed, beautified, and made virginal altogether.

The goddess - impersonated by an actor - hid herself
momentarily in the base of the tower that had been put at
the disposition of the spectacle, while the music and ballet
entertained the audience; and, from another exit that gave
upon the sea (at Scheria the agora was next to the arsenal: it
was the same in all the maritime cities; elsewhere the sea
was simulated by pulling a boat with a pulley) she
embarked on a boat kept in readiness and reappeared from
the other side, landing and reentering the arena with all of
her cortege, quickly then joined by the entire corps de
ballet which, having given further proof of its unmatchable
competence, composed itself for the final scene. And what
could be the meaning of the scene if not: The Triumph of
Aphrodite?

The answer to his rhetorical question would disappoint him. It
could be, it was, the Triumph of Athena the Producer and
Director of the opera. Zeus said to Hera in the Iliad when Hera
proposed to fight Ares: "Go to it then, and set against him the
spoiler Athene, who beyond all others is the one to visit harsh
pains upon him."[19]

The chorus of this Mycenaean drama moved directly into the
classical Greek chorus, says Patroni (p. 250). Here is one more
indication of the interface between Mycenean and Greek, rather

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than a five hundred year chasm of barbarism. The circle we see
in Scheria, too, persisted in the theatre at Epidaurus.

Patroni's informed visions of the dramaturgy of Homer are
captivating. The production of the Love Affair in Scheria was
complete and elaborate, as much so as the Dreamtime
production of the Moon and the Dugong that I mentioned
above, though relative to the culture of the indigenous
Australians. Patroni's assertions, that Homer was heir to the
Minoan and Mycenaean theatre, and that he was a fully
experienced choreographer and dramatist, are acceptable too.

The anthropological and mythological evidence should induce
Patroni to acknowledge his own immense cultural panorama
and to grant that the "marveling" and "spellbound" Odysseus,
along with the Phaeacian audience, was in the state of Holy
Dreamtime, midway between the pomp and circumstance of the
religious "mass" and the nearly secular games that preceded the
spectacle.

Here Emile Mireaux has hit the target briefly and sharply:

Choral lyric poetry naturally remained closer to its religious
origins. It was really the poetry of the sacred songs, with
their accompaniment of music and dancing... (It included
the hyporcheme which involved mime dancing. The
mischievous story recited by Demodocus...may be simply a
hyporcheme... All these collective displays were designed
to 'inspire' the community and lead to the exorcizing of the
'demons' of envy, discord and civil strife [20].

The Olympic Games themselves, agglomerates of athletics and
poetry, had been instituted in the year -776, and no one doubts
their religious and cultural aims. Then and at the time of the
Love Affair, the Greeks, of many ethnic subcultures with local
versions of the gods, and with all manner of archaic and foreign
vestiges, were pulling themselves together. The divine Homer
was striving to lead them.

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Notes (Chapter 5: Holy Dreamtime)

1.      Odyssey, VIII,* s. 487-91.

2.      VIII, I. 62-4; V. I, 263 in Murray, op. cit.

3.      Graves, I,23:I, p.87.

4.      Cytherea is one of the epithets given Aphrodite. Cytherea
was the holy island which the newly born goddess touched
while floating towards her destination of Cyprus.

5.      The English Works, Vol. X (London: ed. 1677; John
Bohn, 1844, W. Molesworth, editor), p. iv.

6.      Ibid, p. 376.

7.      Op. cit., p.276.

8.      The Homeric Gods, trans. by Moses Hadas (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1954).

9.      M. I. Finley, The World of Odysseus (Middlesex,
England: Penguin Books, 1954, 1967, 1972),p. 40.

10. A History of Science: Ancient Science through the Golden
Age of Greece, 1958 (New York: John Wiley and Sons,
1964),p. 135.

11.     From Mycenae to Homer (New York: W. W. Norton,
1958, 1964), p. 88.

12.     Page 5.

13.     The Greek Myths, 2 vols. (New York: Braziller, 1957).
Cf. v. II, pp. 376,365.

14.      Op. cit., p. 245.

15.     Immannuel Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, hereafter
cited simply as W in C, (New York: Doubleday and Co., Inc.,
1950), pp. 343-4.

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16.      The Myth of the Eternal Return, originally in French,
1949(Princeton, N. J.:Princeton University Press, 1954, 1965),
pp. 28-9. As a well worked out case, see R. M. Berndt, "A
'Wonguri-Manzikai Song Cycle of the Moon-Bone," XIX
Oceania (September, 1948, 16-50)

17.      Ibid., and see my note on this song in The Burning of
Troy.

18.      Commenti Mediterranei all'Odissea di Omero (Milano:
Marzorati, 1950), p. 249

19.      Richard Lattimore, The Iliad of Homer(Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1962),p. 148.

20.      Daily Life in the Time of Homer, trans. by Iris Sells from
the 1954 French edition (New York: MacMillan and Company,
1959),p. 102.

55

PART TWO

GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS

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CHAPTER SIX

THE RAPE OF HELEN

It began during the furious quarrel between Odysseus and
Achilles at the rich feast of the gods, sings Demodocus, "for it
was at this very moment that calamity began to unroll upon
both Trojans and Danaans by the plans of the Great Zeus."[1]

The Iliad is sung as the wrath of Achilles on one level - the
Poet says so - but is of a type with the battles of the sky gods
recited in Scandinavian, Finnish, Hindu, Mexican, Babylonian,
and other epics. The Greek gods of the Trojan Wars engage in
plain soldiering, hurling rocks and spears, shooting arrows, and
driving chariots. They make onslaughts from heaven; they
launch disasters upon Earth: plagues, fires, hurricanes,
earthquakes, floods, hail of stones and arrows, famines, fogs,
and darknesses in the day.

The gods negotiate amongst themselves and with humans. They
engage in fighting, trickery, argument, and bribery amongst
themselves. They build morale and conduct psychological
warfare; they provide military intelligence but also distort
information for the good of their favorites. They counsel the
warriors on tactics. They enforce rules of warfare that they
sometimes themselves violate. They manufacture weapons.
They promote and reverse events, battles, and decisions of
leaders.

Whole sections of the Iliad are devoted to the warring of the
gods. On the Achaean side there range Athena, Hera, Poseidon,
Hephaestus. On the Trojan side, the line-up includes Ares, Aph
rodite, and Apollo. The victory is with the Achaeans and their
gods, although the Homeric element ends with Achilles' killing
of Hector, the burial of Hector, and a mere pause in the
struggle; however, all known versions of the rest of the story,
occupying the tenth year, agree that the Achaeans "won the
war" and razed Troy.

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Whether or not Troy was actually destroyed by the Achaeans
cannot be told from the ruins of the city. Troy VI and VIIa are
the best candidates for the historical city; Schliemann's Troy
(now referred to as Troy IIg) is not regarded anymore as a
possibility; I have written of this case in the Book, The Burning
of Troy. Troy IIg was destroyed by an atmospheric
conflagration; Troy VI by an earthquake; Troy VIIa by an
atmospheric conflagration.

These, to Homer and his audiences, would be the gods in battle,
the effects of "a divine-kindled fire of stones" (Iliad) and other
superhuman operations. The "Fall of a City" is a legendary
symbol in various cultures for a disaster, that is, the disruption
and end of a celestial order. It is likely that the Fall of Troy was
such a catastrophe, in which human agency played less of a role
than the divine.

THE INDESTRUCTIBLE LADY HELEN

Some of the Trojan story is reported in the Odyssey, by
Demodocus no less, and by Odysseus from Hades. There and
elsewhere the post-war adventures of the Achaean heroes are
recounted and it would appear that for the most part they
received very little for their pains except more suffering,
mishaps, treachery, and misadventure.

But let us examine, with Finley's words, the case of

Helen, who is a very peculiar figure. Helen, daughter of
Zeus and Leda, was Aphrodite's favorite, and thanks to the
gifts of the goddess she succeeded in embroiling Greeks
and Trojans in a gigantic struggle that cost both sides
dearly. Helen was no innocent victim in all this, no
unwilling captive of Paris-Alexander, but an adulteress in
the most complete sense. For Paris there was no atonement
... But Helen received no punishment, and scarcely any
reproach. She ended her days back in Sparta, administering
magical drugs obtained in Egypt, interpreting omens, and
participating in the life of the palace much like Arete
[queen of the Phaeacians and a strange, powerful figure]
and not like a proper Greek woman [2].

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The "enigmatic" and "complicated" image of Helen, that Finely
alludes to, has a simple solution. Helen of Troy stands for the
Moon. She represents the goddess Aphrodite. Paris-Alexander,
Prince of Troy, represents the god Mars-Ares. The Moon that
had been "embraced" over centuries by Hephaestus (Athena
planet Venus) in his encounters with the Earth is taken away
from him; Athena-Hephaestus and their allies must repossess it.
Helen is the Moon Goddess and the world is the male version
of Helen, father of the family of all Greeks. Etymologists have
also indicated a connection between "Selene" and "Helios," the
latter deriving from the same Indo-European root as sun and
solis [3]. Thus she symbolizes in the battle of the gods the
coming of the Hellenes into their revived nationhood in
conjunction with the triumph of the Athena faction of the
family of Zeus.

Let us read in Graves briefly:

The Ionians and Aeolians, the first two waves of patriarchal
Hellenes to invade Greece, were persuaded by the Hellads
already there to worship the Triple-goddess and change
their social customs accordingly, becoming Greeks (graikoi
'worshippers of the Grey Goddess, or Crone'). Later, the
Achaeans and Dorians succeeded in establishing patriarchal
rule and patrilinear inheritance, and therefore described
Achaeus and Dorus as first-generation sons of a common
ancestor, Hellen - a masculine form of the Moon-goddess
Helle or Helen ... Aeolus and Ion were then relegated to the
second generation, and called sons of the thievish Xuthus,
this being a way of denouncing the Aeolian and Ionian
devotion to the orgiastic Moon-goddess Aphrodite - whose
sacred bird was the xuthos, or sparrow, and whose
priestesses cared nothing for the patriarchal view that
women were the property of their father and husbands [4].

Hans Jones, author of The Gnostic Religion, may also be
quoted. For he has traced a very old belief in the connection
between Moon and Helen:

"Some Greek mythological speculation seems to have
associated the Homeric Helen with the moon, whether
prompted by the similarity of Helene and Selene, or by her
fate (abduction and recovery) interpreted as a nature myth,
or by Homer's once comparing her appearance to that of
Artemis. One story had it that the egg which Leda found
dropped from the moon; and the late Homer commentator

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Eustathius (twelfth century A.D.) mentions that there are
some who say that Helen fell down to earth from the moon,
and that she was taken back up when the will of Zeus was
accomplished. When and by whom this was said,
Eustathius does not state; neither does he say (or imply)
that in this form of the myth Helen served as a symbol of
the anima..."[5]

The plot of the Iliad, then, would become the plot of the Love
Affair, where the central action concerns the recapture of Aph
rodite from Ares by Hephaestus (Athena). The theory would
explain many problems (and no doubt will create some). The
question raised endlessly by students, "How could people of
little discipline fight so murderously and for so long over a
mere woman in an age when women were nearly ordinary
chattels?" is answered. Beautiful Helen, eternally unravisheable
and unconquerable, was Moon-Aphrodite. Aphrodite was also a
Great Goddess, and retained qualities of a Great Mother
Goddess; so the psychic prize was not only the Moon and the
beautiful women, but also the Mother of Greece.

The connection between the two wars - one of men, the other of
gods - is often explained as a form of hyperbole and egocen
trism: it "heightens the glamour of the human warriors." This
kind of explanation would no longer be necessary. The two
wars are inextricably and originally linked now; they must be
told together because they happened together. As for the city of
Troy and the Trojans, it is as much a mythical place as the
Shinning Land of Phaeacia. The Trojans are the Moon
capturing followers of Ares.

As has been argued increasingly for two decades, the Trojans
may have been Greeks who were set up by Homer to provide a
counterforce to the Achaeans. Perhaps no saga in all mythology
treats the enemy so objectively, even with positive sympathy.
An epic singer usually delights his audience by heaping sins
and defeats upon the enemy. Even Achilles may have to assume
a new character, that of Athena-Hephaestus, triumphant, but
falling finally through a wound of the foot from the arrow of
Paris-Ares-Apollo-Aphrodite.

If this were generally so, and it is not to be demonstrated here,
then at least the Love Affair portion of the Odyssey may be
fixed as concurrent with the Battle of the Gods in the Iliad. It

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has been affirmed that the Love Affair is a late piece of the
Odyssey. We would not contest this placement at all. We are
thinking of the middle 7th century for the composition of the
Iliad, and of the culture and the skies being both of the
preceding two generations.

Yet one more theory needs to be put forward respecting the
Odyssey, before agreeing that the work may well be composed
of older materials and have its own hidden plot. Compare the
strong affection that Athena holds for Odysseus in the Iliad. He
has her traits. See him again in the Odyssey. Again he has her
traits.. From beginning to end, the work of the Odyssey is the
divine work of Athena. She was not only the producer of the
Love Affair, and of the Iliad, but also of the Odyssey as a
whole, and as she was the principal actor in the first two, so she
is once more the principal actor. For the Odyssey is, in its latent
plot, the story of the wandering planet Venus between 1500
B.C. and her final settling in her present orbit, personified in
her human mirror-image, Odysseus. She it is who saves him at
the beginning from the enraged Sea-Earth god, Poseidon, and
places him safely in command of his royal sphere in the end. If
the Love Affair is a Holy Dreamtime cycle, and the Iliad is
sacred History, then the Odyssey is to be categorized as Sacred
Saga.

For all of this we praise Homer and his kind. He chose for the
leitmotif of his works the natural history of seven centuries. He
rationalized the sky-gods for the Greeks and transfigured
unbearable truth into tolerable myth. His myths coordinated the
basic activities of sexuality, subsistence, respect, power,
technology, and wealth into a consistent cultural pattern and
created the archaic Greek character. He restored to the Greeks
an ethnic identity consistent with the changed nature of the
Gods and heaven.

THE AGE OF MARS

"When the gods fought" was a stock phrase among the ancient
Greeks. Or they referred to "the strife of the Gods," meaning
something that was not simply confined to passages of the Iliad
but was a historical event. According to Velikovsky, the period
776 B.C. to 687 B.C. experienced at least four catastrophes at

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fifteen-year intervals that were felt throughout the world. There
were probably six terror-filled episodes.

This disastrous agenda began with an earlier event, which he
dealt with in the first part of his work called Worlds in Collision
and in his Ages in Chaos. The former amassed evidence that the
planet that we know as Venus appeared before our ancestors as
a comet and nearly destroyed life on Earth around 1500 B.C.
Thereafter the eccentric orbit of the planet threatened the Earth
at intervals of fifty-two years. The comet was worshipped as a
god, Pallas Athena, in the Greek world. Sometimes before 776
B.C. and perhaps close to that year, Venus, in a diminishing
elliptical orbit, encountered Mars. Thereafter, and until both
planets were impelled to take roughly their present safe orbits,
now one and now both approached Earth and Moon with
consequent devastation to the participating bodies.

Awe-inspiring celestial phenomena accompanied the founding
of the Greek Olympic Games in -776. Hercules is supposed to
have organized the games, ushering in what later came to be a
quadrennial all-Greek spectacle of religion, athletics, and
poetry. The Greek Mythikon calendar ends in -776. The
Historikon calendar begins. But Stecchini says that it may have
actually begun, or soon was redone, in -748/7 [6]. And this
would conform to those who say that Hercules did not enter
upon the games until they had been operative on eight prior
occasions.

In the west, the town of Rome was founded in -748 or -747.
Some say -753. It was a period of commotion. Fabius Pictor's
ancient adoption of the date -747 seems most likely to have
been accepted for an event which probably did not take a single
day but had best, for patriotic reasons, to accompany some
climactic events.

The founding of Rome was in the name of Romulus who was
sponsored by Mars. Romulus was the direct descendant of
Aeneas, hence of Aphrodite, mother-protector of Aeneas.
Aeneas founded towns in her names on his long journey to
Italy. Barely had the Trojans become latinized when Rome was
founded. Once more, the revised chronology connects well with
an ancient tradition.

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In the time of Romulus the week and month were reckoned
long, and the early calendar began with the month of Mars and
proceeded in four nine-day weeks for ten months, a total of 360
days. Romulus himself disappeared on the occasion of a natural
tumult during which, says Ovid, the earth shuddered, clouds
obscured the heavens, and the sky was riven by flames; "The
people fled and the king soared upon his father's steeds to the
stars."[7] (His "father" was Mars.) No people on earth came to
be dominated more by Mars and imbued wit the spirit of
ruthless, single-minded warfare personified by Ares-Mars.

In a study of the validity of carbon-dating in ancient times, H.
E. Suess has come upon "a most conspicuous and so far
unparalleled irregularity in the *C14 as a function of time.
There was a "rapid C14 increase at the beginning of the 8th
century B.C. and the sharp maximum between 780 and 770
B.C...It is also the time of a general climate change that took
place on the North American continent... The climatic change
was not a temporary one; it marked the beginning of a
completely new climate epoch."[8] So severe a change
introduces the probability of extraterrestrial encounters, for
reasons that I have advanced and supported in The Lately
Tortured Earth.

In Egypt it was the time of the Libyan and Ethiopian dynasties.
These were foreigners, whose domination over the greatest of
empires has not been satisfactory explained, except as a conse
quence of natural disasters. In Italy, Vesuvius exploded with a
fury not to be approached until the milder eruption that buried
Pompeii and Herculaneum. In Judah, heavenly commotion
excited the populace and brought destruction in the times of
Uzziah (783-742), Ahaz (735-717), and Hezekiah (717-687);
the kingdom of Israel was dissolved and its people dispersed at
this time. The Assyrians were under six different kings, the last
of whom, Sennacherib, saw his army blasted to death before the
city of Jerusalem in a single night of the year -687. It was the
period of a Babylonian-Chaldean empire; of Laomedon and
Priam of Troy; of the destruction of the now Greek-speaking
Cretans at Knossos; of the destruction of Mycenae; and, at the
end of the period, there came Homer and Hesiod. They are the
oldest known Greek writers, and the first whose writing have
appeared in the classical Greek script and alphabet.

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The adoption of a new calendar by the Assyrians in -747, the
beginning of the "Age of Nabonassar," suggests that heavy
disturbances occurred in the first and second encounters;
probably the Earth's orbit, rotation, and axis all underwent
changes.

Thales, one of the great "seven sages," calculated the Greek
calendar, perhaps shortly after Homer and possibly around 
600. But, as Velikovsky points out, Thales re-calculated the
seasons and year after the period of turmoil and changed
celestial periodicities. For, "all around the globe the years
following -687 saw activity directed towards reforming the
calendar."[9] Velikovsky asserts, too, that the day shortened in 
717 and lengthened in -687. These would indicate orbital
changes, axial tilts, changes in rotational speed, or a
combination thereof.

Accordingly, in the Greek-speaking and Middle East areas,
crushing damage to late Mycenaean and early Hellenic
civilization occurred in the period -776 to -687. One or more of
the type of encounters pictured in the Love Affair took place,
with Moon and Mars largely barren of atmosphere, and
susceptible to nearly complete destruction on the faces that they
turn to Earth.

Velikovsky dates the last disaster as centering upon 23 March 
687. It is noteworthy that the Romans celebrated the festivals of
both Minerva (Athena) and Mars about the same time. The
Exodus has also been assigned this day by Velikovsky, over
seven centuries earlier. Probably this is more than a
coincidence, and the double celebration is evidence of both
bodies participating in an encounter about 23 March -687. That
the same date would also correspond roughly with the spring
fertility rites in which the Moon would have long played the
major role would stress, too, the occasion.

This Seventh Century date would put the story that Homer
writes down and Demodocus sings in the period of heavy Greek
colonization of the Western Mediterranean. The physical
destruction of the pre-existing civilization, the movements of
people, the loss of their written language, the capture of
initiative on the part of the uncouth survivors, the loss of
memory (that is, loss of will to report the disaster), the revival

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of poetic forms, the mastering of the forms and then the
Homeric collection and integration of them in writing would
have to take place in no more than a hundred years. Only a
radical reformulation of the nature of Homeric studies would
permit this. But one must pursue this approach, for, in the
words of Lucian, "It is the conjunction of Venus and Mars that
creates the poetry of Homer."

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Notes (Chapter 6: The Rape of Helen)

1.      Od. VIII, 81-2.

2.      The World of Odysseus, p. 150.

3.      So I am informed by the linguist, Malcolm Lowery, who
adds, "conversion of original s- to h- is also exampled by hex
six and hepta (septem, seven).

4.      Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths, Vol. I., p. 161.

5.      (Boston, Beacon Press, 1958) Fn.9, p. 109.

6.      "Astronomical Theory and Historical Data," in Alfred de
Grazia, ed., The Velikovsky Affair (New York: University
Books, 1965),pp. 158-9.

7.      My source is a discussion with Stecchini. On nine-day
divisions of the months, see in Worlds in collision, II, viii citing
Sicke (1892), Kaegi (1891), Kugler(1907), Naville (1875),
Roscher(1903, 1904); and Ovid; for the ten -month year, he
sites Schiefner (1857), Male (1846), Nilssen (1920), and Frazer
(1931) together with Plutarch, Eutropius and Procopius.

8.      "The Three Causes of the Secular C14 Fluctuations.
Their Amplitudes and Time Constants," Radiocarbon
Variations and Absolute Chronology (Proceedings. 12th Nobel
Symposium at Uppsala Univ. 1969), ed. Ingrid V. Olsson
(Almquist and Wiksell, Stockholm, 1970), p. 602, quoted in
Pensée, Fall 1972, p. 41.

9.      Worlds in Collision, p. 358.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

CRAZY HEROES OF DARK TIMES

It was early Springtime [1] in Pylos, a Mycenaean town of the
Peloponnesus, facing the western sea. The year was between
776 and 687 B.C. It may even have been March 23, -687. A
force of 800 men was posted along 150 kilometers of shoreline.
With them were liaison officers from the Palace of King Nestor.
The famous old sage of the Achaean warriors himself would
have been home from the siege of Troy.

A clay tablet, one of those inscribed "immediately before the
destruction which baked them and rendered them durable"[2]
begins, "Thus are the watchers guarding the coastal regions."[3]
What could they be watching for? Obviously no enemy had
been sighted nor could the men be in fighting formation, so
thinly dispersed were they. It might be as in Jerusalem around
this time, when Isaiah the Prophet was answering the call,
"Watchman, what of the night?"[4]

Another tablet may have been the last:

A single large tablet bears evidence of haste and changes of
mind during its writing.

The retention of such an ill-written document in the archive
might occasion surprise, unless it was in fact only written
in the last day or two before the palace fell. The meaning of
some key words is still uncertain, but there is no doubt that
it records offerings to a long list of deities. The offerings
are in each case a golden vessel, but the principal deities, if
male, receive in addition a man, or, if female, a woman. It
has been suggested that these human beings were being
dedicated to the service of the deities, but the grisly
possibility that they were human sacrifices cannot be
lightly dismissed. At all events the offering of thirteen gold
vessels and ten human beings to a whole pantheon of
divinities must mark an important occasion; and what
occasion more likely than a general supplication on the
receipt of news of an imminent attack?[5]

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The "occasion more likely" is catastrophe. Tidal waves were to
be watched for, and the setting of the sun behind the flaming
horizons. Matters quickly worsened. The news was bad. The
gods and goddesses had taken to the skies. "The whole
pantheon of divinities" was supplicated, with the richest
offerings; gold and human bodies. Not a solitary god of the sea,
or a single god of the hearth, or of love, of battle. All of the
great sky-gods seem to have been involved.

So Pylos perished. The Palace was destroyed in a "holocaust"
which "consumed everything that was inflammable within it,
and even melted gold ornaments into lumps and drops of
metal." The flames melted brick and stone into "a solid mass...
as hard as rock." In one room two large pots were fused "into a
molten vitrified layer which ran over the whole floor."
Everything that a human invader might desire was reduced to
shapelessness. Stone was burned into lime [6]. No human hands
and hand-set fires could have wreaked such ruin. Only blasts
from the sky-electrical, gaseous or both.

THE SAGE WHO BRIDGED THE DARK AGES

The name of King Nestor graces both the annals of the siege of
Troy in the Iliad and the Linear B tablets. Which came first, the
burning of Troy, or the disaster at Pylos, or did they occur
simultaneously? If Pylos were consumed by fire at the same
time as Troy was, than its King Nestor would have been away
at the siege of Troy. He would have been, shall we say, fifty
five years old, with plenty of fire left in him. One day, before
the gates of Troy, he told a long story, whose irrelevance is
only seeming. Professor Denys Page refers to it significantly as
"a brilliant piece of late Ionian composition, but it has a
continuous pedigree ascending to the Mycenaean era."[7] That
is, ascending 400 years or so, by his reckoning; by mine, Nestor
was a Mycenean in the Homeric Age of 800 to 650 B.C.

When Nestor was a child, Hercules had descended upon Pylos
and a battle of the gods ensued. Hercules and Athena were on
one side, while Ares was on the other, and Hercules bested
Ares. "Herakles had come in his strength against us and beaten
us in the years before, and all the bravest among us had been
killed. For we who were sons of lordly Neleus had been twelve,

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and now I alone was left of these, and all the others had
perished."

Little by little the Pylians had recovered until they were able to
raid their northern neighbors and revenge themselves somewhat
for the ravages of old. The revenge came when Nestor was still
young - shall we say fifteen years older? Perhaps he was nine
teen, for he had been warned from the fight because of his
youth, yet had become its hero. If he was fifty-five in -700, say,
he would have been nineteen in -736. The disaster that killed all
but a few Pylians would have come around -747.

Working in the other direction, one learns something else about
the wise old time-clock. Nestor lived to entertain Telemachus,
son of Odysseus, shortly before the latter's homecoming in Itha
ca. Therefore, we would add ten years to Nestor and ten years
of life also to his palace. It could not have been destroyed when
the city of Troy was. Supposing Pylos to have been consumed
by an atmospheric disaster, and Troy VIIA by the same (for it
was indeed incinerated), it is possible still then that the end of
Troy VI, which was wrecked by earthquake, might have
marked the end of the Trojan War and the departure of the
Greeks. We recall two stories of the war: Poseidon battered
down the famous Achaean defensive wall near the sea after the
Achaeans departed; further, the breech in the Trojan Wall was
made to admit the Trojan Horse, which may have been the
symbol of Horse-Tamer Poseidon, whose tides swept over all
barriers like charging steeds.

If such were the case, Pylos and Troy VIIa would go down in 
687, along with pitiable Phaeacia. Troy VI would go down
eleven years before. And the War of Pylos involving Hercules,
Ares and Athena would be set around -747.

We may take this occasion also to tie in the "neighboring
giants," who made life impossible for the Phaeacians when they
lived in Hypereia. These were probably astral phenomena of
monstrous shape who hurled debris upon them from the skies.
The Babylonians were chanting in their hymns to Mars-Nergal:
"Great giants, with awesome members, run at his right and at
his left."[8] This may have been part of the terrible destruction
wrought in Asia Minor in -747 in the time of King Uzziah [9].

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For King Nausithous led them to Scheria, and he was the father
of their present King, Alcinous, who is in the prime of life.

The excavations of Schliemann and Blegen at Hisarlik were
valuable as ordinary archaeology; they contributed almost
nothing to solve "the Homeric Questions." What we derive
from their reports is an important negative: if either
Schliemann's Troy or Blegen's Troys were "the real Troy," then
Troy was destroyed not by the Achaeans, but by "the gods" - by
earthquake and by conflagrations exceeding any possible
human agency [10].

Unfortunately, one cannot at this point be certain of how many
celestial encounters in the period -776 to -687 involved simply
Mars alone. As we shall see, the years -687 and -747 are candi
dates for the triple encounters.

If the Battle of the Gods and the Love Affair took place in 698
then, accepting the end of the Trojan War in its tenth year and
then years of wanderings of Ulysses, one would have the
destruction of Pylos and Odysseus' killing of the Suitors [11]
occurring at the same time, eleven years later, 687 B.C. On both
occasions, both Venus and Mars were active in the sky. This is
not impossible. Venus was "seeking" a circular orbit. Mars may
have been "knocked out of the ring" of its more regular orbit.
Professor Earl R. Milton and I discuss this matter in Solaria
Binaria. Two encounters with Earth as a participant might have
been needed.

This interpretation is preferable to one that would dissolve the
Odyssean temporal sequence and have Pylos come crashing
down at the same time as Troy, with Nestor in two places at the
same time. The scene at Pylos upon which Telemachus, son of
Odysseus, happens, when in search of news of his father, is
convincing. Nestor tells him that he himself had hastened home
from Troy (wise old man that he was) in fear of divine wrath,
and that those who tarried suffered greatly. Now we find the
King and his whole people on the seashores sacrificing a
hundred rich cattle to Poseidon. The skies and Earth have not
settled. It may be that a month later, Pylos will be destroyed by
"star-fire" or astro-flame. If we check back upon Velikovsky's
accounting of concurrent events in the Middle East, we see that
Sennacherib's Assyrian Army was blasted in 687 B.C. but also

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that the army of Esarhaddon, his son, fled in terror of astral
phenomena on a successive invasion of Palestine [12]. Here
again, the puzzle was whether to unite the two events or treat
them successively, and Velikovsky chose the latter course, as
do we.

The present state of speculation may be conveyed in tabular
form:

The Pylos story is not ended, however. There is more to it, and
it fashions a warning to scholars who have accepted faithfully
the theory that a Mycenaean age was ended about 1200 B.C. by
barbarian invasions and a "Dark Age" set in that was to be illu
minated by the great poets, Homer and Hesiod, finally around
800 B.C. The Love Affair holds a light to the Dark Age and the
disposition of the Dark Age provides a key to the Love Affair.

To return to the story, we call upon the research of Isaacson on
Pylos. The destruction of Pylos has been compared with the de
struction of Gordion, in Asia Minor. The city whose Gordian
knot was later cut by Alexander, perished also in a disaster.
Pylos was of Mycenaean Greek culture: Gordius was Phrygian.
At Pylos were found ceramics that resembled Mycenaean ware
that was associated with Egyptian ware and therefore assigned
the Egyptian dates because these were the basis of Near Eastern
chronology. The Phrygians, however, are honored by their own
archeological and historical dating system and Gordius is said
to be of the eighth century before Christ.

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Table
Hypothetical Benchmarks:
Planetary Encounters and Historical Coincidences

Calendar
date
(B.C.)*
Elapsed
time
between
periods
Nestor's
possible
age
Personal events         Other events               Sky
encounters

776                                                            Olympic Games
Founde
Venus/Mars/
Earth-Moon

761          15                                                Hercules
Destroys Troy
and Wins
Olympic Games
Mars/Earth
Moon

747          15           5            Nausithous Moves
to Phaeacia; Iliad
and Odyssey begin
Career as Epic
Cycles; Hercules
and Heralids in
Peloponnesus
(Nestor Sole
Survivor)
Pylian War of
Gods
Venus/Mars/
Earth-Moon

732          15           20           Atreus and
Thyestes; Pylians
Raid Elians
(Nestor a Hero)
Mars/Earth
Moon

717          15                        Alkinous Becomes
King of Phaeacia
Mars/Earth
Moon
702          15           45           Nestor and
Odysseus at Troy
Start of Trojan
War
Venus/Mars/
Earth-Moon
698                       55           Nestor at Troy;
Agamemnon
Fights Memnon
the Ethiopian
Prince (Egypt)
Troy VI
destroyed by
Earthquakes (War
of Gods)
Mars/Earth
Moon

687          11           66           Demodocus Sings
- Odysseus
Returns. Nestor
and Telemachus at
Pylos.  Homer
Born.
Troy VIIA
Destroyed by
Fire; Pylos Falls
(Last War of
Gods); Phaeacia
Falls by
Earthquake;
Sennacherib's
Venus/Mars/
Earth-Moon

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Army Destroyed
at Jerusalem

Skies clear
670                                                            Greek Alphabet
Developed
Calendars
Reordered;
Earth
Trembles
630                                    Iliad Revised and
Transcribed by
Homer

Odyessey Revised
and Transcribed by
Homer
Present skies

*The six major intervals are 15 years each, placed largely on the reasoning
of Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, pp 362 ff., that Mars' present orbit is
in "favorable opposition" respecting Earth every 15 years. Since Mars had
a different orbit before -776 and might have changed its orbit at every
encounter between -776 and -687, we must of course ultimately use
historical evidence to plot all of the encounters. We must bear in mind,
too, that the geological and ecological aftermaths of disaster provoked by
celestial behavior can continue for some time. Here, also, we have
reasoned that only an 11-year interval separated the last two disaster, that
is. Mars was on its way to becoming an outer planet and suffered two
encounters close together. Although the problem is not insoluble it will
require a great deal of research to established empirically the dates of
several peak disasters and the rate of subsidence of disturbances in the
aftermaths. (Worlds in Collision, 274-8).

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Charcoal of both burnt-out sites was tested at the same labora
tory at the same time to determine its carbon-14 loss.  For it is
by living that a plant or animal ingests carbon 14; after death
the ingestion stops and a decay of this radioactive substance
begins. Measuring the loss of Carbon 14 in charcoal samples of
the two towns, the investigators discovered what they had
expected: the samples of each site could give dates that
conventional archeology had already established. But to do so,
the investigators performed miracles of purification of the
Gordian sample to reduce its age by several hundred years,
while they let the samples of Pylos go by polluted and
unchallenged because they "proved" what was expected.

Not content with casting the Pylos samples back into the ash
heap, Isaacson advanced three further conclusions from the
materials of these two towns far apart, whose dates may now be
said to be close together. He discovered that the C14 dates of
the olive pollen in a core from the bottom of a lake near Pylos
conveyed eighth century readings when the pollen was at its
peak. Reasoning that Pylos was tending a maximum of olive
trees when the town was flourishing, and that there would be
little cultivation in the "Dark Ages" when the population would
be sparse, Isaacson logically deduced that the maximum of the
short-lived pollen in the eighth century could mean that Pylos
was in full flower then as well, although, once destroyed, it
remained uninhabited ever after.

He went on to a second point. Analyzing the famed reports of
the University of Cincinnati excavations at Pylos, he read in
their pages accounts of the mysterious mixing of Mycenaean
pottery and geometric pottery in strata where neither could have
intruded upon the other. Yet these two types of ceramics were
supposed to have been fashioned centuries apart.

Now the basic and perhaps the only unassailable law of geology
and archaeology is the law of superposition. Unless proof of
accident if brought forward, what is on top is younger than
what it rests upon. The Mycenaean and the Geometric Ages
then had to be contemporaneous! The "Dark Ages" of 400 to
500 years appeared to have been squeezed out at Pylos.

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Pondering this point, one is led almost reluctantly to the third
point of Isaacson. Gordion of Phrygia in the 8th century has
walls that strikingly resemble the walls of Troy VI, which were
devastated by earthquake. Archaeologists who are faithful to
their conventions must bargain with an architectural similarity
that flatly denies their 400 years' or more gap between Gordius
and Troy.

Isaacson's work was following a trail already laid by
Velikovsky, who had observed that archaeologists of the 19th
century had somehow lost their way. Velikovsky exposed the
problem and its probable solution in 1973 by the long-deferred
publication of his manuscript on the famous rampant lions gate
of Mycenae [13].

In 1881, W.M. Ramsey had noted that the Gate closely
resembled a Phrygian tomb gate of the 8th century. Flinders
Petrie, the renowned pioneer of Egyptian archaeology and
history, had established an authoritative chronology of Egypt
which could be applied wherever Egyptian artifacts were
discovered, or conversely when foreign artifacts were
discovered in Egypt. Petrie discounted Ramsay's evidence,
because Mycenae had already been "dated" by the association
of its artifacts with those of Egypt. Resemblance or not, the
Lions of the two cities were moved four hundred years apart.

Petrie's Egyptian chronological imperialism, spreading over the
Near East and the Mediterranean island, compelled scholars to
invent a long period of Hellenic culture in which "little hap
pened," barbarism prevailed, the Greeks were illiterate, the arts
and sciences were lost - the Dark Ages of Greece, in short,
conventionally dated between 1300 or 1200 B.C. and 800 B.C.,
a span of perhaps 500 years. Not until Velikovsky [14]
challenged the Egyptian chronology frontally could any scholar
imagine that various baffling puzzles of Phrygia, Mycenaean
Greece, and Homeric Greece would have ultimately simple
solution; the Gordian Knot was cut. Isaacson's studies of the
excavation records at half-a-dozen famous sites, following
Velikovsky's hypothesis, have shattered the empirical
foundations of the theory of the Dark Ages [15].

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SOCIETY IN SHOCK

Speaking of the aftermath of catastrophe, Plato declares of the
survivors; "At first, they would have natural fear ringing in their
ears which would prevent their descending from the heights
into the plain."[16]

If one were, at this pint, to take up in order the authoritative
works of history and archaeology it might be shown that they
are in every case affected by a blind spot in regard to the Dark
Ages. This method would be repeating much of Isaacson's work
and would expand unduly the present text. It may be better to
fashion a new model of the Homeric Age and, by demonstrating
its consistency and efficiency, to buttress the theory that the
Love Affair portrays an astral and earthly disaster that had
recently occurred. Let us call this model, "The Crazed
Survivors of Disaster."

It stands in contrast to the conventional "Greek Dark Ages"
model. The latter holds that the Mycenaean Age collapsed over
the period of a century because of barbarian invasions and that
these barbarians in the course of centuries acquired the
mentalities and facilities of a civilized people.

The "Crazed Survivors" model is constructed from the theory
that a general catastrophe involving great ecological and cultur
al damage is followed by a shocked society. The shocked
society would exhibit a complex of expected behaviors that
distinguish it from stable or moderately changing or even
revolutionary societies, or more significantly, from a society
that is slowly evolving from a "primitive" to a "civilized"
culture. In the societies of crazed survivors, personal and mass
self-destructiveness and destructiveness of others and of culture
increase as terror and guilt interact on a complex and massive
scale. Depending upon the extent of the disaster, a totally
amnesiac and stupefied society of cultural degenerates may
ensue or a more furious cultural coping that may eventuate in a
flowering of religious institutions, crafts, and arts.

The Homeric heroes, Odysseus and Achilles among them,
typified the bands of survivors of the extensive Mycenaean
civilization that was largely destroyed in the catastrophic
interventions of the planets Mars and Venus in the Earth-Moon

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system in the 8th century. The plots of the Iliad and Odyssey,
despite 2700 years of trying to make something else of them,
clearly point to the skies as the source of the disruptive and
awful events that produced the crazed heroes of the dark times.
Western civilization has treasured and imitated the posturings
of these mad warriors, hardly ever realizing what they were and
how the docile mind of later generations would be affected
when this madness was presented to it as normality and for
inspiration.  We shall proceed now to enumerate and describe
briefly a number of psychological and social indications that we
are dealing with human beings behaving in the aftermath of
catastrophe.

The Homeric Greeks developed a pantheon of skygods and
assumed that these gods would continuously manifest
themselves by thunderbolts, showers of arrows, tidal waves,
earthquakes, meteorites, and so on. They venerated all sky signs
and objects from the sky, such as meteoric iron and stones. The
earth itself was a living animal and thoroughly animated in its
parts [17]. A number of gods and demi-gods contributed to a
continual geological and ecological restlessness. Animals,
plants, and rocks changed readily into humanoid forms and vice
versa. Ovid's Metamorphoses elaborates this theme
interminably.

By the time of Thucydides, free will and controlled change
were accredited to mankind, but the Homeric Greeks were
yoked to moira, fortune, destiny, lot - the law of chance that
determines human fate [18]. Uncontrolled license and little self
discipline were ascribed to (projected upon) the gods. Well
developed priesthoods had dissolved, just as other specialized
occupations crumpled into individuals. (Finley calculates that
over 100 occupations discernible in the linear B tablets dropped
to a mere dozen in Homer.) Nevertheless there were ritual
guardians and diviners with prodigious memories, aides to
kings but not members of kingly families. Priests, bards, and
madmen were possessed by gods.

The priests "were guardians of ritual and of the forms and lan
guage of the sacramental songs; preservers of the motions and
rhythms for the due observance of ceremonial; interpreters of
those signs and often obscure sayings by which the gods
manifested their decrees, desires or warnings; and, lastly they

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were the custodians of the science of precedents in all
domains;"[19]

The preceding Mycenaean bureaucratic and feudal order had
broken down. Finley and other experts have described an oikos
(household) system as a kind of feudal plantation system that
survived the collapse of bureaucratic urban centralism. It is true
that the oikos system prevails, but it is really a piratical or ship
wreck system in which people gathered around surviving
leaders. A great many expatriates, outcasts, outlaws and
refugees were to be found among the community. There is a
remarkable lack of the stable assignment of social, economic,
and political rights to the types of people who clustered in these
strongholds.

Practically all of the titles of hierarchical officialdom
disappeared. The chiefs of households (that it would be a
mistake to call "clans") [20] ruled a mixed community as judge
and religious-political protector.

The "Argive Kings" and the kings who were supposed to have
developed from and after the Homeric heroic age were actually
the same traditional kings whose Greco-Mycenaean kingdoms
had come tumbling down in the disasters of the 8th and 7th
centuries [21]. The warlords and oligarchies followed. Alcinous
of Phaeacia rules like Agammemnon. We quote Denys Page:

When history dawns on the island of Lesbos in the seventh
century B.C., we discover there a mode of government
hardly distinguishable from that of Agamemnon at the
siege of Troy. The will of the sovereign power,
Agamemnon himself, is not absolute: he must first summon
a council of elders, and whatever they approve must be
declared to an agora, an assembly of all lesser noblemen. In
the seventh century, B.C., at Lesbos the political
constitution is exactly the same; and it happens that the
sovereign power is still in the direct line of descent from
the family of Agamemnon [22].

This startling claim is followed by one even more sweeping: "In
this place certainly, and in other places presumably, the royal
family survived throughout the dark ages from beginning to
end."

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We cannot grant either the Lesbos presumption or the general
presumption. It is rare in the annals of history to find a genuine
400-year old dynasty, and hard to imagine one that would have
suffered 400 to 500 years of the so-called Dark Ages. If the
family of Agamemnon of Troy still ruled Lesbos in the seventh
century, it is simply because the Trojan War took place less
than a century beforehand.

Indeed, Agamemnon himself had probably an upstart pedigree
like most of the Homeric heroes. The heroes spoke of home
frequently but there is a lack of definition of their homes,
Nestor's account being exceptional in the Iliad and those of the
Odyssey being largely mythical and savage. The heroes boasted
in the names of their parents, some of their grandfathers, and
usually stopped at this point; some lapsed into claims of divine
forebears in the second generation. Glaukos and Diomedes, in a
famous encounter in the Iliad, discovered while bragging of
their antecedents that their grandfathers were guest-friends and
decided not to fight each other [23]. The absence of "family
trees" among self-assertive "nobles" raises doubts that they
either knew their ancestors or, if they did, could claim any
distinction on their behalf.

The Dark Ages, as a catastrophic century, found ancestors in
short supply. So also communities. Homer "does not talk a
great deal about tribes and groups and clans and sects and
varieties of idealistic associations, whether pacific or
belligerent. What Homer does is to confine himself to the
immediate family of the warrior in question."[24] Only a short
paternal link is stressed, along with guest-friends. This is
exceedingly strange. It is not at all like "primitive peoples"
whose lives are bound into communities of blood served by
totems. Nor like a bureaucratic society. But by the "dawn of
history," in the next century, we find definite blood lines as the
basis of organization of the Greek polis. Apparently, though
missing in Homeric times, they are quickly reestablished in the
succeeding generations.

The warriors stayed away from their "homes" so long that we
could question whether they had any.  They remind us of
Vandals and Vikings who left home never to return. Of all of
Ithaca's warriors, only Odysseus ever reached home. Odysseus
played the pirate - looting, killing, raping. For the sake of

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Athena, he had to be brought home, there to face and slay a
horde of suitors of his "long-suffering" wife. His shepherd
slave, Eumaeus, was armed against other shepherds and wild
beasts. Marauding was frequent, if not from one's neighbors
then from pirates and foreign warriors. Slaves abounded, of
various nationalities, one may note. It was a society where
every man's hand was raised against his neighbor. Homo lupus
homini. "The bearing of arms, particularly lance and sword, on
all solemn occasions of civil life, was the distinguishing feature
which, more than any other, marked the separation of classes in
Homer's time."[25]

In battle one encounters a frenzied behavior whereby fear is
whipped up in order to gain courage. Eliade's words apply to
the heroes: "The frenzied berserker, ferocious warriors, realized
precisely the state of sacred fury... of the primordial world."[26]
In a famous scene of the Iliad, Achilles went so berserk that he
battled the river, the River-God and the gods themselves. Ajax
went mad and finally committed suicide.

A frank, hollow, extreme braggadoccio characterized the best
and the worst of the fighters. The glorification of
destructiveness seems interminable. Apart from a chosen few,
the women are subjects of aggressive degradation and measured
by head of livestock; yet some time before, in Minoan, if not
Mycenaean, civilization, women had achieved high position
and status. More information about Mycenaean women is
needed before we can claim what we guess to be true: that the
degradation of women was not a trait of the Indo-European but
was the outcome of catastrophically induced aggression.

Certain undercurrents of attitude haunt the passages of Homer.
The boasts of the warriors are often about the conquests and
destruction of towns. The similes of Homer are overwhelmingly
rural and pastoral. May we surmise that the heroes sacked many
a half-destroyed town? There is a pervading sense of splendors
of the past being gone and citations of armies, cities, and wealth
appear to be grossly exaggerated. This pretentiousness is not
that of nobles, or of a people who had lost something they once
knew, did not own, but had given them their character.

One senses also the general lack of awareness, a "mind-blown"
stupidity, a calloused morality.

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Am I reading feelings into Homer's poetry that are not there?
Perhaps. But the interpellations of morality in the Iliad and/
Odyssey are mostly those of the poet. Are these traits not typi
cal of "primitive man" ? Definitely not. It is only by getting
one's concept of primitive man from Homer that one can
believe so, for usually modern "primitive man" is gentle, aware,
and only occasionally "possessed" or obsessed. The Homeric
warriors are not primitive types.

The "guest-stranger" concept of Homeric times is intriguing
too. The Homeric peoples had an ambivalence towards
outsiders. Deep mistrust alternated with sometime hysterical
acceptance. Apparently, a person entering the precincts of an
unknown community, one such as Odysseus, for example,
would not know whether he would be maltreated or well
treated. This ambivalence appears to have gone beyond logic or
normal behavior [27]. Odysseus was warned by Nausicaa that
he should avoid being seen in Phaeacia because of the general
mistrust of strangers. Yet she also assured him, that if all went
well, he would be royally treated. And so he was. The forms of
human relations, like the world itself, were shaky. Augeas, "the
king of the Epeians, treacherous to his very guest-friends, not
long thereafter saw his own rich city, under stark fire and the
stroke of iron, settling into the deep pit of destruction. Augeas
was himself dragged to the edge of steep death, nor escaped
it."[28] It was for double-dealing over the cleaning of his stable
that Augeas incurred the wrath of Hercules which destroyed his
city and him.

We should say that this same Hercules is an active participant
in many of the events of the dark times and one day it may be
confirmed that he is an alter ego of the planet Mars. He
destroyed Troy once before its destruction by the Achaeans of
Homer. He destroyed Nestor's Pylos once. He is often berserk, a
paragon of the crazed survivor, and was deified upon death.

Hercules (or Heracles) had progeny, the Heraclids. They were
so many that they seemed to be whole bands of people. More
than that, they have been identified with the Dorians whom
scholars believe to be the Greek ethnic strain that devastated the
Mycenaean kingdoms and carried on their primitive
development during the so-called "Dark Ages."

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For example, Rhys Carpenter [29] is to be discovered on a
magnificent tour de force aimed at proving that long term
intense climatic change from wet to dry caused the Mycenaean
civilization of the "14th century" literally to collapse and
permitted the starving country folk to sack and burn the centers
of civilization in search of necessities. The country and islands
were practically abandoned, and only with time did a better
acclimated population begin its rise.

Carpenter encounters many obstacles, only two of which need
be mentioned here. He is confronted by sudden disaster; yet it is
apparent from his own words and in meteorology that climatic
disaster can only be sudden and quite destructive if an immense
external source produces it. Second, everywhere he turns he
sees terrible incendiarism (or, rather, he turns everywhere to
avoid seeing the terrible incendiarism that destroyed
Mycenaean civilization).

We cannot help but thank him, however, as one must thank
practically every strainer and stretcher of the Dark Ages.  For
he describes in many an incident the takeover of Mycenaean
areas by the Heraclids, whom he obligingly postulates as
Mycenaean refugee families returning a couple of generations
later at the head of mixed bands of other ethnic Greeks,
especially Dorians. The Heraclids, in our theory, are crazed
survivors, sons, naturally, of Hercules, who is identifiable in
myth with Ares or Mars, even though he sometimes fights Ares.
The Heraclids are borne back in the name of the God who
destroyed their kin and culture.

"How unsettled and mobile were all these heroes," writes
Mireaux [30], after he has devoted a book, like Finley, to
discovering a social order that would make sense. "The heroic
world of the epics appears in our eyes as something mobile,
effervescent and tumultuous."

They depended upon the seas but were bad sailors. There was
no class of specialized sailors. Everyone was a "sailor."
Maritime ventures were not materially distinguishable from
piratical excursions. We can imagine what confusion and fear
drove them over the seas to found their many colonies, for the
period 750-600 B.C. was the great period of colonial expansion.

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The journey from Crete to Egypt took five days and nights, "a
terrifying venture for such poor navigators as were the Greeks
of Homer's time."[31]

They were meat-eaters: cattle, sheep, and wild game, animals of
the uplands. "For Homer fish is a detestable food, while Hesiod
does not even deign to mention it. Never is fish eaten at the
Homeric repasts."[32]

Probably around 67\87 B.C. Gyges the Lydian overthrew the
Heraclids of Maeonia in Asia Minor, and struck the first coins.
Actually they were not the first coins, but the Greeks had large
ly abandoned coinage. Homer mentions a gold talent of fixed
value, reports Mireaux, but exchange was almost entirely in
kind rather than in money.

Gift-giving was often a spectacular affair. It was more a system
of exchange than a pleasant supplement to normal exchange
like bonuses or birthday presents. The things given seem often
to be for re-giving, to be untouched and unused, even homely
objects like linens, and the metal gifts seem all too frequently to
have semidivine or divine "makers" which, as false pedigrees
conceal humble origins, may have concealed their origins in
loot and theft. Their description, too, conveys an awesomeness,
as if they were not familiar objects to the childhoods of the gift
exchangers. They are described as pirates would speak of their
misunderstood loot of pots and laces.

Altogether there is an incongruous mixture of ethnic names,
events, artifacts and practices in the works of Homer. Names
that are "centuries old," and not to be heard again in history,
occur. Chariots are used, not as battle-wagons, but to convey
warriors to places where they would descend and fight. Their
use was partly forgotten or had not been familiar to the types
who owned them. T. B. L. Webster [33] shows that Homer is
indebted to Minoan and near East influences in plots, style, and
references. He is influence by the archaic Mediterranean
culture. He is very Mycenaean, Webster concludes. But in all of
his speculations, Webster does not speculate upon the important
chronological puzzle: If it is proper to imagine that all of these
influences happened so "early" and Homer came so late, why
not speculate as well that all of these similar bits actually
existed almost within the living grasp of the poet?

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At one time, many scholars believed that Troy and the Trojans
were poetic inventions. Then Schliemann discovered "Troy" or
something that corresponded to indications found in the poetry.
His site at Hisarlik has revealed in successive excavations a
number of "Troys." It appears now that the Troy of levels VI
and VIIa may have been Homer's Troy but it also appears now
that the Trojans were akin to the Greeks and that the Trojan
War(s) pitted Greek against Greek. Homer probably stressed
differences between Greeks and Trojans as a splendid device,
first, to convey the battle of the gods, and, second, to give the
disarrayed and scattered Greek communities a common
weltanschauung - a common religious, political and cultural
outlook on the world.

Moreover, now we permit ourselves another conjecture: The
besieged Troy was a congress of allied forces containing Greek
and non-Greek forces, clustered survivors, who could be called
Greek or Anatolians, who might provide characters with
connections as far away as Etruria and send an Anatolian like
Aeneas to seek kin in Italy after the wars (as Virgil says).

The Trojan Wars were plural, most likely, during the Martian
period. Armies may have come and gone; the occupants of Troy
may have changed several times. The artifacts dug up could be
interpreted as coming from a melange of cultures - Greek and
Anatolian. The revolution of heaven and earth is the heart of the
primordial myth and the epic poem. The Homeric epics are no
exceptions to the rule. An old era was being destroyed and a
new one was arising [34].

The Iliad and the Odyssey used various dialects of Greek
blended by the genius of the bard. Homer used metaphors of the
clearest and most ordinary kind, to the exclusion of far-flown
and fancy comparisons. Words expressing "fire" abound, for
example. His poetry seems to be addressing audiences of low
verbal ability; or they might have understood a melange of
dialects and phrases, a lingua greca like a lingua franca or
both. On the other hand, his similes are prolonged and
complicated, dealing with rural and pastoral comparisons.
Obviously Homer was not primitive, nor inexperienced, nor
bereft of imagination; nor were his confraternity of poets, nor
their audiences. Why should this melange be used, and not, say,

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a single preferred dialect like the Tuscan that Dante's genius
made to become the preferred Italian tongue? A reasonable
answer would be that there was then only a gathering of
tongues: the audiences were related, widespread, itinerant, and
diffused.

More significant is the non-use of a sacred, liturgical language.
If there had been a Mycenaean dead language, like classical
Greek is to modern Greek, or Latin to Italian, then would not
that have been the basis for portions of the epic poems? But it
was not, not even for prayers. Therefore it did not exist.
Mycenaean Greek was probably a living and related set of
dialects whose standard expression had disappeared with its
ruling class and scribes.

It gives cause for bewilderment. If a sacred language was not
understood, that would place the old civilization far into the
past; but there are many tie-ins of Homeric and Mycenaean cul
tures. Conversely, the fact might indicate that the old civiliza
tion was either foreign (which it was not) or largely destroyed
(which we think was the case).

The linguistic melange (with its numerous catch-phrases of all
Greek sub-cultures), which was Homeric Greek, was "instant
prosody." There had been no time, no more than a couple of
generations, to build an epic language. Yet such an epic
language would surely have evolved smoothly and uniformly
over the several centuries of any "Dark Ages." What emerges
therefore is a people and culture exploding in space and time,
whose language, that of Homer, had not yet caught up with its
expanding front.

The Greeks of Homer, to conclude, did not come as an invasion
from afar. They consisted of all kinds of Greeks. They were
survivors, largely from the rural areas and the interior high
lands. From personal experience and hearsay, they knew of the
centers of their societies that had been destroyed. They often
lacked kith and kin; they lacked communal security; they
lacked law and order; they lacked education; they trembled
upon the trembling earth.

The experts commonly remark on the unabashed juxtaposition
of knowledge and ignorance in the epics. Mireaux has said,

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"There was decidedly nothing primitive about Homeric
civilization." The very sophistication of the poets, like Homer
and Hesiod, who told about them, indicates an age whose
savagery could easily be penetrated by civilized forms.

For a grandly disciplined, informed, and stylized poet like
Homer to write so sympathetically of his subjects, he had to be
of their age, and to be of their age required that their age be the
eighth century.

The massive destruction of Mycenaean civilization fully
attested in the archaeological record, was accompanied by a
complete social transformation, in which all the institutions
by which men organized their existence were refashioned
to met the new situation... When Mycenae fell, the
surviving Greeks, in their new kind of society, had no need
for records or for scribes; in fact, on the evidence we have
at present, they had no need for the art of writing and they
lost it altogether, improbable as that may seem to modern
men [35].

What seems "improbable" to us is that anything but abrupt cata
strophe could cause "the massive destruction" in so many
places - Crete, Mycenae, and elsewhere. The Homeric scribes,
working with new dialects and a new alphabet, did not need
centuries of time to accumulate material on the chaotic life that
followed.

Homer did his best to reassure the survivors and to set them on
their way again. The incongruences and inconsistencies of
material culture, nomenclatures, customs, and attitudes found in
his works are not sloppy artistry; they are of the essence of the
people whom he was describing. And his work was not an oral
conglomerate of centuries, but a description, from two main
sources, those of the Iliad and the Odyssey, [36] with as much
consistency as he could import to them, of the suddenly
produced cultural chaos of the eighth and seventh centuries. He
took as his task the assembly of plots dealing with erratic and
fear-driven survivors and inspiring these folk to become "one
nation under the gods."

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THE CART BEFORE THE HORSE

The contrast with conventional historiography is obvious:
Homer flourished in the middle seventh century. His writings
were an agglomerate of the early century. The pieces of his
writing came from different quarters; many from the period 
670 to -776, some from times stretching far before (-766 to 
1500). The people active in his writings were from the crushed
cultures of -776 to the beginning of his own lifetime.

The Mycenaean Civilization collapsed in a set of natural dis
asters. The marginal survivors regrouped repeatedly in the fol
lowing century. They fought bitterly amongst themselves, used
what they could manage of the old tools and skills. Homer sang
about them and their destroyed culture.

The assumption is tied to a brief time sequence derived from
evidences of natural disaster. (See the Chart on pages 64-65).
The theory of causation seeks evidence of abrupt takeover of a
destroyed culture by marginal survivors who cast aside, or
employ ceremonially, practices they do not or cannot use or
understand. Then they proceed to draw from every source their
new synthetic culture.

On the other hand, most Homeric experts nowadays believe that
Homer lived a century earlier, that his writings were an agglom
erate of centuries before, that the pieces of writings came from
different quarters, some of them as early as 1500 B.C. The
people acting in his writings, they believe, are fictional
characters referring to real characters occupying a space of 400
to 500 years. Their culture is believed to be a composite of all
this time, but is concentrated in a true primitive culture that
made savage contact with the civilized world in 1300 B.C. or
thereabout, and after half a millennium, arrived at the stage of
producing Homer and Hesiod. The Mycenaean civilization
weakened and then was ruined by invaders. Centuries of
primitive illiterate history followed. The pre-Homerics emerged
and found new tools and skills. Homer at this point sang about
their deeds. They were learning to sail boats; they disliked
eating fish; they were learning to use chariots.

This conventional theory is tied to a time sequence derived
from an incorrect Egyptian chronology. The society and

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behavior of the pre-Homeric Hellenes are viewed in a sequence,
according to a theory of causation that has a culture being
gradually born. Practices are invented or adopted slowly from
abroad.

Thus occurs the confrontation of two theories. The reader has
already some means of adjudging it. Other means will follow.
But before this chapter is ended, a suggestion may be offered to
all those who read and write about the Dark Ages of ancient
Greece. The suggestion concerns methodology, or, more
simply, logic.

The logic of writing about history, that is, about the sequence of
cause and events, is that events are arranged by time and then
causes are uncovered. This usually works because the
succession of events is ordinarily known before the causes are
discovered. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc, though strictly speaking
a logical fallacy, establishes a presumption of cause: After this,
therefore (perhaps) because of this.

However, the less the evidence of temporal sequences, the
greater the possibility of logical fallacies. Hysteron proteron, as
the Aristotelians called it, or "putting the cart before the horse"
is one of them. When a temporal sequence is not known, but a
presumption of the sequence is held, then the possibility of the
reversal of cause increases. The logical problem that is involved
in "putting the cart before the horse" is exemplified in the
saying, "If the Brahmin do not pray, the Sun will not set." Wise
skeptics know that "If the Sun will not set, the Brahmin will
pray." (As a matter of fact, they will pray anyhow, if only be
cause in illo tempore the sun did not set.) At the same time,
many people, zealous or simply naive, will let the cart be placed
before the horse and believe that the cart pulls the horse.

In a subtle way, much of the writing about the Greek "Dark
Ages" falls victim to this fallacy. Take, for instance, the
statement that "the Dark Age Greeks were poor sailors." This
fact is usually interpreted to mean that these Greeks were
evolving from land animals into seafaring animals; they had not
learned yet to sail. But these Greeks had no reason to be good
sailors because they were raised as herders and warriors.
Seamanship had disappeared with the washing away and
destruction of the seacoast settlements.

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Or take the fact that "the Greek warriors before Troy misused
their chariots, dismounting from them instead of fighting from
them." This fact is usually interpreted to mean that they were
just learning of the chariot from a superior culture with whom
they were now coming into contact. But their chariot sub
culture had just been destroyed with the palaces, and the
survivors had not been raised as chariot warriors but used
chariots because their "betters" had used them.

"The government of Phaecia was a typical emerging primitive
state heading towards the polis of classical Greece out of
tribalism." But no tribe stands behind the Phaeacians; they are a
colony surviving its mother country and organized more simply
than it was.

Or take the fact that the "The Achaeans attacked Troy in the
name of their gods, and Troy was destroyed." To most, the
statement means that the Achaeans destroyed Troy. On the
contrary, "the gods" destroyed Troy and the Achaeans occupied
it. Not, "the wrath of Achilles elaborated into "the battles of the
gods," but rather "the battles of the gods reduced to the wrath of
Achilles."

Finally, considering the Love Affair in this light, the "gods" do
not act so that people can have comedy; comedy is played so
that the effects of the gods can be controlled.

Further, the dance forms and opera theater of the Love Affair
were ancient and Minoan. So asserts Patroni [37] He points out
that the dancing circle and chorus carried from Minoan to the
classical Greek theater. But when the Greek theater appeared,
he writes, we find the rustic god Dionysus, with a goat-cult of
dancers cloaked in skins. The poverty of the means, the few ac
tors, the vagabond origins of the Thespian theater, all showed 
still according to Patroni who follows the Dark Age theory
faithfully - that the primitive real Greek theater was not
receiving the subsidies of princes, not the interest or
participation of Mycenaean high society; it was left to the rural
folk. Again "the cart before the horse." In the general
destruction of societies, the art of the survivors made its way
quickly forward. The elite and its sophisticated art forms were
destroyed; folk art (not primitive art) dominated the scene.

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An analogy with the problems of geology is tempting. When
folds and faults occur, the principle of superposition is thrown
off and the effects are baffling to explain. So in history, when
temporal evidence is scarce, the principle of post hoc ergo
propter hoc loses its ability to guide one. Then, in geology, one
says of a layer of shells and pebbles: "This land was raised from
the sea", while another will say, "This land was once flooded
with shells and pebbles."

A rather lengthy example may be excused, especially since it is
the last. After describing what appears to have been a solid and
regulated archaic system (which led me to suspect my theory),
Mireaux [38] concludes:

Thus one is led to believe that the (lack of) care for agricul
ture, and the dispersal of a peasantry so firmly rooted in the
soil, must have brought about, in most of the cities, at a
quite early stage - and no doubt as early as Homeric time 
the dissolution of the primitive brotherhoods of youth and
soldierly companionship, and the breaking up of their
community-centres. Nevertheless, even if the traditions of a
life in common and an armed confraternity were growing
looser, they were not yet so obsolete that they could not
still color the lives of the rough peasant classes, guiding
them and instilling into them the old ideals of honor and
pride; for they still knew that their lands were only theirs as
long as they could defend them, with helmet, buckler and
javelin, after an appropriate training and a traditional
initiation received at the hands of their elders.

In this quotation and all of the chapter containing it, Mireaux
first establishes the existence of a rigid (old) order, which he
calls "primitive," because presumably he believes it to have
followed the Mycenaean culture over the centuries.

Then in the same breath, as above, he speaks as if this order
preceded the Homeric order which was a breakdown of it.

That is, he reverses the logic of his own evidence. He moves
back and forth uncertainly, reversing precedence and effect,
and, of course, cause and effect. It is more likely that the
"primitive order" he describes was the collapsed remains of the
Mycenaean order that had persisted into the eighth century and
was retained especially long by the Spartans who clustered

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fearfully in villages rather than committing themselves to a
great polis. This order could only be feebly reinstituted by the
Homeric crazed heroes. But a new civilization, which
developed out of the Homeric age, moved in all directions; it
quickly blended new and old forms. The Love Affair was an
effort, on the literary front, to establish the new age by
mastering the trauma that came with the end of the old age.

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Notes (Chapter 7: Crazy Heroes of Dark Times)

1.      The Cambridge Ancient History (1973), Vol II, Part I, p.
611. We recall the suggestion that Odysseus may have
awakened to Nausicaa's spring washing rites.

2.      Ibid.

3.      Ibid., p. 624.

4.      Cf. Velikovsky (1950), p. 214 et passim.

5.      The Cambridge Ancient History, loc. cit., 626.

6.      The above details of this paragraph come from Israel M.
Isaacson, 'Carbon 14 dates and Velikovsky's Revision of
Ancient History." III Pensee no. 3 (1973), 26, p. 29 who is
quoting C. W. Blegen and M. Rawson, The Palace of Nestor at
Pylos in Western Messenia (Princeton: Princeton U. Press,
1966), I, pp. 167, 40, 199, 210, 169, 66.

7.      History and the Homeric Iliad (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ of
California Press, 1959), p. 255.

8.      Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, 281, quoting
Bollenbucher, Bebete and Hymnen and Nergal, p. 29.

9.      Worlds in Collision, p. 213.

10.     T. Blegen, "Troy VI," Cambridge Ancient History
(1973), p. 685.

11.     The interpretation of this event, which we cannot take at
face value, must await a later day.

12.     Worlds in Collision, pp. 268-9, quoting Sidney Smith's
Babylonian Historical Texts (1924), p.5. I refer the reader to
The Lately Tortured Earth for explanations of the phenomena
of extraterrestrially produced incineration and blasts.

13.     "The Lion Gate at Mycenae," Pensee, III (1973). p. 31.
supported in the same issued by Lewis M. Greenberg, "The
Lion Gate at Mycenae," p. 26.

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14.     Theses for the Reconstruction of Ancient History (1946);
Ages in Chaos (1950); "Astronomy and Chronology," III
Pensee, No. 2. 38.

15.     I. Issacson, op. cit., and "Applying the Revised
Chronology," IV Pensée (Fall, 1974), 5. Posthumous studies of
Velikovsky are expected in re Dark Ages and Issacson's
(Schorr's) studies are being prepared by him for publication.

16.     Plato, The Laws, III, p.57 of the translation of B. Jowett,
Dialogues of Plato, v. V (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1871).

17.     Mireaux, p. 24.

18.     Mireaux, p. 28.

19.     Mireaux, p. 79. Cf. p. 14.

20.     As e.g. Mireaux does, p. 55.

21.     Contrary to Mireaux, cf. p. 31.

22.     Denys Page, The Homeric Odyssey, pp. 145-6, citing
Alcaeus and Aristotle.

23.     IL, VI.

24.     John Cowper Powys, "Preface to Homer and the Oether,"
p. 146, cf. Mireaux, 124-5.

25.     Mireaux, p. 137.

26.     The Myth of the Eternal Return, p. 21.

27.     Cf. Finley, op. cit., pp. 115-20 et passim. Sociology
delineates a "stranger" concept and says it is always observable;
but it is a quantitative ambivalence that has a norm which is
here far exceeded.

28.     pindar, "Olympian Ode 10." (Loeb ed.) It would seem
that Augeas and his city were swallowed up by an earthquake
or volcanic fissure.

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29.     Discontinuity in Greek Civilization (Cambridge, Eng.:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1966).

30.     p. 241.

31.     Mireaux, p. 249 and 242-5.

32.     Mireaux, p. 146, citing Od XII, 329-32, IV, 368-9.

33.     From Mycenae to Homer (1964), p. 197 et passim.

34.     See Mircea Eleade, The Myth of the Eternal Return,
chap. IV.

35.     Finley, p. 168.

36.     See pages 134ff below.

37.     Op. cit., pp. 250-2.

38.     P. 124-5.

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