"The Odyssey and the Occult: Hidden Esotericism in Homer’s Epic" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "Theurgy: Theory and Practice"
SPECIAL FEATURE
The Odyssey and the Occult: Hidden Esotericism in
Homer’s Epic
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Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opened this weekend to
the biggest live-action debut of his career, and by Sunday night it will likely
be the number one film in the world. Somewhere between Matt Damon lashed to a
mast and the box office charts, though, almost nobody buying a ticket this
weekend will know that they’re watching a story ancient philosophers,
magicians, and mystics have spent nearly two thousand years reading as
something closer to a spellbook than a war story.
Long before Homer’s epic was
assigned reading, it was scripture for people who believed Odysseus’s ten-year
voyage home wasn’t really about a man trying to get back to Ithaca at all. It
was about a soul trying to get back to God…
The Cave of Two Doors
Sometime around the third century CE,
Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry sat down with eleven lines of the
Odyssey and wrote an entire treatise about them. The passage, from “Book
13,” describes a cave on Ithaca sacred to nymphs, one with two entrances: one
facing north, used by mortals to descend into the cave, and one facing south,
reserved for the gods. In On the Cave of the Nymphs,
Porphyry reads this modest bit of geography as a complete cosmological diagram.
The cave itself is the material world; its two gates are the two directions a
soul can travel, downward into physical birth (genesis) or upward back toward
the divine. Odysseus, in Porphyry’s reading, isn’t a soldier trying to get home
from Troy; rather, he’s a symbol for every human soul, stripped of its memory
of the divine by its descent into a body, slowly finding its way back to its
true origin through suffering, temptation, and hard-won wisdom.
It’s one of the earliest surviving examples of a Western philosopher treating a poem as a coded initiation text rather than a story, a move that would echo for the next seventeen centuries, straight through to Renaissance Hermeticists and twentieth-century occult writers who did the same thing to fairy tales, tarot decks, and, yes, Homer all over again.
Séance on a Foreign Shore
If Porphyry’s reading treats the Odyssey
as allegory, “Book 11” doesn’t need any allegorizing at all; it’s already a
straightforward how-to guide for necromancy. Following instructions from the
sorceress Circe, Odysseus sails to the edge of the
known world, digs a pit in the ground, and pours in a specific sequence of
offerings: milk, honey, wine, water, and barley, in that order. Then he cuts
the throats of a ram and a ewe over the pit, letting their blood pool inside
it. The dead, drawn to the blood like moths to a flame, come swarming up out of
the underworld—so many, and so eager, that Odysseus has to hold them back with his sword until the shade of the blind prophet Tiresias has had his turn to
drink and speak. Classicists have a specific word for this scene, nekyia, and it stands as one of the oldest
detailed ritual scripts for evoking and consulting the dead in the whole of
Western literature—centuries older than any grimoire, and considerably more
precise about ingredients than most of them.
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Before Tiresias, though, Odysseus has to get past Circe herself, and it’s worth pausing on just how completely she originates a type: she lives alone on an island, works with pharmaka (a Greek word attributed to drugs, poisons, and magic more or less interchangeably) and turns Odysseus’s men into pigs with a wave of her wand and a doctored meal. She is, quite plausibly, the first fully realized “witch-on-an-island” in the whole of Western storytelling, the direct ancestor of everyone from the Grimms’ forest crones to Baba Yaga to every sorceress who’s ever kept a lonely tower stocked with transformed men. Even her family tree reads like an occult genealogy: Circe is the aunt of Medea, another famous mythological sorceress, and both are traditionally said to descend from Helios, the sun god himself—magic, in other words, running directly through the bloodline of light.
The single strangest occult detail in the whole epic might be the smallest. To survive Circe, Odysseus is given a protective herb by Hermes himself, called moly: black root, milk-white flower, and, in Homer’s own words, “dangerous for a mortal man to pluck from the soil, but not for the deathless gods.” That’s it. That’s the whole description. And for roughly twenty-five centuries afterward, people have been trying to figure out what moly actually was. Pliny the Elder took it seriously enough to rank it among the foremost antidotes to poisons and spells in the whole of the ancient world. Renaissance and later scholars proposed wild garlic, mandrake, and rue. In 1983, two pharmacologists proposed something genuinely startling: the snowdrop, whose bulbs contain a compound called galantamine that can chemically counteract the exact category of poisoning: anticholinergic, the kind that causes hallucination, delusion, and amnesia, that Circe’s potion would have inflicted if taken at face value. Whether or not Homer had any real plant in mind, generations of magicians, herbalists, and now actual medical researchers have treated a fifteen-word description from a three-thousand-year-old poem as a genuine botanical riddle worth solving.
The rest of the voyage keeps circling the same themes. Calypso, the nymph who keeps Odysseus captive for seven years, has a name that comes directly from the Greek verb kalyptein, “to conceal”—she is, etymologically, Concealment itself, holding a hero hidden from the world the way an occultist might speak of hidden knowledge. The Sirens, whose song no listening sailor survives, occupy the same liminal ground as every death-adjacent oracle in the ancient world: knowledge purchased at the cost of everything else. And Tiresias, consulted specifically because he can see the future despite—or because—he cannot see the present, fits a pattern occultists have recognized in prophetic and psychic traditions for millennia: that blindness to the ordinary world is often the price of admission to the extraordinary one.
OCCULT READS PRESENTS:
DAILY OCCULT REVIEW
Modern Occultist is proud to present a second “Daily
Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult
Reads... In honor of The Odyssey and its history of deep esoteric
roots…
By
P. D. Newman | Inner Traditions
For readers who want to go straight
to the source rather than take this column’s word for it, this is about as
direct a path as exists. Newman traces theurgy, the ritual practice of aligning
oneself with the divine, back through the Chaldean Oracles and into Homer
himself, arguing that both the Iliad and the Odyssey preserve genuine ritual
technique beneath their narrative surface. The book includes a full, careful
analysis of Porphyry’s On the Cave of the Nymphs alongside Proclus’s
similar treatment of the Iliad, walking readers through exactly how the
Neoplatonists read Homer's katabasis and anabasis, descent and ascent, as real
instructions for the soul rather than poetic decoration. It's serious,
scholarly work, but for anyone who finished this piece
wanting the primary sources rather than a summary of them, there's no better
place to start.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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