Reaktion Books 2021

(10) PAUL ROBICHAUD – PAN: THE GREAT GOD’S MODERN RETURN

Io Pan! Io Pan Pan!

Pan, the original horny god with the groin of a goat or as Bill Hicks styled him, randy Pan the Goat Boy. God of nature, mountains, shepherds and sexuality – also the source of our word panic, for the divine mad fear he could inspire in people, including as savior of Athens, the invading Persian army at Marathon.

As a Capricorn goat boy myself, I’ve long been a Pan fan. And so too is Paul Robichaud, a devotee of Pan. Well perhaps not the Capricorn part, but he has written a whole book as a paean to Pan.

Ironically, the only classical Greek god reported as dead – in a historical legend by Plutarch, with a sailor during the reign of Tiberius reporting a divine proclamation from an island that “the great god Pan is dead” – but reports of his death, to paraphrase Mark Twain, were greatly exaggerated. Pan was the one god that endured more than all the others, even to the extent of embodying in horned and hooved form all classical paganism as a whole in modern romanticism and neo-paganism. Perhaps aptly enough, given the pun on Pan – as the word for “all” in Greek also being Pan.

Robichaud comes from a background as an English professor – it shows in his fluent prose style, but also a focus on literature as he explores how Pan has been imagined in mythology, art, literature, music, spirituality, and popular culture through the centuries. The chapter titles best demonstrate this odyssey of Pan from mythic Pan – through medieval and early modern Pan, Pan’s romantic rebirth, Pan in the twentieth century (and his Edwardian height of popularity) and Pan’s occult power – to contemporary Pan.

All the usual suspects are here as cultural or literary devotees of Pan, but most notably those from Edwardian children’s literature of all places – prompting Bill Hick’s joke about his Goat Boy being available for children’s parties (“Mommy, I want Goat Boy to come play at our house”). Kenneth Grahame’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Peter Pan’s namesake, as well as much of his persona – with the Lost Boys as his satyrs.

Sadly, no C.S. Lewis’ Narnia, despite its deliciously Dionysian portrayal, maenads and all. Pan did often pal around with Dionysus after all, but generally not so much the other gods – not to mention all those fauns in Narnia. Wait a minute…Mr Tumnus is Pan! Spread the word.

Of course, there are bound to be omissions – Bill Hicks’ Goat Boy for one, Rhys Darby’s fleeting Pan-like figure in Flight of The Conchords’ Prince of Parties song for another. There’s just too much Pan – or is that too many Pans? – out there.

Also sadly, Rochibaud does suggest one of my favorite historical legends of how Christianity embodied Pan as its devil – as being just that, a legend dating back only to the nineteenth century (following the hypothesis of Ronald Hutton to that effect).

I still prefer the legend. In one of my story ideas, a somewhat lost and forlorn Satan muses to the protagonist (with whom he has occasional chats) of his origin from Pan (as one of his multiple-choice origin stories). The protagonist calls him out on his conflicting origin stories, to which Satan replies “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am legion, I contain multitudes”. But then he becomes sadly wistful “I would give anything just to dance in the moonlight again, when I was not evil but only wild and free”.

RATING: 4 STARS****
B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

(9) BETTANY HUGHES – HELEN OF TROY / APHRODITE & VENUS

A thematic duo of books for my top two favorite female figures from mythology – Aphrodite Venus and Helen of Troy (which I understand to be adapted from or for TV series written and presented by Hughes).

And for those who think it a cheat to include two books within the one entry, I’d rank her Helen of Troy over her Aphrodite & Venus (despite ranking Aphrodite over Helen for my top female figure from mythology). Firstly because it was, well, first of the two (including in my reading order of them) and secondly because it seemed to me the more developed in depth. Don’t get me wrong – her Aphrodite book is an interesting presentation of the goddess in her many aspects, written in Hughes’ characteristic engaging style, but I just would have preferred it to be a little longer to consider its subject a little deeper.

“As soon as men began to write, they made Helen of Troy their subject; for nearly three thousand years she has been both the embodiment of absolute female beauty and a reminder of the terrible power that beauty can wield”. And that’s literally as soon as men began to write, as she was enshrined within the Iliad, Homer’s epic poem that is the foundation of Western literary culture.

The subtitle of the book sums up her aspects in myth and history – goddess, princess, whore. I was aware of her divine mythic aspect from other sources – including one referenced in this book that saw Helen as a semi-divine figure in a blissful life, ironically with Achilles, but aptly enough coupling the world’s most beautiful women with its greatest warrior. And of course her divine origin as a daughter of Zeus in the form of a swan with Leda, with Helen hatched from an egg.

However, I was intrigued by Helen of Sparta, “the focus of a cult which conflated Helen the heroine with a pre-Greek fertility goddess”. For that matter, I often tend to overlook that Helen was from Sparta (SPARTA!) – and Hughes is evocative in fleshing her out as a Spartan princess or Mycenaean aristocrat, as well as fleshing out Paris as delegate from Troy as Hittite satellite, doing the Bronze Age equivalent of sliding into her dms.

It reminded me of other reading – that while we moderns tend to query a casus belli as retrieving a stolen wife, substituting other theories for the Trojan War, when one looks at ancient or tribal war, that wars fought over women or a woman may not be so strange after all.

And that of course brings me to that other aspect of Helen – “the home-wrecker of the Iliad” and “bitch-whore of Greek tragedy”. It’s an aspect that evokes the original sin of Eve on a geopolitical scale, “held responsible for both the Trojan War and enduring enmity between East and West”. There’s even an apple in Helen’s myth!

As for Aphrodite & Venus, it’s summed up by its subtitle – history of a goddess. And what a goddess! It starts – aptly enough – with her mythic birth (or one of its versions at least), reminding us of something that Botticelli’s famous birth of Venus often charms us to forget, that Aphrodite wasn’t just born from the bubbles of sea foam, but the bloody foam formed by or around the severed genitals of a deposed divine ruler.

It evokes images of the Anatolian goddess Cybele imported into Greece and Rome, some of whose frenzied male devotees were reputed to have castrated themselves at the height of her ecstatic festivals – which I suspect at least of few them regretted in the distinctly, ah, un-ecstatic light of the next day.

I don’t know of any association or connection between Aphrodite and Cybele – the Greeks associated Cybele with mother goddess Rhea – but Aphrodite was certainly associated with ancient near Eastern goddesses of love and war like Ishtar, aptly enough for Aphrodite’s’ blood-foamed birth. Hughes explores this association, seemingly conflated with her origin in Cyprus, as demonstrative of a divine figure far more complex in all her aspects than the mere classical pinup or party girl to which she is often reduced.

One such aspect is as goddess of the Roman Empire itself – evoked in Hughes’ chapter Venus and Empire – as Romans traced their empire to legendary Trojan founder, Aeneas. Aeneas – leader of exiles from the Trojan War, heir to the Trojan royal lineage of Priam, Paris and Hector, and above all, son of Aphrodite. The Romans also looked more favorably on her consorting with the god of war, as while the Greek god of war represented the brutish violence of war (with Athena representing the art of war), the Romans saw their counterpart Mars as representing more martial virtue and honor.

RATING: 4 STARS****
B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

Wiley-Blackwell, 1st edition

(8) WALTER BURKERT – GREEK RELIGION

If Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths are my Old Testament of classical mythology, Burkert’s Greek Religion is my New Testament. Alternatively, the three are my holy trinity of classical mythology (which I suppose would make Nietzsche the Father, Graves the Son and Burkert the Holy Spirit of classical mythology).

No, seriously. For me, Nietzsche and Graves are poles at the other end of a thematic spectrum from Burkert – which I suppose would make all three the points of a thematic triangle. Whatever.

The line from Nietzsche to Burkert is perhaps more obvious – both came from a long tradition of German classicists or classical philologists, indeed its most prominent figures in the English-speaking world (or at least authors of its most prominent books), but in some ways diametrically opposed from each other.

Nietzsche essentially extrapolated a recurring dichotomy of the Apollonian and the Dionysian from classical mythology, above all in its literary manifestation in Greek tragedy, hence his title The Birth of Tragedy. He wrote as an eccentric poet-philosopher, or as he himself described it, a ‘rhapsodizer’ (prompting thoughts of Nietzsche as rhap-artist), not unlike his own prophetic ‘madman’ and apostle of the death of God before his time – “I have come too early…my time is not yet”.

Graves strikes me as similar to Nietzsche – probably someone somewhere has studied or written of the influence of Nietzsche on Graves, if any, but I don’t know anything about that subject – writing as a fellow rhapsodizer or poet, but as an apostle of the Goddess rather than of the death of God, extrapolating his monomyth of the Goddess or prehistoric matriarchal religion from classical mythology.

Of course, the historical accuracy of either has been almost universally contested or considered to be idiosyncratic – “of value only as a guide to the author’s personal mythology”. But who cares? They’re fun! And it’s hard to argue with poetry.

Burkert’s The Greek Religion on the other hand, originally published in his native German in 1977 and translated into English in 1985, has been widely accepted as a standard work in the field. And unlike Nietzsche or Graves, Burkert pretty much extrapolates nothing, robustly sticking to the facts of his literary or archaeological sources.

Burkert presents classical polytheism as inherently chaotic in nature, but at the heart of classical religion was sacrificial ritual – “The term gods…remains fluid, whereas sacrifice is a fact”.

His section headings say it all about his comprehensive survey of Greek religion – Prehistory and the Minoan-Mycenaean Age; Ritual and Sanctuary; The Gods (the Olympian dirty dozen and the balance of the pantheon); The Dead, Heroes and Chthonic Gods; Polis and Polytheism; Mysteries and Asceticism; and Philosophical Religion.

“He describes the various rituals of sacrifice and libation and explains Greek beliefs about purification. He investigates the inspiration behind the great temples at Olympia, Delphi, Delos, and the Acropolis―discussing the priesthood, sanctuary, and oracles. Considerable attention is given to the individual gods, the position of the heroes, and beliefs about the afterlife. The different festivals are used to illuminate the place of religion in the society of the city-state. The mystery cults, at Eleusis and among the followers of Bacchus and Orpheus, are also set in that context. The book concludes with an assessment of the great classical philosophers’ attitudes to religion”.

RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Art by Simon Bisley for “Slaine: The Horned God” written by Pat Mills for the 2000 AD comic as one of my favorite adaptations of Graves’ Goddess in popular culture, even more so than it was of Frazer – since it essentially adapted Graves, who in turn adapted Frazer

(7) ROBERT GRAVES – THE WHITE GODDESS & THE GREEK MYTHS

Graves saw Frazer’s sacred king and raised it with a queen, his titular White Goddess. For Graves, the monomyth was his theme, or rather the great mythic and poetic Theme:

“The Theme, briefly, is the antique story, which falls into thirteen chapters and an epilogue, of the birth, life, death and resurrection of the God of the Waxing Year; the central chapters concern the God’s losing battle with the God of the Waning Year for love of the capricious and all-powerful Threefold Goddess, their mother, bride and layer-out. The poet identifies himself with the God of the Waxing Year and his Muse with the Goddess; the rival is his blood-brother, his other self, his weird.”

However, The White Goddess is not as accessible in its prose as Frazer’s The Golden Bough and is essentially a compilation of poetic musings, which has its shining moments but can often become turgid or bogged down in Graves’ esoteric discussion of the Irish tree alphabet or the poems of Taliesin. And like The Golden Bough, it’s best read as poetry than for factual or historical accuracy.

And he was an apostle of the White Goddess again in his study of Greek mythology. However, it remains my favorite single volume study of Greek mythology.

Essentially it comes in two parts.

The first part is a conventional compendium of Greek mythology – literary retellings of the various myths from their sources – and it is this part that is the basis for the book as my favorite single volume study of Greek mythology, albeit somewhat dense in its prose style.

The second part – his interpretative notes or commentary – is where things get more wild, albeit all in good poetic fun. This is where Graves ‘decodes’ or reconstructs Greek mythology to his monomyth of the Goddess or prehistoric matriarchal religion – “Graves interpreted Bronze Age Greece as changing from a matriarchal society…to a patriarchal one under continual pressure from victorious Greek-speaking tribes. In the second stage local kings came to each settlement as foreign princes, reigned by marrying the hereditary queen, who represented the Triple Goddess, and were ritually slain by the next king after a limited period, originally six months. Kings managed to evade the sacrifice for longer and longer periods, often by sacrificing substitutes, and eventually converted the queen, priestess of the Goddess, into a subservient and chaste wife, and in the final stage had legitimate sons to reign after them”.

So there you go. Of course, the historical accuracy of Graves’ interpretation or commentary has been almost universally contested or considered to be idiosyncratic – “the interpretive notes are of value only as a guide to the author’s personal mythology”. His characteristic rejoinder was to plead poetic privilege, essentially rebuking his critics or classical scholars “You’re not poets!”. And it’s hard to argue with poetry.

RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Art by Simon Bisley for “Slaine: The Horned God” written by Pat Mills for the 2000 AD comic as one of my favorite adaptations of Frazer’s sacrificial sacred king in popular culture. Well, that and The Wicker Man (which also features in Slaine)

(6) SIR JAMES GEORGE FRAZER – THE GOLDEN BOUGH

“Who are these coming to the sacrifice?” –
John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn

Behold the monomyth of the sacrificial sacred king.

That is – the monomyth of a recurring or universal mythic archetype, as used by Joseph Campbell for his archetypal hero’s journey. But it doesn’t get much more monomythic that one of the original monomyths – Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough.

The Golden Bough proposed the monomyth or recurring mythic archetype of sacrificial sacred kings – or their surrogates once the kings wised up to it – as incarnations of gods or solar deities whose death and resurrection in turn represented fertility. And believe me, Frazer saw these sacred kings or fertility cults everywhere – including Jesus and Christianity, controversially at the time – such that he filled several volumes up with them, although more people (including me) tend to read his abridged single volume.

Now I think that Frazer was always entertaining and occasionally illuminating in The Golden Bough – his discussion of the principles of sympathetic magic, a term coined by himself, seems particularly definitive – but in terms of factual or historical accuracy…not so much as he’s much more mixed at best in this respect. As the old adage goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail – and when all you have is a theory of sacred kings, then by god or goddess, everything begins to look like a sacred king, even if you have to hammer everything into shape for it. After all, we all have to make sacrifices…

While Frazer is or was mostly dismissed as a footnote in academic study, The Golden Bough has been highly influential in literary culture, because whether or not it is true, his mythic archetype of the doomed hero or sacrificial sacred king has the elements of a ripping yarn.

Just for starters, there’s his influence on T. S. Eliot, who openly acknowledged the influence of Frazer on The Waste Land, although with the characteristic pessimism of that poem, proposed the cycle might be broken, leaving only violence and death without rebirth – and in which the dying god is just another buried corpse, perhaps even prompting to mind a Nietzschean murder victim or contemporary zombie apocalypse, rising writhing from their own resurrection – “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, has it begun to sprout?”

Or there’s his influence on Campbell’s own monomyth. Or on Sigmund Freud, lending itself to the segue of his influence on Camille Paglia, who described her primary influence as a fusion of Frazer and Freud (although doubling the inaccuracy of the former with that of the latter).

RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Pentheus being torn apart – Attic red-figure vase painting

(5) EURIPIDES – BACCHAE

Literal Dionysian deus ex machina in the original folk horror story and clash of church against state – or cult against throne.

The greatest Greek tragedy – indeed one that has been argued to be one of the greatest ever written – in the usual style of Greek tragedies, which is the gods will screw you over and there’s nothing much you can do about it, even with that weird chorus telling you what’s happening, and even if they liked to call it nemesis for your hubris.

Yes, I know Dionysus personally appears, albeit in mortal disguise, to give Pentheus a repenting chance, but he doesn’t exactly go all out in the attempt because it’s much more demonstrative – and fun – setting up Pentheus for the Wicker Man to his Lord Summerisle. Except that the Bacchae makes the Wicker Man look like a picnic.

Anyway, the play by Euripides is based on the myth of Pentheus, king of Thebes, who is opposed to the new god Dionysus and his cult, despite being, you know, actually related to him. No, seriously, Pentheus is the cousin of Dionysus, because that’s how it was in those days, particularly with Zeus. Worse, Pentheus – and much of Thebes denies the divinity of Dionysus. And you can’t be disrespecting Dionysus.

So Dionysus does what any Greek god would do:
Step 1 – disguise yourself as a mortal priest of yourself and be captured only to respond cryptically to questions
Step 2 – drive your female worshippers or Maenads mad and trick Pentheus into spying on them in disguise as one of them
Step 3 – !!!
Step 4 – profit!

And by step 3, I mean sit back as your Maenads, including Pentheus’ own mother Agave, literally tear Pentheus apart with their bare hands in a crazed frenzy, believing Pentheus to be a wild beast.

That leads to a moment of classic horror as Agave proudly bears the head, still under divine delusion that it is the head of a mountain lion, to her own father Cadmus, only to see it for what it really is when Cadmus recoils and calls upon her to look more closely.

From a modern perspective, it’s hard not to identify or sympathize with King Pentheus cracking down on a strange new cult spreading through his city – particularly one with literal crazed worshippers like the Maenads, up there with the followers of Jim Jones or Charles Manson.

The Bacchae resonates on so many levels. I’ve already compared it to The Wicker Man, which replays many of its story beats for horror – and it’s easy to adapt the Bacchae for horror, from folk horror to cosmic horror – Dionysus as Yog Sothoth, perhaps?

More substantially, others have argued the parallels between it and the Gospels, with Jerusalem for Thebes and Jesus for Dionysus (and the Jewish leaders and Pontius Pilate for Pentheus), except of course Jesus is far more morally palatable in his divine coup de grace than Dionysus.

And there’s the Nietzschean interpretations, most famously with his dichotomy of the Apollonian and Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy – and it is tempting to see Pentheus as a good Apollonian, attempting to hold the line of order against Dionysian chaos. Or the Freudian interpretations with Pentheus as ego trying to hold back the wild ecstasy of the id…

RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Netherlandish Proverbs – painting by Pieter Brueghel the Elder 1559

(4) FOLKLORE INDEX

Well, Folklore Indices to be precise – two of them, usually used in tandem, the Thompson Motif-Index of Folklore, and the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index of folklore tale types.

Both are regarded as standard tools of folklore studies – and are endlessly fascinating to browse even for those outside folklore studies with a general interest in mythology or culture.

As its title indicates, the Thompson Motif-Index was compiled by American folklorist Stith Thompson (at the substantial length of 6 volumes) as a catalogue or index of motifs – the granular elements of folklore or folktales.

As Thompson himself defined it, “a motif is the smallest element in a tale having a power to persist in tradition. In order to have this power it must have something unusual and striking about it”.

Although in compiling the index, Thompson used a broader-brush approach to motifs as anything that goes to make up a traditional narrative.

Obviously a full summary even of the categories of the Thompson Index would be too exhaustive, let alone the thousands of motifs themselves, but the categories are organized by broader themes denoted by letters from A (Mythological Motifs) to Z (Miscellaneous Groups of Motifs).

This includes animals, taboos, magic, the dead (including ghosts and vampires), marvels, ogres (and monstrous figures in general), tests, deceptions, reversals of fortune, ordaining the future, chance and fate, society, rewards and punishment, captives and fugitives, unnatural cruelty, sex, the nature of life, religion, traits of character and humor.

And as its title indicates, the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index (ATU or AT Index) also involved Thompson – but as originally compiled by Finnish folklorist Antti Aarne and as further expanded and revised by German folklorist Hans-Jorg Uther, classifying tales by their type.

As defined by Thompson, “a type is a traditional tale that has an independent existence. It may be told as a complete narrative and does not depend for its meaning on any other tale. It may indeed happen to be told with another tale, but the fact that it may be told alone attests its independence. It may consist of only one motif or of many”.

The Index divides tales into sections with an AT number for each entry, which also have their own broad title and including closely related folk tales – for example, 545B “The Cat as Helper” includes folk tales with other animal helpers. Similar types are grouped together – “tale types 400–424 all feature brides or wives as the primary protagonist”.

To illustrate further, 510A is their Cinderella entry (including other versions and similar variations), itself a subcategory of 510 Persecuted Heroine, and noting other entries with which it is commonly combined.

RATING: 4 STARS****
S-TIER (GOD TIER)

That’s one trippy cover – from a 2023 reprint edition by Martino Fine Books

(3) PRINCIPIA DISCORDIA

Or how I found Goddess and what I did to Her when I Found Her.

No really, that’s the subtitle of the book. The Goddess in question is the playful goddess of chaos in classical mythology, Eris or Discordia, but as the object of the Discordian “religion”, which is either a joke disguised as a religion or a religion disguised as a joke.

The Principia Discordia is the central Discordian “religious” text – and much briefer than other such texts. Written by the pseudonymous Malaclypse the Younger and Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst, it is full of contradictions and humor:

“Is Eris true?”
“Everything is true.”
“Even false things?”
“Even false things are true.”
“How can that be?”
“I don’t know man, I didn’t do it.”

At the same time, as noted in its Wikipedia entry, it contains several passages which propose that there is serious intent behind the work, for example a message scrawled on page 00075: “If you think the PRINCIPIA is just a ha-ha, then go read it again.” Also, it is is quoted extensively in and shares many themes with the satirical science fiction book The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, one of my top ten SF books.

“Notable symbols in the book include the Apple of Discord, the pentagon, and the “Sacred Chao”, which resembles the Taijitu of Taoism, but the two principles depicted are “Hodge” and “Podge” rather than yin and yang, and they are represented by the apple and the pentagon, and not by dots. Saints identified include Emperor Norton, Yossarian, Don Quixote, and Bokonon. The Principia also introduces the mysterious word “fnord”, later popularized in The Illuminatus! Trilogy”.

“I can see the fnords!”

I particularly enjoy how it deems every single man, woman and child on Earth as “a genuine and authorized pope of Discordia” – even including an official pope card that may be reproduced and distributed to anyone and everyone. Or that it has five classes of saint as exemplars and models of perfection – with the lowest class of saint being for real people, deceased or otherwise, as the higher classes of saint are reserved for fictional beings, who by virtue of being fictional, are better able to reach the Discordian view of perfection. The canonization of Discordian saints was a profound influence upon myself to canonize my own saints of pagan Catholicism – and apostles of the Goddess.

RATING: 5 STARS*****
S-TIER (GODDESS TIER)

0 The Fool – Rider-Waite Tarot (A.E.Waite & Pamela Colman Smith as artist)

(2) TAROT – RIDER-WAITE & CROWLEY THOTH

The Tarot earns special mention in my Top 10 Mythology Books for the decks of cards, particularly the two iconic and definitive modern decks.

Of course, there are a plethora of modern Tarot decks, most of which originate from those two definitive modern decks (named for their creators) which were themselves substantial reconstructions from earlier tarot decks, pumping up their esoteric mystique – the Rider-Waite deck and the Crowley-Thoth deck, my Old Testament and New Testament of Tarot respectively. (And like Martin Prince in The Simpsons dismissively handwaving away Ray Bradbury from his ABC of science fiction with “I’m aware of his work”, I’m aware of the third most common modern Tarot deck – the Marseilles Tarot).

Interestingly, both these two definitive decks were by female artists, Pamela Colman Smith for the Rider-Waite deck and Lady Frieda Harris. My personal preference is for the artwork and themes of the Crowley-Thoth deck (even if Crowley himself was one generally weird dude and sick puppy), albeit still shaped by the influence of the Rider-Waite Tarot deck.

RATING: 5 STARS*****
S-TIER (GOD-TIER)

Homer Simpson as Odysseus from “D’oh, Brother Where Art Thou?” in “Tales from the Public Domain” (episode 283 – S13 E14) – aptly enough and still one of the best televised adaptations of the Odyssey

(1) HOMER – ILIAD & ODYSSEY

“Sing, Muse, of the wrath of Achilles”.

Also “tell me, Muse, of the cunning man who traveled far and wide after he had sacked the famed city of Troy”

We’re going old school here, the oldest school there is – the Iliad and the Odyssey, the rosy-fingered dawn of Western literature, preceding even literacy as those two epic poems were performed or sung rather than written by their author Homer, with tradition holding that he memorized both and probably changed the story each time he told them. (And no, not that Homer, although I couldn’t resist using him as my feature image). Although everything about Homer – or is that Homers? – is contested, such as whether he was indeed illiterate, or blind, or a man (I do have a soft spot for the theory that while a male Homer authored the Iliad, a female Homer authored the Odyssey), or Greek, or indeed even existed at all, at least as a single person.

“The Greeks held Homer in something like reverence” – as they and everyone else damn well should have or should – “viewing his works as the foundation of their society, in much the same way as modern Europeans view the Bible”. As do I and have since childhood, in which they (or at least the Odyssey) have been hugely influential for me personally, comparable to my god-tier mythologies or books of mythology, such if you were to peel back the layers of my psyche you’d find them deep within it. Of course, that wasn’t because anyone sung them to me – although again they damn well should have – or even that I read them in their original poetic form, but as a prose adaption of the Oydssey for children, which still remains the version of the Odyssey lodged within my psyche. Sadly, I can’t recall the name of its author, except that it was female – aptly enough for that female authorship theory for the Odyssey or both, and aptly enough in that I recall it brought the female characters, upon which its protagonist heavily relies, vividly to life.

Indeed, the Iliad is my Old Testament and the Odyssey is my New Testament. Aptly enough, given the Bronze Age battle hymns of Iliad and Old Testament, or the hero’s return from death in Odyssey and New Testament.

And while we’re on such comparisons, the Second World War is the American Iliad and the Cold War the American Odyssey.

However, I have always preferred the Odyssey to the Iliad. When people think of the Iliad, they usually think of all the things that aren’t actually in it – the whole mythos of the Trojan War in what is usually referred to as the Trojan Cycle. Instead, the Iliad is an incredibly brief snapshot of the Trojan War – a few weeks or so in the final year of a legendary ten year war. And of course most of that is the greatest Greek warrior Achilles sulking in his tent, because the Greek leader Agamemnon deprived him of the booty, in both senses of the word, of a Trojan girl taken captive. Until of course Achilles’ boyfriend Patroclus is killed by the greatest Trojan warrior Hector – at which time, it’s personal. Well until the Trojan king Priam begs Achilles if the latter could please stop dragging Hector’s dead body behind him while doing victory laps in his chariot.

Ultimately though, the Iliad is just men killing each other and squabbling over women. The Odyssey on the other hand is a ten year maritime magical mystery tour – or dare I say it, Poseidon adventure, as the Greek hero Odysseus just tries to return to his kingdom Ithaca after the Trojan War, barely escaping death as he is tossed from flotsam to jetsam in one shipwreck after another from Poseidon’s wrath. I mean, seriously, he could have walked home faster from Turkey to Greece, although Poseidon probably still would have got him somehow. And he loses all his ships and men en route, returning home as lone survivor – and stranger, as even then he has to remain disguised as a beggar to infiltrate his own household and outwit his wife’s persistent suitors partying it up there. And let me tell you, every dog has its day. Literally and heartbreakingly, as he is recognized by his faithful dog Argos who has awaited his return for twenty years (only to finally pass away with that last effort). But also figuratively and with undeniable satisfaction as he outwits and defeats the suitors.

RATING: 5 STARS*****
S-TIER (GOD-TIER)