Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Intensified Trajectory of Consciousness in Odysseus' Vision in Hades

2014; Boston University; Volume: 22; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/arn.2014.0039

2327-6436

Robert Tindall, Susana Bustos,

Psychedelics and Drug Studies

The Intensified Trajectory of Consciousness in Odysseus’ Vision in Hades ROBERT TINDALL SUSANA BUSTOS The winding path that led to this essay began with the traditional lore of an Ashaninkan shaman working in the Peruvian Amazon. Towards the end of our year long investigation into the healing practices of the vegetalistas, as the indigenous and mestizo practitioners of rainforest medicine are known, we engaged in a plant dieta under the direction of one of the informants in Susana’s dissertation research,1 the curandero Juan Flores. One day, Flores tramped back to visit us during our solitary fast, and there the conversation turned to the mythic—and quite real according to him—beings that inhabit the Amazonian waterways. As Flores described the behavior of these sirenas, Robert was struck by the intriguing parallels between their seductive behavior and that of the Sirens described by Homer. Flores had never heard of the Odyssey, yet when given the story of Odysseus’ ordeal in the orbit of their rapturous song, Flores nodded his head and said grimly, “That’s them, alright.” It was then we began to suspect that the indigenous experience of the natural world, which has a marked universality among native peoples, might have an underlying, shaping influence upon Homer’s narrative. Along with familiarizing us with the cosmovision of the Amazonian peoples, our fieldwork also introduced us to the practice of shamanic journeying, which among Amazonian peoples, who live in an environment of extraordinary biodiversity , is often conducted in ceremonies utilizing ayahuasca, a psychoactive plant medicine whose name translates from Quechua as “vine of the spirits” or “vine of the dead.” arion 22.1 spring/summer 2014 There we were also struck by certain parallels between Odysseus’ visionary descent into Hades and ethnographies of traditional shamanic practices among indigenous peoples worldwide, especially when supplemented by cognitive archeologist David Lewis-Williams’ theory of the intensified trajectory of consciousness. These parallels are suggestive of a deeper morphological relationship between Homer’s narrative and the traditions of vision quest among the ancient, indigenous Mediterranean peoples (whose material culture is preserved in the Paleolithic cave sanctuaries), than is generally recognized. By viewing, as our main objective, just one episode in the Odyssey, the hero’s visionary journey in Hades, from an ethnographic perspective, this essay hopes to open up more inquiry into the indigenous, and shamanic, background of the epic poem. the indigenous worldview what makes plausible a deep affinity between the worldview of the ancient inhabitants of the Mediterranean, their descendants the Homeric Greeks, and indigenous peoples worldwide is a shared animistic perception. Such perception of a vital, sentient cosmos is, according to the eminent prehistorian Jean Clottes, expressed by traditional peoples in two marked ways: permeability and fluidity of consciousness . “Fluidity means the categories that we have, man, woman, horse, tree, etc., can shift. A tree may speak. A man can get transformed into an animal and the other way around. The concept of permeability is that there are no barriers , so to speak, between the world where we are and the world of spirits.”2 The Odyssey, on the surface, possesses rich examples of both these concepts. Under the concept of fluidity, there are numerous episodes involving a variety of transformations of form, such as when Athena suddenly abandons her disguise as Telemachus’ companion Mentor and (in the Fagles translation), wings away the intensified trajectory of consciousness 108 “in an eagle’s form and flight” (Fagles, tr., Odyssey 3.416), leaving an amazed crowd of Achaeans in her wake. There is also violent animal-becoming, as in the transformation of Odysseus’ men into swine under the influence of Circe’s “wicked drugs” (Odyssey 10.259).3 There are episodes of shape-shifting, for example, when Athena changes Odysseus’ appearance into a beggar, where she “shriveled the supple skin on his lithe limbs, stripped the russet curls from his head, covered his body top to toe with the wrinkled hide of an old man and dimmed the fire in his eyes, so shining once” (Odyssey 13.493–96), and then shape-shifts Odysseus back into a younger man, “taller, supple, young, his ruddy tan came back, the cut of his jawline firmed...