The Texas Chainsaw Underworld

Young Heretics

Spencer Klavan

Society & Culture, Education

4.9 • 4.5K Ratings

🗓️ 15 October 2024

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It's about time for our Halowe'en special--and as luck would have it, I can think of no more chilling or eerie storie than the one we have to tell today. It's Odysseus' meeting with the shadows of the dead in the Odyssey Book 11. In it, both Odysseus and Homer must confront the ultimate existential crisis and grapple with the possibility that life itself ends in nothing but worm food. So why go on living? It's a painful question, but one a hero must face to make his way out the other side of death and come back home.

SIGNUPS OPEN: Register for Spring courses at The Ancient Language Institute https://ancientlanguage.com/youngheretics/

My book is out!! Order Light of the Mind, Light of the World: https://a.co/d/2QccOfM

Catch up on my livestream with Andrew Klavan (no relation): https://thenewjerusalem.substack.com/p/new-livestream-october-7-6pm-et

Simon Netchev’s Odyssey Map: https://www.worldhistory.org/image/15906/odysseus-ten-year-journey-home

Transcript

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0:00.0	So Halloween is coming up and usually around this time I like to do a Halloween special.
0:05.8	It's one of my favorite young heretics traditions to read a ghost story and talk about it or tell you guys about some tradition from the history of the West
0:15.8	some folklore about ghosts and goblins and demons and spooky scary stuff and I was
0:20.7	thinking man what am I going to do this? I'm in the middle of this series on Homer's Odyssey,
0:26.0	and I don't really want to interrupt it for the Halloween special.
0:30.0	But my friends always trust Homer because Homer will provide.
0:34.1	It turns out just in the natural course of telling Odysseus story,
0:38.0	we've arrived at a scarier story than any other I can think of. I can't imagine a better topic to tell you about
0:46.2	for our Halloween special than the one that has just come up in book 11 of the Odyssey.
0:50.8	We have reached the literal darkest point on the hero's quest. It's time
0:56.3	for the journey into the underworld. world. So when we last saw our hero you may recall he had broken free at last of the clutches of
1:15.3	sercie. They weren't very aggressive clutches at the time of departure. They had
1:22.3	evolved from evil witchcraft and sorcery into something more like beguiling
1:28.4	caresses. This he has spent a year with what was left of his crew on the island of Eia with
1:34.6	CERC. But as we've been discussing the whole time every journey every moment in this
1:41.1	quest is also a road not taken and for Odysseus the road not
1:45.6	taken with Circe is the road of raw pleasure and a life of lust he has to give that
1:52.1	up he has to give up all the other options he has to sleep
1:55.7	with all these beautiful women and nymphs and goddesses in order to attain true love,
2:00.6	true happiness, true peace at home with his faithful wife
2:04.2	Penelope. Now he's not quite finished with that part of his quest but he's made a
2:09.0	major advance which is over the raw animal lust of Serse's beguiling charms that turns men,
	...

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