Thoughts and Prayers for Odysseus: Circe's Island

Young Heretics

Spencer Klavan

Society & Culture, Education

4.9 • 4.5K Ratings

🗓️ 8 October 2024

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Life is very hard for Odysseus. He's lost comrades to war and to people-eaters of both the one- and two-eyed varieties. He's far from home, wandering at sea, and now, after all that...he has to go to bed with a beautiful goddess. Please bow your heads in a moment of silence. Truly, though, the island of Aeaea, where Circe the witch lives, does represent a major trial that Odysseus must go through to make his way back into civilization. But it's not he kind of trial we'd imagine today, when Christianity has totally transformed sexual ethics. What does it mean to stay true to your family, and what is true strength? Odysseus is going to have to answer both questions to make it home.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Poor Odysseus. Life is very hard for him. He's already been blown off course, days and days of storms.
0:09.2	He's already faced the man-eating Cyclops and lost several of his comrades to that gruesome fate.
0:17.2	And now he must face what is perhaps his most painful trial yet. He's going to have to go to bed with a beautiful goddess.
0:28.8	Thoughts and prayers during this difficult time. Okay, things are about to get freaky if they weren't already if the land of the Cyclops and the man-eating
0:46.8	monsters who live outside of society were not high octane and weird enough for you it It's about to get even weirder. We are visiting
0:55.8	Circe on the island of I-I-I-A-A-A-A-A-A-e-e-a-e-a-a-a-a and that's where the goddess, the witch Sersei lives, one of the most famous episodes in the Odyssey,
1:12.4	takes up a significant chunk
1:14.0	probably the bulk of book 10 and I was kind of kidding obviously it's a little
1:19.9	rich that Odysseus now has to face the terrible trial of a beautiful woman that wants to sleep with him.
1:26.0	But there is an element of reality to that because this is also one of the paths not taken.
1:32.8	Remember last week I suggested that each of these episodes
1:35.8	in the story of Odysseus journeys,
1:38.1	now that we're in the main portion of the tale,
1:41.2	each of these episodes you can kind of think of as a path not taken for Odysseus. He's a veteran. He's coming home from war. He has lost his identity in some very profound sense, both because he's no longer
1:55.0	embedded into the network of relationships with other warrior heroes that he was
2:01.3	previously in. He used to be in a council of his peers among the different
2:05.6	Greek fighters. Now he's the sole lone leader at the head of a band of men and so he's in this
2:12.1	isolation. He's lost lost he doesn't know how to
2:15.5	find his way back home exactly now that he's been blown off course and he doesn't
2:21.4	know how to find his way back into human civilization in peace time
2:26.0	and this journey that he's on which really takes off with the Cyclops and with this famous
2:32.0	and very profound allegory where he has to pretend to be nobody and then reclaim his identity
	...

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