The Joy of Learning

[sdi]

The reason why being a student is so great is that you can be wrong all you want and it's not a problem—you just fix the mistake, learn something new, and off you go. Today was the first day in a while that I felt like I was capable of thinking well and so I spent a bunch of time reading and thinking about Apollodoros's account of the Theban cycle, when I realized that the Horos myth does have an exile-and-return. In fact, it even has a city! It's Bublos that is the equivalent of Thebai and Troia.

But it isn't Horos that gets exiled, it's Osiris; Horos is only "exiled" in the sense that his seed is contained within Osiris. Osiris is thus sort of the entire Greek host; his box being accepted into Bublos is not so very different from the Troian horse, and his coming back in fourteen pieces is like how the Greek host was scattered to the far winds in their returns.

But this means Aineias isn't Horos. But it turns out I already knew our Horos: it's Orestes, son of Agamemnon. (Which I suppose should have been obvious, since Orestes never goes to Troia, murders his mother, and avenges his father.) We see the same character in the Theban cycle in the figure of Alkmaion, who also murders his mother to avenge his father, is chased by the Erinues, undergoes purifications, etc.

But there were many heroes at Troia (and, indeed, at Thebai). I haven't chased them all down, but the one who really stands out is Diktus, who almost leaves Bublos, but not quite; this one is Akhilleus, who was also nursed-but-not-really by a goddess by day and burned in a fire at night, and managed to survive most of the way through the war before succumbing to passion. (I'm sure he would have left Troia alive had Peleus not cried out upon seeing him burning!) And, while I'm not 100% sure of it, the most likely candidate for Aineias is actually old Teiresias, who led the Thebans away before the Epigone sacked the city, helping them to found a new one.

Anyway, I've a long way to go, but I think there's two takeaways from this. First, always treat your knowledge as provisional; there is always something to be learned by ditching your assumptions. Second, if I want to reconcile my myths, it won't do to simply have a list of point-by-point in the stories: they actually form a sort of tree, with the core stem following Osiris-Horos, the house of Atreus, and Europe's magical necklace, but with branches splaying off at various points depending on which hero we are talking about. This strengthens the hypothesis that the ancients knew there were many spiritual paths and tried to support them...

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[sdi]

Thank you, friend—may your path be likewise blessed!