sdi

Ἑρμείας ἀκάκητα κατ’ εὐρώεντα κέλευθα.
πὰρ δ’ ἴσαν Ὠκεανοῦ τε ῥοὰς καὶ λευκάδα πέτρην,
ἠδὲ παρ’ Ἠελίοιο Πύλας καὶ δῆμον ὀνείρων
ἤϊσαν: αἶψα δ’ ἵκοντο κατ’ ἀσφοδελὸν λειμῶνα,
ἔνθα τε ναίουσι ψυχαί, εἴδωλα καμόντων.

Beneficent Hermeias led [the souls of the suitors] down the moldy ways:
they went past the currents of Okeanos and the white rock,
past the Gates of the Sun and the land of dreams,
and soon they came to a meadow of asphodel,
where souls live, the reflections of worn-out men.

(Homer, Odyssey XXIV 10–4, as translated—hopefully not too badly!—by yours truly.)

I much prefer the Hesiodic map of the end of the world, but Homer's seems to me to be no less valid:

• Okeanos is the night sky and the white rock is the Moon, demarcating the end of the material (e.g. "sublunary") world.

  (Translators don't usually seem to know what to do with λευκάδα πέτρην: I've seen "white rock," "rock of Leukas," and "Lefkada," this last being an island in the Ionian sea, and the birthplace and namesake of Lafcadio Hearn. But the last is silly, since Lefkada isn't even in Okeanos, and anyway we're speaking here of εὐρώεντα κέλευθα "the moldy ways," which are beyond earthly sight.)

• The Gates of the Sun are 𓈌 akhet (cf. Hesiodic Akheron), that place immediately beyond the eastern and western horizon where the Sun comes from at dawn and goes to at dusk, the threshold between Earth and Haides (cf. Egyptian 𓇽 duat).

• Haides itself consists of three locations: the land of dreams is closest and refers to that part of the world of Water which is densest (e.g. the lower part of the astral world, between the Moon and Saturn) and which mortals go to when they sleep; the meadows of asphodel is moderate and refers to that part of the world of Water which is least dense (e.g. the upper part of the astral world, between Saturn and the sphere of fixed stars) and which mortals go to when they die; and finally, the Elusion fields is distant and refers to the world of Air which mortals go to when they apotheosize (whether by love, cf. Menelaos; by virtue, cf. Rhadamanthus; or by deed, cf. Herakles).

ἐχθρὰ δέ μοι τοῦ δῶρα, τίω δέ μιν ἐν καρὸς αἴσῃ. [...]
οὐδ' εἴ μοι τόσα δοίη ὅσα ψάμαθός τε κόνις τε,
οὐδέ κεν ὧς ἔτι θυμὸν ἐμὸν πείσει' Ἀγαμέμνων
πρίν γ' ἀπὸ πᾶσαν ἐμοὶ δόμεναι θυμαλγέα λώβην.

I hate his gifts, and I've no respect for the man himself. [...]
Not even if he gave me as many gifts as there is sand or dust,
not even so would Agamemnon yet appease my anger
until he has paid me for his bitter outrage in full.

(Akhilles ranting. Homer, Iliad IX 378, 385–7, as translated—hopefully not too badly!—by yours truly.)

I often tell people that half the battle is to identify which myth you're in. Sometimes you're the little billy goat gruff, and the solution is to foist the troll off on your older brother; other times, you're the youngest prince, and the solution is to be brave and follow the advice of the troll's captive princess; other times, you're the youngest princess, and the solution is to sing the troll to sleep and make good your escape. Knowing which littlest-of-three you are tells you what approach you should take.

With all the horrors going on in the world, people keep wondering why my stance is that positive evil doesn't exist, and I think it comes back to identifying what myth we're in: when I look at the CIAs and CEOs of the world, I don't see great and powerful demons working towards cosmic Chaos, I see spoiled and petulant children who can't even tell right from wrong. The solution isn't to defeat them in battle—indeed, to do so is to play to their strengths and our weaknesses!—it is to educate them in their folly.

And, oftentimes, the simplest way to educate them is to let them see the consequences of their actions first-hand.

A little bit of a weird one, today: I have compiled digitized versions of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. These are UTF-8 plaintext files, consisting of the book number (2 digits), followed by a period, followed by the line number (3 digits), followed by a tab, followed by the line of the text (in Epic Greek). It is meant to make it easy for me to look up specific lines from the texts using standard UNIX tools (e.g. grep) for a future project. Being faithful reproductions of a work several thousand years old, these are obviously in the public domain.

I can't imagine anyone but myself is super interested in these, but on the off chance you are, have fun?

Like many, I suppose, my first experience with divination was the Tarot, probably a decade ago by now. I learned from it that particular oracles don't work for everyone—even now, I struggle to get almost anything from it, but I've had readings done for me which have shocked me with the detail that could be pulled from even a single card.

I met Geomancy back in 2019 by stumbling across Greer's books on the subject (which have issues but are the best available on the topic). It took maybe six months to get acceptable at it, and I still cast a chart every day, month, and year, since no other oracle does so well at giving me a bird's eye view of a situation. Its main downside is that it is so abstract and impersonal, which makes it difficult to pull out a course of action from it. I used to use it for specific inquiries, too, but it has lately been supplanted at these by other oracles.

I have been playing with the I Ching seriously for about eight months. True to its name, I have found it to really excel for trying to understand how a situation will evolve, and consequently for what strategy to adopt: not so much "should I do X?" but more "given X, what should I expect?" The main difficulty I've had with it is the culture barrier: the I Ching is deeply concerned with material well-being and the correct ordering of society, and, erm, neither of those are of much interest to an ascetic hermit like me.

But around the same time as I picked up the I Ching, I came across a couple ancient Greek oracles. Both are described in John Opsopaus's The Oracles of Homer and the Bones (which is how I discovered them), though—you know me!—I've dug up and use the original source material for both as best I can.

The first of these is the Astragalomanteion ("Knucklebone Oracle"), which we've found inscribed on a number of columns dug up in various places in Asia Minor. The idea is that you roll five knucklebones (which act as four-sided dice), and look up an answer related to some divinity from the column. I have found this to be quick, simple, and excellent for questions of the "should I do X?" variety. Curiously, when I ask a question, the responding divinity is always related to the question at hand (e.g. a question about my house might be answered by Zeus Ktesios, "protector of the household"), and when the divinity is unexpected, this gives interesting nuance into unseen factors affecting what I want to do.

The second of these is the Homeromanteion ("Homer Oracle"), which we've dug up in a few ancient books of magic (there is a copy, for example, in the famous Greek Magical Papyri). The idea is that you roll three dice (of the normal, six-sided variety) and get as an answer a line from the Iliad or Odyssey. I would have thought that the context in the story matters, but at least for me, the text of the line itself has been paramount and what the line refers to in the story doesn't matter so much. It gives the feel of a line spoken directly from the divinity to answer your question; in that sense, it is like a Magic 8-Ball that is actually useful. It's a versatile oracle which can be used for many kinds of questions, but I find myself reaching for it when I don't really know exactly what I'm looking for; "what should I know about X?" is, I suppose, as good a way to put it as any.

All of these systems have their quirks, and, odd as they are, I have learned that "when in Rome, do as the Romans:" those quirks are there for a reason. In Geomancy, for example, one should never conduct a reading during a thunderstorm, since if you do, the answer won't be accurate. The Homeromanteion requires observance of lucky/unlucky days and the use of a specific prayer to Lukian Apollon before casting it, which is drawn (creatively) from the Iliad and Odyssey. I wanted to understand it better, so I spent way too long translating it for myself:

κλῦθι ἄναξ ὅς που Λυκίης ἐν πίονι δήμῳ
εἲς ἢ ἐνὶ Τροίῃ: δύνασαι δὲ σὺ πάντοσ' ἀκούειν
ἀνέρι κηδομένῳ, ὡς νῦν ἐμὲ κῆδος ἱκάνει·
καί μοι τοῦτ' ἀγόρευσον ἐτήτυμον, ὄφρ' ἐὺ εἰδῶ,
ὅττι μάλιστ' ἐθέλω καί μοι φίλον ἔπλετο θυμῷ.

Hear me, Lord, whether you are in the rich land of Lukia
or here in Troia, for you are able to listen in all directions
to a man in distress, as I am now:
tell me truly, so I may know well,
whatever I want most which has endeared itself to my heart.

The first three lines are from the Iliad XVI 514–6: Patroklos kills Sarpedon, captain of the Lukians; Sarpedon's injured lieutenant Glaukos prays to Apollon for healing and strength so that he might defend his captain's corpse. The fourth line is from the Odyssey I 174: Athenaie comes to the house of Odusseus in disguise; Odusseus's son, Telemakhos, asks the stranger who they are and why they have come. The last line is from the Odyssey XVIII 113, except that the sentence has been modified from the second-person ("you"/"your") to first-person ("I"/"my"): Odusseus returns home in disguise; the suitors welcome him with grand, empty words.

It is reasonable for the prayer to say "here in Troia," since the Neoplatonists, beloved of Apollon, considered Troia to be the material world (e.g. it is as far from home as Odusseus, the soul, could ever get).

And while I'm blathering about Homer, if you're interested in reading him, my favorite translation for pleasure reading is W. H. D. Rouse's: The Story of Achilles and The Story of Odysseus. (The latter was even suitable for reading to my then-seven-year-old daughter so long as I explained things as I went along.) Those are hard to find in hardcopy, but don't let that stop you: even if all you can get locally is Samuel Butler's translation, it's stodgy but it's fine (for example, I have a really nice leather-bound, gilt-edged edition from Barnes and Noble, which I got while traveling for maybe $20 and is pretty hard to complain about).

Alexander Pope's Iliad is exquisite but I can't read heroic verse for more than a couple pages before my eyes bleed.

If I need a very precise translation (if I'm trying to understand the Greek line-by-line, say), I've been very impressed with Andrew Lang's Iliad and Odyssey every time I've looked things up in them (but I haven't read them cover to cover).

My daughter liked the Odyssey so much that she begged me to read her the Iliad, but even with an easy translation (and my skipping over large sections), it was too much for her. She enjoyed Rosemary Sutcliffe's retelling for children, Black Ships Before Troy, though.

Fun fact: the English word celery is from French celeri, Latin selinum, Ancient Greek σέλινον (selinon). It is evidently named after the city-state Σελινοῦς (Selinous) in Sicily, which was founded upon a spot abundant with wild celery, and from there the plant became widely associated with the city: its coat-of-arms was a celery leaf, its coins were stamped with the image of a celery leaf, and Plutarch tells us that they once presented the temple of Apollo at Delphi with a solid-gold statue of a celery plant as thanks for victory in war.

I stumbled across the following (modern) folk prayer the other day:

May the angels walk beside you always, offering wisdom in times of uncertainty, courage in the face of fear, luck in moments of opportunity, and protection in times of vulnerability.

The prayer is fine as far as it goes, even though I have a tendency to be dismissive of modern folk spirituality: my default response is to look down on such things. The reason for this, I think, is that spirituality is and must be descended from mystical experience, and it is difficult to authenticate the mystical experiences of others; lacking better tools, I favor time as a filter to separate the wheat from the chaff, and so the more archaic the belief, the more likely it is to have had merits worth preserving. However, I realized today that I am being rather unfair to this prayer in particular.

As you all surely know by now, I am very fond of my guardian angel, and so, in an effort to understand them (or as an offering to them, which I suppose is the same thing), I have been tracing the doctrines about these kinds of beings for a while. The earliest source I have found so far is Hesiod, Works and Days ll. 121–6 (tr. Hugh G. Evelyn-White):

αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ δὴ τοῦτο γένος κατὰ γαῖ᾽ ἐκάλυψε,—
τοὶ μὲν δαίμονες ἁγνοὶ ἐπιχθόνιοι καλέονται
ἐσθλοί, ἀλεξίκακοι, φύλακες θνητῶν ἀνθρώπων,
οἵ ῥα φυλάσσουσίν τε δίκας καὶ σχέτλια ἔργα
ἠέρα ἑσσάμενοι πάντη φοιτῶντες ἐπ᾽ αἶαν,
πλουτοδόται: καὶ τοῦτο γέρας βασιλήιον ἔσχον—,
[...]

But after the earth had covered [the golden] generation—they are called pure spirits dwelling on the earth, and are kindly, delivering from harm, and guardians of mortal men; for they roam everywhere over the earth, clothed in mist and keep watch on judgements and cruel deeds, givers of wealth; for this royal right also they received;— [...]

Translation is treason, and Evelyn-White's is no exception, but as best as I can discern with the help of several dictionaries, Hesiod outlines here the following five tenets:

• Guardian angels live on the earth with us (as contrasted with the gods in heaven, the silver generation in the underworld, etc.).

• Guardian angels are morally good and guide us in right behavior.

• Guardian angels protect us from spiritual harm.

• Guardian angels encourage us through difficult situations.

• Guardian angels dispense good fortune.

Astute readers will note that these five points are the exact same ones from the folk prayer I mentioned above, merely rearranged. One might be inclined to see Providence ensuring continuity of doctrine over the last three thousand years, and if that is so, then it makes for a good antidote to my conservative tendencies.

I suspect Hesiod's teachings go back further still, either to Egypt or Mesopotamia (though I despair of tracing it back any further than that). If anyone knows of textual references from either, I would be grateful.

I dreamed that my wife and I were in an unfamiliar town and saw that they had a farmer's market going on. She loves those, and so we went over to browse. One of the stalls had a tray piled with soap-like bricks of aromatics. My wife grabbed a turquoise-colored one, smelled it, and said, "Mmm, ephun! Yes, please!" and bought it on the spot. I had never heard of the plant before, so I looked at a nearby sign, which simply said, "Turquoise: ephun, good for dreams." I picked one up and smelled it, but just like in the waking world, my sense of smell didn't work and I could smell nothing.

I woke up and wrote the dream down, just like I always do, and did a web search for "ephun," but found nothing. While meditating today, I had the brainwave to try searching for it in Greek ("ἴφυον"), and it turns out it's simply spike lavender, which is, indeed, good for dreams.

It's a pretty specialized word and I've not encountered it in my studies, so it seems my dream has taught me something. (This wouldn't be the first time, though it is the first time I can say with certainty that it wasn't something that I could plausibly have known but forgotten.)

I mentioned Hipparchia's epitaph a while back; it turns out that Diogenes' is preserved for us, too:

εἰπὲ, κύον, τίνος ἀνδρὸς ἐφεστὼς σῆμα φυλάσσεις;
 Τοῦ Κυνός. Ἀλλὰ τίς ἦν οὗτος ἀνὴρ ὁ Κύων;
Διογένης. Γένος εἰπέ. Σινωπεύς. Ὃς πίθον ᾤκει;
 Καὶ μάλα· νῦν δὲ θανὼν ἀστέρας οἶκον ἔχει.

"Whose tomb is this, O Dog, thou watchest here?"
 "The Dog's." "Who's he?" "Diogenes the Seer."
"His town?" "Sinope." "Lived he in a jar?"
 "Yes—but in death, the stars his dwelling are."

(As quoted by the Greek Anthology VII lxiv, and as translated by W. H. D. Rouse. Apologies if I messed up the Greek, the scan I worked from was really bad.)

A lot of learning the ancient Greek language is inseparable from understanding the ancient Greek culture: for example, the word for "buy" is related to the word "agora;" the word for "sex" is related to the name "Aphrodite;" the word for "quarrel" is related to the name "Eris." If you don't understand what the agora, or Aphrodite, or Eris meant to somebody back then, then you can't understand the words: the agora wasn't merely a marketplace and Aphrodite isn't merely the archetype of sexuality—these are larger concepts, square pegs that don't fit into the round holes of modern English, and so simply saying that "ἀγοράζω" equals "buy" is a gross trivialization.

I think that mystical experience is like that, whether it be channeled writing (e.g. the G. Vale Owen scripts) or direct gnosis (e.g. Emmanuel Swedenborg's books) or whatever. The spiritual worlds are vast, and to write them down in words is impossible. Human language describes human experiences, and so it is inevitable that we don't have words for super-human experiences; but more than that, any translation from spiritual experience to human experience has to map not only to words but to cultural constructs that are encoded in those words.

A good example of this is that I find a lot of written mystical texts in English to be useless, because the worldview of English-speaking cultures is fundamentally a Christian worldview; the language presupposes this, and the assumptions are baked in to it. So if I am reading about, say, Lorna Byrne's mystical experiences, I have to account for a double-translation: she is translating her spiritual experiences into a Christian worldview just to merely be able to put it into words, and so when I read it, I need to not merely translate the words to experiences, but I need to try and generalize from her Christian model to try and get to the bigger reality that is hinted from it (since I am not a Christian and do not, cannot, subscribe to that worldview). But this is impossible: if translation is treason, then a translation of a translation is beyond treason, it is trash. If the original is like a live flesh-and-blood person, a translation is like a mere photograph, and a translation of a translation is more like a Picasso.

And let it not be thought I am just picking on Christianity here: we have many records of Greek mystical experiences, and they are likewise fraught. One simply can't understand the spiritual worlds by using human models.

Let me contrive a little example: very often, accounts of what heaven is like say that people go to various buildings and do God's work of making things or helping people or what have you. This strikes me as a very industrial, Western view of how a person in heaven lives, where one goes to a place and does a particular, specialized task for some kind of reward. Yes, there must certainly "work" of a sort in the spiritual world, but I can't imagine heaven to have anything remotely related to the "work" we do here on earth! I could very easily see somebody from a different culture treating heaven as constant sex—because isn't part of sex to know something completely, without barriers? And isn't that the kind of knowledge one has of things in heaven? This is not something that can be taken too literally, of course—there are no bodies in heaven!—but as an analogy, a translation of an experience, I can see it being valid. But of course if one said such a thing in an English-speaking context, even the few who are inclined to read of mystical experiences would decry the supposed mystic as speaking strictly in terms of wish fulfillment.

If one walks their own path to divinity—and so many of us here do, I think; not for nothing does Manly P. Hall call it "the way of the lonely ones"—then they are necessarily withdrawing themselves from the cultural context in which they are situated. And if one does so, then no account of spirituality can possibly fit them: it will always be lost in translation. The only experience that can fit into an isolated, idiosyncratic worldview is one's own; and so we must develop our spiritual eyes to see for ourselves.