In Re-Imagining ‘The Odyssey,’ Nolan Has Birthed a Prophetic Myth

Mythology is an encounter with the deepest dimensions of the soul. A myth, a potent myth, bottles an essential knowing, activating remembrance. The more timely, emotionally relevant, or thematically rich, the more potent the myth. It’s interesting, then, that in 2026, audiences are resonating with the potency of Christopher Nolan’s interpretation of The Odyssey, which originated more than 2,500 years ago via Homer’s epic poem.

Myths are timeless, they exist outside of the flow of linear time. Yet that doesn’t mean they don’t have timeliness. Timeless and timely are in a marriage, a chronic engagement, governed by laws of eternal and becoming. Myths are the underlying universal truths playing out in all of our lives, all the time. We are mythological beings in a cosmic story. And yet, in certain moments, special moments, the union of timeless and timely reaches a crescendo.

Zeitgeist is a German word combining zeit (time) and geist (ghost or spirit). It’s an apt word. Spirit is eternal and timeless. A ghost, though? A ghost haunts, a ghost is residue from times past, a reminder of things we’d prefer to forget. Mark Twain said “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Myths are ghosts of the unclaimed and the unseen, rhymes that land upon deaf ears but refuse to mute themselves. In The Hero’s Journey, Joseph Campbell urges:

“You’ve got to live on myths of the olden days! The elementary ideas are constant, they remain, they remain, they remain. The problem is the inflection. How are the myths represented? The function of the artist is to present these eternal mysteries in terms of a contemporary context of life.”

The zeitgeist describes the “spirit of the times.” As mythological beings in a cosmic story, the surfacing of this myth, at this point in time, isn’t an accident, but a rhyme. We can debate artistic merit, critique and review, crave repetition of the old and complain about how the new fails in comparison. But we shouldn’t ignore the film’s mythological message. Nolan has given birth to a prophetic myth that shines light on our current global crisis, and illuminates a way forward.

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The Zeitgeist and the Zeitraum

Dreams are the common wellspring of mythological material. Creative works also emerge from dreamspace. The Odyssey has remained relevant for millennia, dreaming itself into relevance, again and again. If the zeitgeist is the spirit of the times, the zeitraum (“time-dream”) is the myth we dream together. Returning to Campbell’s wisdom:

“.. a dream is a personal experience of that deep, dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is the society’s dream. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn’t, you’ve got an adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.”

If, as I’m suggesting, The Odyssey is a prophecy, decrypting what the myth is trying to communicate to us, and through us, is a sacred task. To interpret in this way, we have to subvert the conventional way of knowing. This isn’t an intellectual exploration. Like transformative private dreams, mythological potency is all about feeling, intuition, and sensitivity to imagination.

As I immersed myself in Nolan’s world, there were moments I was completely overawed with powerful feelings; that’s the initial message, the knowing. Myths bypass the intellect, which includes the intellect’s usual attempts to narrativise in structured, linear ways. The stronger the feeling, the closer to a soulful, mythological truth. The more resonant the underlying archetypal structure, the more coherent the message. 

This isn’t about specifics, but universal patterns of the collective psyche. This is the issue with “experts in mythology” who focus on facts and replication of specifics, rather than lived mythological experience. This isn’t a side-by-side comparison. It’s understanding what the myth’s evolution is signalling about human consciousness. How cognizant Nolan is about this process is secondary; he is a vessel for higher truth.

A prophet is “ahead of their time,” able to draw from the timeless and predict timely outcomes of psychic patterning. The Greek etymology, prophēteia, means the “gift of interpreting the will of the Gods.” The Odyssey is a public dream, a meeting of zeitraum and zeitgeist, timeless and timely, an interpretation of the will of the Gods, for their will writes the script.

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Psyche and Gods Within

The surface level story of The Odyssey is a journey to far off lands and an enduring struggle to return home. King Odysseus (Matt Damon) is the lost hero who left Ithaca to fight the Trojan War, leaving his wife Penelope (Anne Hatheway) and his son Telemachus (Tom Holland) behind. Twenty years later, Odysseus is nowhere to be found. Penelope and Telemachus haven’t given up hope, neither has his faithful dog Argos, despite a palace filled with potential suitors who drain supplies and wait to take Odysseus’ throne.

Nolan modernises the ancient through the inflection of Hollywood — the domain that gets the most attention. Ludwig Goransson’s score translates the mythological via musical genius. The glue holding the story together, his composition bypasses the rational mind, into the wellspring of the heart’s inner knowing. He and his team even re-designed instruments used in Ancient Greece, to create an audible rhyme from times gone by.

Thematically, Nolan’s Odyssey speaks to a psychologically informed society, rather than one with blind faith in the Gods. Compared to Homer’s poem, Nolan expresses the Gods’ will and influence subtly. From the vantage point of a modern, rational viewer, it’s tempting to assume the Gods are mere projection, instead of a revelation. This would be a mistake, as it’s one of the clues to understand the prophecy. In Cosmos and Psyche, Rick Tarnas writes:

“To assume a priori that the entire universe is ultimately a soulless void within which our multidimensional consciousness is an anomalous accident, and that purpose, meaning, conscious intelligence, moral aspiration, and spiritual depths are solely attributes of the human being, reflects a long-invisible inflation on the part of the modern self. And heroic hubris is still indissolubly linked, as it was in ancient Greek tragedy, to heroic fall.”

The Odyssey captures the early divergence from blind faith in the Gods, as demonstrated by doubt towards Zeus’ law. In this ancient world, social cohesion is driven by a fear of wrath. People are reminded to respect every human, not because all humans innately deserve respect, but because they could be a God in disguise. It fuels order, harmony, and goodwill. It holds people to moral standards. Until doubt sets in.

Early on, Odysseus expresses his frustration to his vision of the Goddess Athena (Zendaya), asking why the Gods don’t speak in a way humans understand. “Who doesn’t understand thunder? Fire? A child’s smile? A good harvest?” she replies, echoing an animist perspective, where God’s fingerprints are everywhere, and everything is God’s language. Carl Jung provides a useful foundation to understand the risk of doubting:

“We think we can congratulate ourselves on having already reached such a pinnacle of clarity, imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods far behind. But what we have left behind are only verbal specters, not the psychic facts that were responsible for the birth of the gods. We are still as much possessed today by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. 

“Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room, or disorders the brains of politicians and journalists who unwittingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world.“

The heart of the film’s mythological potency isn’t a regression to blind faith or to recreate an ancient culture. As a myth of progress, it acknowledges the hubris of a culture that no longer respects divine forces, that places the ego at the top of the hierarchy. The Gods aren’t “out there,” they are within. Wrath doesn’t arrive like thunder and lightning in the sky, but instead, a psychic epidemic.

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The Weeping Prophet

“The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort.”

carl jung

Like myths, magnum opuses are timeless and timely. Jung prophesied the danger of hubris, lack of reverence for the Gods, and the necessity of moral effort. Eric Neumann built on Jung’s prophecies, distraught by his experience during the holocaust. “No appeal to old values and ideals can shield us,” he warned, “from the recognition that we live in a world in which evil in man is emerging from the depths on a gigantic scale and confronting us all.” 

Neumann developed a “new ethic” that approaches evil from a depth psychological perspective. He argued the “old ethic” seeks goodness by identifying with moral ideals and excluding their opposites. Attempting to be “good” represses “dark impulses” and leads to projection onto the “scapegoat.” Identifying villains and punishing them through conventional justice offers temporary relief, but doesn’t get to the root of the problem, and can fuel self-righteousness. A new ethic looks beyond divides, into inner darkness, where myth and monsters reside. 

New ethics are an act of individuation. They are not a replacement for justice or an excuse to downplay the acts of specific individuals, groups, or nations, as a strawman to argue for equal culpability. Anyone committing immoral deeds should face appropriate repercussions. From the perspective of the collective psyche, we aren’t equally culpable, but we all have a responsibility to overcome this cycle of denial, projection, and scapegoating. That demands the moral effort of making the shadow conscious.

During a recent emotional opening, I wept for acts of barbarity, greed, destruction, and genocide. A collective ache moved through me. I felt God’s presence, which calmed me, yet I was overcome by a sense of urgency. My body autonomously maneuvered into a prayer position. In my mind’s eye, I was on my knees, pleading to those guilty of immoral acts: repent, repent, you must repent! In this open state, a phrase came to mind that gave me goosebumps: the weeping prophet. As is the case when this happens, I searched the term.

As the hero of Nolan’s prophetic myth, Odysseus represents the development of human consciousness.

The weeping prophet is sometimes used to describe the Biblical priest, Jeremiah. His prophecies warned of destruction and fallen empires, and yet his words often fell on deaf ears, much to his despair. There are parallels with the story of Jeremiah and The Odyssey. In the Bible, Jeremiah prophesied the siege of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, due to Israel having forsaken God and deviated from divine law, including sacrificing their children. 

There are no pre-emptive prophets in The Odyssey — it’s already too late. The closest is half-blind servant Eumaeus (John Leguizamo), who laments what Ithaca has become in Odysseus’ absence. However, the atmosphere is thick with the foreboding prophecy of the “sea people.” Eventually the Greeks come full circle and become the projected enemy, exemplifying Neumann’s old ethic.

The collective psyche isn’t a concept, it’s an experiential reality. Like Jeremiah and weeping prophets before and after him, we must weep, deeply, for collective suffering, lament wrongdoing, and yield the collective shadow to transmute it — not from victimhood, but collective responsibility. Atonement (at-one-ment) requires the humility to seek repentance. As the hero of Nolan’s prophetic myth, Odysseus represents the development of human consciousness. His moral reckoning is our moral reckoning, his path is our path.

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Odysseus’ Moral Reckoning

Initially, Odysseus makes hubristic mistakes. He angers Polythemus by firing an arrow into his eye, which leads to extra deaths. The cyclops demands his father, Poseidon, enact vengeance. With the sea God against them, Odysseus relentlessly pushes forward, in a confrontation with the Gods’ will. He cannot escape harsh repercussions, because, as our hero, he is called to higher morality, he is a man who must enact his fate. The building tension through his trials and tribulations is a moral tension.

Defiantly, Odysseus strives to save his men. But he is internally fragmented. Conflict between conscious and unconscious pulls him apart, though he doesn’t know it yet. This conflict becomes clearer to Odysseus during his encounter on Aeaea with witch Goddess Circe (Samantha Morton). Circe transforms Odysseus’ men into pigs, before reluctantly returning them to their human “disguises.” Guided by her divine insight to “truths,” Circe directs Odysseus to Hades.

Hades is Odysseus’ initiation into the underworld. His moral reckoning claws its way through the dirt. He comes face-to-face with Sinon (Elliot Page), who he sacrificed for his mission to succeed. He learns that the commander of the Greek forces, Agamemnon (Benny Safdie), was killed by his wife as revenge for sacrificing his daughter (another mirror of Jeremiah’s prophecy.) Fallen soldiers, dishonoured by Odysseus, chase them away; but not before Odysseus receives a prophecy from Tiresias (James Remar).

True to prophetic form, Odysseus’ moral reckoning is guided by the anima.

Once Odysseus’ moral reckoning is underway, another key theme of the prophetic myth emerges. In addition to new ethics, in The Origins and History of Consciousness, Neumann traces archetypal stages of development, beginning with the Great Mother archetype. Myths depicting heroic separation from the Great Mother (a “kill the dragon” type story) ushered in the era of patriarchal consciousness and the ego’s separation from the unconscious.

Separation was necessary but Neumann lamented the subsequent imbalance, especially through the subjugation and fear of the feminine, the cultural beheading of Athena. For our myth to be prophetic, our hero must demonstrate a higher stage of development. This, I suggest, is done by integrating the shadow and repressed feminine qualities. No easy task. “If the encounter with the shadow is the ‘apprentice-piece’,” Jung reflected, “then the anima is the ‘master-piece.’” In Man and His Symbols, Jung explains the anima as:

“A personification of all feminine psychological tendencies in a man’s psyche, such as vague feelings and moods, prophetic hunches, receptiveness to the irrational, capacity for personal love, feeling for nature, and — last but not least — his relation to the unconscious. It is no mere chance that in olden times priestesses (like the Greek Sibyl) were used to fathom the divine will and to make connection with the gods.” 

Jung notes that male shamans often take feminine form to “enable them to connect with the ‘ghost land’ (the unconscious).” True to prophetic form, Odysseus’ moral reckoning is guided by the anima. She takes the form of the ghost of a haunted past, and the spirit of the Gods’ wisdom. Our hero’s path of individuation isn’t a regression, isn’t woke, isn’t prudish, but is a demonstration of the rebalancing of patriarchal culture. Nolan’s creative choices reflect the birth of a new myth. Changes to the story mirror the development of human consciousness. As prophecies, such myths are ahead of their time. But they guide us, from the past, to the future.

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The Anima as Moral Guidance

Nolan’s Odysseus represents integration of the anima, with female characters guiding the direction of growth. The lack of Odysseus’ sexual interactions inspired New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd to refer to the film as “Zero-Eros ‘Odyssey’.” In Homer’s poem, Odysseus meets a young princess Nausicaa, has sex with Circe and stays with her for a year, and is the sex slave of Calypso. But the sexual shadow of lust, possession, and dependency, must be transmuted to integrate virtue.

Athena (Zendaya), a Greek Goddess of strategy and guidance, bridges Odysseus’ connection to the divine. She appears in the scene with Circe, possibly as evidence of Odysseus’ growing conscience and decision not to engage in carnal pleasure. Even more telling is the role of the Sirens. Odysseus and his men are warned the Siren’s song will tempt them to their death. In Greek mythology, Sirens are feminine figures who embody dangerous temptation, a mixture of seduction and demise.

In his first conscious movement towards individuation and moral transformation, Odysseus chooses to listen to their song, whilst ensuring his men block their ears with beeswax. When a crewmate reminds him no man survives, he responds nonchalantly that it’s even more reason to listen — to become the first. That’s what heroes do; they summon future consciousness. Strung to the mast, the Siren’s song pulls him apart. He yells, he cries, he despairs, and he survives. 

The intoxicating, seductive, transformative power of the feminine makes the split within his conscious and unconscious a full rupture, but through that rupture, the undercurrents of truth break into consciousness. He becomes the first man to live and tell the tale, a giant leap forward for the integration of the feminine. Asked what the song was like, Odysseus demonstrates a growing connection with his anima by using emotional, metaphoric, symbolic language:

“All the things you wanted to be and then all the things you wished you never wished for. It was a delicious itch you want to scratch, but you find it under the skin and can’t reach it. So the delicious itch becomes unbearable. It told you what you most want is what you most can’t have, and that the most you can’t have is what you already had, and lost. It was a song of all the promises I failed to keep. And it told me I don’t really want to go home.”

The message evolves from desire, to a paradoxical unmet longing, to a moral reckoning, and a profound, consciousness-shifting truth. This isn’t a song that wants to destroy, though it can, it’s a song that wants to break everything down in order for a higher truth to emerge. Such is the way, though, metanoia (spiritual conversion) takes time to integrate, as it did with Paul on the road to Damascus. 

As prophesied, Zeus strikes down his ship. Only Odysseus survives. Washed up on the island Ogygia, he meets another manifestation of his anima: the nymph Calypso. Nolan’s adjustments to Calypso’s role is a clear indication of an evolving prophecy. She cares for him and falls in love with him. Providing him with lotus flowers to induce amnesia (a significant creative choice by Nolan), Odysseus is stuck in purgatory, not yet ready to face the ghost of the past that haunts him from the deep.

The lotus is a common Hindu symbol of rebirth, and purity arising from the dirt. The Bhagavad Gita states: “One who performs his duty without attachment, surrendering the results unto the Supreme Lord, is unaffected by sinful action, as the lotus is untouched by water.” This symbol is a bridge between Odysseus and Nolan’s last hero-of-focus, Oppenheimer, another man plagued by moral complexity, aware of his fate, as the consequences of his actions spiral out of control.

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Fate and Feminine Embodiment

“The Goddess is coming to light. She is coming through the Earth and through our physical bodies, but we have to relate to her with our own individual consciousness. Otherwise we could be sucked back into unconscious matriarchy.”

Marion woodman

Woodman expanded on Neumann’s work by emphasising the sensate wisdom of the body. The masculine focus of mind and intellect tries to conquer the body. The feminine is in a deep, intuitive relationship with the body. Odysseus’ incubation with Calypso illustrates the repair of this mind/body split. In Homer’s version, Odysseus doesn’t forget, and begs to leave. In Nolan’s, his comment, “I don’t know, I feel,” demonstrates the antithesis of the masculine, and a sign of the transformative effect of the Siren’s song.

Calypso tells him she could heal his body before his mind, through her comprehension of sensate wisdom. She represents feminine intuition, healing and nurturing. Though her love plays a part in her motivation, Calypso holds on to Odysseus until timeliness is right. Inspired by a clap of Zeus’ thunder, she senses he is ready, and supports his remembrance of home. Her departing words show insight into Odysseuses’ duty, and doubles as an oracle for patriarchal consciousness: 

“You’re a man who needs to control his fate. But you cannot control this. You must give yourself to the storm, give yourself to Poseidon. And take your punishment. Give up the fight, give up control and live. It is a leap of faith you haven’t yet made, Odysseus.” 

The weeping prophet urges: repent! The anima urges: surrender! As the personification of heroic consciousness, Odysseus has to surrender to the Gods, to forces far beyond his individual will; the journey patriarchal consciousness must take to re-integrate the feminine. As per the revelation of the Siren’s song, his stagnation was the result of not truly wanting to return home. Now, the split between mind and body, conscious and unconscious, is healed, supported by the anima. Now, he is ready, finally, to return home.

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The Remorse of Breaking Zeus’ Law

With Poseindon’s approval, Odysseus is carried by the sea back to Ithaca. He walks the path of redemption disguised as a beggar, under the name of Sinon, a symbol of humility and remorse. When invited to talk by Penelope, he begins: “What if the Odysseus you knew lost his way?” His third person speech creates distance between deed and identity, the veil between him and Penelope reminiscent of a church’s confession booth. He is again joined by Athena, as we learn why she haunts him from within. 

“What if…one night, in a strange city, he saw things that made him think the home he knew couldn’t possibly be there anymore. What if… when he left the belly of the horse, and opened the gates of Troy, he saw ten years of rage pour into that city in one night?”

Athena is the central symbol of moral reconciliation, and an example of Nolan’s storytelling genius. Only now the source of Odysseus’ shame is revealed — the statue of Athena is beheaded at the exact moment the priestess is beheaded. This symbolic act creates a dual-purpose for Athena. She represents God, guidance, and the projection of conscience in taking the form of the priestess, who is opposite him, witnessing his confession, crying. Odysseus reaches out, he holds her hand.

“We left them a gift, an offering of peace, that they took into their home. We violated all that’s ever sacred between people. It turned a fight into a hunt. To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world-entire. Including his home. What if he knew, that very night, as he walked through fires, anarchy, and pain — and in a daze of sweaty celebrations that follow — what if he knew exactly what he’d done?”

“What all of you had done?” Penelope responds. Odysseus, aligned with Neumann’s new ethic, claims his shadow. He doesn’t project evil. “One man’s idea. One man’s trick to break Zeus’s law forever. We lived in a world of palaces and trade, language, blind to its beauty, until we broke it.” Then comes Penelope’s realization: “You are the people from the sea.” The prophecy comes full circle.

“Yes, my queen. The breaking of Zeus’s law, spreading like plague. Our age of bronze is collapsing, and maybe he couldn’t bear to see the ruins of what he’d done. Anywhere. Least of all, his home.” The paradox is, Odysseus’ conscience convinces him of his guilt. If he were evil, if he were soulless, he wouldn’t question his role, he’d return victorious. The germ of his goodness fuels his long road of moral redemption. Through confession, the vision of Athena disappears.

Like Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, Odysseus’ fate includes one last act of violence: slaughtering the suitors, the men symbolizing immorality and the mockery of Zeus’ law. Odysseus’ one-versus-many battle concludes by killing Antinous (Robert Pattinson) and giving him his shame on behalf of Sinon. Wounded, exhausted, victorious, yet not glorified, Odysseus reunited with Penelope. 

He places the pin of Athena, given to him by Penelope to guide him home, in her hand. He chooses exile, he says, and the honouring of his men. He hands the throne to his son, and heads west, alongside Penelope, his anima in mortal form.

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Reaching Across the Ethical Gap

“Homer suggests that if you forget your pain, you forget your homeland-you ‘lose your hope of home.”

Jonathan shay

In 2002, Dr. Jonathan Shay published Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming. Shay popularised moral injury through work with Vietnam veterans, which, unlike PTSD,  is “psychological harm incurred from committing, witnessing, or being subject to actions that violate one’s moral code.” Odysseus’ pain, his unconscious barrier to returning home, is moral injury.

Moral injury isn’t exclusive to warfare. We live in a world run by those who don’t only break Zeus’ law, they brutally violate it. Corruption and immorality is a psychic epidemic. The murder, sexual abuse, and trafficking of children is normalised. People, disconnected from humanity, from soul, project evil onto children, in order to justify the killing of those very children. And technology makes us all witnesses. We are all morally injured, whether we know it or not. The community is no longer the tribe, it’s the whole world.

The ethical gap — between moral development and technological might — has never been bigger. Unethical tribes with spears are less frightening than unethical politicians with nuclear codes, unethical scientists modifying viruses that could wipe out the human race, unethical generals with the tools of modern warfare at their fingertips, unethical engineers coding artificial intelligence.

Our technological power demands the new ethic, to make the moral effort to see our darkness and how we, too, betray Zeus’ law, turn a blind eye to injustice, how the rage burns within us, like walls of Troy burning. The Odyssey is a reminder that immoral deeds cannot be outrun, that the Gods don’t forget, that redemption, too, is timeless and timely. Those who have fallen believe themselves to be soaring, yet they are sorely wrong, and time is running out.

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An Epoch of Sacred Remembrance

“I see the world as going through an initiation into puberty. People are no longer willing to live by thou-shalt-nots. We are coming into something completely new: a new femininity balanced by a new masculinity.”

Marion woodman

History doesn’t repeat, it rhymes. Civilisations rise, and civilisations fall. Timeless and timely meet to urge us: learn from past mistakes. Isn’t that evolution? Isn’t that progress? Isn’t that why myths have enduring relevance, warning us about the future from the past, guiding us from dreamspace? Homer’s optimism was perhaps premature. In the millennia since his poem, patriarchal consciousness has refined, dominated, and imbalanced collective consciousness.

The Early Modern Period saw peak subjugation of the feminine. The hysteria of witch trials burnt those accused of witchcraft and magic at the stake, and later, non-rational knowing was deemed insanity. The “time of apparent magic,” an opening line used by Nolan, came to an end with the Age of Enlightenment, which ushered in a new masculinity, higher values of reason, logic, and science. This was progress. Yet weeping prophets warned us: Nietzsche lamented, “we have killed God”; Max Weber lamented “de-magic-ation”, or dis-enchantment.

Despite a wave of reason and science and supposed sanity, wars and holocausts and dominance and subjugation have remained, fracturing sacred and scientific, rational and irrational. Slowly but surely, a new epoch began. Our perceived societal collapse is the collapse of the old epoch.  As the new emerges, those stuck in the old are too busy congratulating themselves on having reached a pinnacle of clarity to notice.

The ethical gap is Odysseus’ hand reaching for Athena, but it is also Adam’s hand reaching for God.

The next epoch is one of higher ethics and spiritual aspiration. The ethical gap is Odysseus’ hand reaching for Athena, but it is also Adam’s hand reaching for God. Neumann described the “gentleman’s agreement with the shadow.” In addition, rather than hubris, we must enter a sacred agreement; a covenant of reverence and respect — with the light. Fortunately, like Odysseus, we don’t have to do this alone — divine forces are at play. 

Nolan’s modernising of The Odyssey depicts the path to true sanity, which R.D. Laing defined as “an ego in service to the divine, no longer its betrayer.” Returning to Tarnas, to assume “purpose, meaning, conscious intelligence, moral aspiration, and spiritual depths” are exclusively human attributes is the hubris of patriarchal consciousness. A new epoch emerges complete with understanding our highest aspiration, our highest intelligence, our highest ethic, and deepest depths, are qualities of a divine sanctuary that has always been our true home.

We don’t have to fear or revere Gods “out there,” but recognise them within the sacredness of the heart. Ethics aren’t a man-made attempt to be good; they connect us to our divine nature, to our spiritual potential. What starts with the shadow leads to an odyssey toward spiritual heights and aspirations that must be grounded into the Earthly, into the body, into the Goddess. Hindu mystic and philosopher Sri Aurobindo saw ethics as indistinguishable from the divine:

“Its parts of purity are an aspiration towards the inalienable purity of God’s being; its parts of truth and right are a seeking after conscious unity with the law of the divine knowledge and will; its parts of sympathy and charity are a movement towards the infinity and universality of the divine love; its parts of strength and manhood are an edification of the divine strength and power.”

As Odysseus sets sail with Penelope to honour the dead, to reject his throne in favour of repentance and integrity, so too the horizon beckons us. Odysseus’ journey is a journey we must take. We are mythological beings in a cosmic story, each of us fractals of an eternal witness, witnessing the unfolding, playing a role. In certain moments, special moments, the union of timeless and timely reaches a crescendo.

No matter how much we forget, murmurings from the depths tell us that our time has come, the will of the Gods fated this. Mythology is an encounter with the deepest dimensions of the soul. A myth, a potent myth, bottles an essential knowing, activating remembrance, of home, of homecoming. Do you remember?

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