Black Gate

“I really don’t know who I am. I don’t know when to stop. So if I see a great, big, threatening button which should never ever ever be pressed, then I just want to do this. <presses button>”   ~Doctor Who, “The Christmas Invasion”

 

It’s the oldest story in the world.

(Literally, depending on who and what you believe. As a mother of small children, I think there is a reason for that.)

Person A (A god. A parent. A fairy godmother.) tells Person B (A hero. A child. An archangel.), “Everything is great. And everything will be great. As long as you don’t (Eat the apple. Open the box. Push the big shiny red button.).”

The minute the prohibition is given, we know what’s going to happen. What has to happen. Because it’s the nature of story and because it’s human nature.

And because, of course, if no one pushes the big threatening button, there’s no story, is there.

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After Odysseus makes his way past the Sirens, he has to thread his way through twin threats on his way home: Scylla and Charybdis. Like many of the threats the Ithacan king faces, these have become proverbial: to be caught between Scylla and Charybdis is to be forced to choose between two terrible options.

And terrible they are. Scylla is a many-headed creature who snaps up sailors as they pass by. Charybdis is an unseen monster who lives under the sea, gulping down water and devouring ships like an aquatic Sarlacc. And if these weren’t individually terrifying enough, they are placed on opposites sides of a narrow strait, so that Odysseus must choose between them. Sailing far enough from Scylla to avoid getting chomped means getting sucked down into Charybdis’ maw, and vice versa.

(And does anyone at this point notice that an overwhelming number of Odysseus’ problems involve him being in terror of being sucked down, eaten, conquered or otherwise waylaid by women? UNLESS HE TERRIFIES THEM WITH HIS GIANT… UH… SWORD? I mean seriously. I really don’t give much weight to Freudian analysis the vast majority of the time but sometimes? You say one thing and you obviously mean your mother.)

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So Odysseus is still trying to find his way home, and if it feels like we’ve been talking about this trip forever, imagine how he felt.

In order to get home, Circe tells Odysseus he will have to sail past the Sirens. Homer tells us these are beautiful sea goddesses who lure men to shipwreck on the rocks around their island. How? With their singing.

In order to make certain this doesn’t happen to his own men, Odysseus orders them to stuff their ears with wax so that they can’t hear the Sirens’ song. But he is unable to pass up the opportunity to hear them himself. Instead, he leaves his ears open but has his men lash him to the mast so that he cannot redirect the ship or jump overboard.

Modern interpretations of the Sirens have taken several different angles to explain their power, usually with two variations. Either their voices themselves have magic powers that lure people in, or the seduction is taken far more literally.

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Maybe it’s just where I live, but this seems like the perfect time of year to celebrate a holiday dedicated to spooky things. The days are short and cold, the trees are almost bare, and the nights are long and dark. And cold.

Did I mention I live in Wisconsin?

From here, it’s a slide into six months of winter and we all turn into Starks, wandering around looking darkly at the sky and muttering, “Winter is Coming.” So to us, it seems like this is the almost inevitable time to celebrate the memory of the dead. The popularity of Halloween has led many of us to see this as a natural and widespread association.

It may strike us as surprising then that this association is nowhere near universal. The origins of our Halloween are murky at best and probably syncretic, tying together British Isles traditions with Catholic veneration of the saints.

So when did the Greeks and Romans celebrate their dead?

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Werewolves have gotten popular again.

I for one am glad to see it. Compared to their gloomy, night dwelling compatriots the vampires, werewolves are… well, they’re just more fun. Maybe it’s just me, but turning into an animal with great intelligence and heightened senses and running around howling to a full moon sounds immeasurably better than sleeping all day and drinking blood.

Ya know. If you had to pick. (I’m not the only one who plays this game, am I?)

In addition to being more fun, werewolves have the claim to being the older of the two Supernatural human hybrids, by at least two thousand years.

Herodotus (a Greek historian who wrote in the fifth century BC), for example, tells us that the Neuri, a people who lived in what is now the Ukraine, turned into wolves once a year for a few days.

Pliny (a Roman historian) tells a related story about a family in Arcadia who would take off their clothes, swim across a marsh, and come out the other side in wolf form. They would live as wolves for nine years, and if they managed not to kill any humans during that time they could reclaim their human form by reversing the process.

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I love a good ghost story.

And who doesn’t? Especially when the nights grow long, the trees grow bare, and the wind howls high up in the treetops. Like most people my age, I have cherished memories of huddling under the covers and reading Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark until I was too terrified to sleep.

(Anyone else vividly remember those drawings? The one with the girl and the spider bite? Just me? I’ll be over in the corner with my nightmare fuel…)

This is nothing new, of course. The Greeks and Romans loved a good ghost story as well. What’s amazing is just how astonishingly familiar they are.

Pliny the Elder famously tells this story about a haunted house:

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As we approach Halloween, I’ll be taking a little detour (appropriate!) from our trip through the Odyssey to highlight some of the more horror-centered elements of ancient literature. First up? How about a raising of the dead to chase our trip to the Underworld last week?

Necromancy is a staple of the fantasy genre. It’s also one of the oldest standards out there. Long before Mary Shelley put a scientific spin on the practice, raising the dead was a popular way to impress people.

And terrify them.

And, given the methods involved, probably gross them out.

Why is necromancy so popular? Maybe it’s because something in us sees crossing that line between life and death as the ultimate power. Maybe it’s a kind of remnant of ancestor worship from an ancient past. Or maybe it’s because we all harbor the hope that once we shed the mortal coil, there will be answers.

(Although, as a magician friend of mine once said, “If your Uncle Jimmy was a dumbass when he was alive, why do you think he’ll be any smarter now that he’s dead?”)

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Storytelling, great storytelling, exists on two levels. It tells us the particular story, of course, but it also tells us the Big Ones. It asks the great questions: about ourselves, our relationships to each other and the universe, about life and death and love and fate. The Odyssey, being great storytelling in addition to beautiful poetry, grapples with the biggest of these: what is this humanity of ours? What does it mean? Odysseus wanders, definitely lost, and in the course of finding home also stumbles through illustrations of what a man is.

His adventures with the Cyclops looks at the difference between a ‘civilized’ man and a monster. His encounter with the Lotus-eaters teaches that memory is essential to identity. And of course, no journey is properly heroic without a road trip to the land of the dead.

Back at Circe’s place, she had told our hero that he had to get directions home from Tiresias.

Which raises the question: why? She’s a goddess who can turn men into animals and, in fact, give him directions to the land of the bleedin’ dead, so why can’t she tell him herself?

Maybe he wouldn’t take directions from a woman.

Maybe she didn’t know the way to Ithaca. Humbling for the island’s king: where ya from? Ithaca? Never heard of it…

Or maybe Odysseus’s problem was less a lack of GPS than the fact that he had royally pissed off the god of the seas. As a man with a fascinating relationship with the gods (more on that another time…), Tiresias was particularly qualified to give the king advice on how to placate Poseidon.

Since Tiresias was dead, this poses quite the trick. But Odysseus wants to get home so badly that he will run the risk.

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AN: Hello all. My name is Liz, and you may remember me from a few years back! I was a Black Gate blogger for a brief period before life happened, as it does, in spectacular fashion. But our esteemed editor has been kind enough to invite me back! So I’ll be posting regularly now, and continuing this series. Ancient Worlds will focus on the roots of Fantasy and Science Fiction in Ancient Literature, beginning with Homer’s Odyssey. I hope you’ll enjoy it.

Circe.

The Odyssey is full of compelling archetypes, but she’s hard to top. She’s beautiful, powerful, terrifying, and sexy as hell. If you’ve ever been attracted to, or wanted to be (or both), the femme fatale, you should raise a glass to her.

Circe first appears in The Odyssey. As Odysseus leads the longest road trip in the history of the world, they wash up on Aiaia. Seeing a cookfire in the distance, Odysseus sends a band of men to investigate.

A few hours later, only one of them returns to inform the king that all of his men have been turned into pigs by an evil witch.

He couldn’t take those guys anywhere.

Odysseus heads off to rescue his men, again. He’s stopped by Hermes, the messenger god, who has been sent to warn him that he should eat a magical herb, moly, in order to be immune to the witch’s transformation spell.

Following this advice, Odysseus survives dinner without being turned into one of Circe’s pets. He then draws his sword and threatens to attack her. Circe responds by inviting him into her bed.

Yeah. There’s nothing even vaguely Freudian about that.

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