Wow! eBook
Islands in the Sky: The Four-Dimensional Journey of Odysseus through Space and Time
Author(s): Rose Hammond (Author)
- Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
- Publication Date: 19 Oct. 2012
- Edition: 1st
- Language: English
- Print length: 395 pages
- ISBN-10: 1443840181
- ISBN-13: 9781443840187
Book Description
Homer provides an enormous challenge to the student; the potentialities of these lengthy texts are legion and the scholarship vast. The author has relied upon her knowledge of symbolic discourse to make a fresh study of the Odyssey, prioritising early neighbouring religions, their mythology, and shamanic practice. The latter has yielded particularly rich material concerning the axis of the world (axis mundi) as a route to the stars and the world of the gods. Man’s shared experience of the night skies has also provided some remarkably consistent patterns for the geography of an Otherworld in the skies and the means to reach the gods residing there. By applying world-wide motifs of the soul journey, the initiatory process and established points of transformation along a solar path, it has been possible to recast the hero’s sea voyage in cosmic terms and give a celestial homeland to the many islands visited by Odysseus and his companions. The result gives a surprising twist to the meaning of the epic and reveals Homer the poet as both philosopher and student of the cosmos. The ‘wine-dark sea’ is revealed as none other than the night sky which serves as backdrop to the hero’s adventures among the stars, and Ithaka itself with its many conflicts finds a place at the very centre of the known universe of Bronze Age Greece.
Editorial Reviews
Review
This beautifully written and imaginative book is perhaps the most comprehensive and lucid introduction in print to ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern cosmology; an intuitive delight, illustrating the huge scope of beliefs among all the cultures of the region. Plurality was the norm porous cultural boundaries allowing the borrowing of ideas singularity of doctrine and exclusive religion was not. And that is just for starters. The cosmological model with its heavenly and infernal journeys, in shamanic mode, is applied as a code for interpreting the wanderings of Odysseus, whose long journey home is as much a spiritual fulfilment as Mediterranean periplus. The voyage acts as a guide for the reader to the astronomical knowledge of the Homeric era, and for Odysseus vice versa. Some classicist purists will find this strong meat; but from a comparative perspective it is a very fruitful exercise, and considerably enhances our understanding of the Odyssey. A brilliant book, of the kind the reader is sorry to finish –Professor Nicolas Wyatt, Emeritus Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Religions, University of Edinburgh
This well-researched and thought-provoking book offers an insightful reading of overlooked areas of cosmological symbolism at the origin of Western thought. Sensitive to the multi-levelled structure of ancient texts, Hammond s ground-breaking book is exciting in its revolutionary implications, as it provides a larger framework which truly does justice to the achievements of the ancient philosophers –John Major Jenkins, author of The 2012 Story and Lord Jaguar s 2012 Inscriptions
About the Author
Rose Hammond has always found the unravelling of symbols in art and literature a valuable tool for the interpreting of an artist’s inner preoccupations. With a foundation in modern languages, she transferred to mediaeval studies in Christian iconography which involved deciphering layered texts and images and establishing concordances between them. After retirement from a teaching career, classical studies initially became a hobby but later developed into a more serious undertaking as it became clear that the same processes could help to decipher an inner text to the epics of Homer.
