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CELESTIAL SEX, EARTHLY DESTRUCTION, AND DRAMATIC SUBLIMATION IN HOMER'S ODYSSEY:

THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS

by
ALFRED DE GRAZIA

Metron Publications
Princeton, New Jersey


Notes on the printed version of this book:

This book was processed by the Princeton University Computing Centre,
using the processing language called Script.

Photocomposition, cover make-up, lay-out and printing
were accomplished by the Princeton University Printing Services.

The photograph on the front and back covers displays a marble male figure, glancing to
the skies and playing the harp; it is of pre-Homeric Aegean origins and now possessed by
the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York.

ISBN: 0-940-268-09-4

Copyright 1984 by Alfred de Grazia

All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
Limited first edition.

Address:

Metron Publications,
P.O. Box 1213,
Princeton, N.J. 08542, U.S.A.

To
Immanuel Velikovsky
(1895-1979)

"Iron sharpens iron,
and one man sharpens another."

Proverbs, IV, 27.17





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THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS

CELESTIAL SEX,
EARTHLY DESTRUCTION,
AND DRAMATIC SUBLIMATION
IN HOMER'S ODYSSEY:

by
ALFRED DE GRAZIA





TITLE PAGE & FOREWORD

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Part. 1:
SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER

Chapter 1. AN ATHENA PRODUCTION

Chapter 2. THE SONG OF LOVE
THE SONG LITERALLY RENDERED IN ENGLISH VERSE 
HAPPY ENDING
THE PHAEACIAN UTOPIA

Chapter 3. THE LOVE AFFAIR AS THE MASK OF TRAGEDY
AN ANCIENT PRIEST EXPLAINS
THE HIDDEN STORY
AUTHOR'S CODA

Chapter 4. CATASTROPHE AND SUBLIMATION
THE GENERAL THEORY OF CATASTROPHE
THE DISPLACEMENT OF AFFECTS

Chapter 5. HOLY DREAMTIME
THE SCANDALOUS LITTLE PIECE
BURLESQUE OR RELIGION?
THE PIOUS DRAMATIST

Part. 2:
GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS

Chapter 6. THE RAPE OF HELEN
THE INDESTRUCTIBLE LADY HELEN
THE AGE OF MARS

Chapter 7. CRAZY HEROES OF DARK TIMES
THE SAGE WHO BRIDGED THE DARK AGES
SOCIETY IN SHOCK
THE CART BEFORE THE HORSE

Chapter 8. THE TWO FACES OF LOVE
A MOST ANCIENT GODDESS
TURBULENT BIRTH IN MYTHS AND REALITY
ENCYCLOPEDISTS AND THE MOON GODDESS
THE COSMIC SPINNER
CONFUSION COMPOUNDED
A MATCH OF SOURCES
HOW TO NAME A PLANET?
THE ROMAN VENUS

Chapter 9. THE RUINED FACE OF A CLASSIC BEAUTY
THE INNOCENT ASTRONAUTS
RADIOACTIVE CLOCKS
THE RILLES OF MOON

Chapter 10. HE WHO SHINES BY DAY
THE EPITHETS OF VENUS
CONGENITALITY AND HOMOLOGY
ATHENA'S LAST BATTLES

APPENDIX TO Chapter 10
LOGIC OF IDENTIFYING RELATIONS SUCH AS "HEPHAESTUS IS ATHENA"

Chapter 11. THE BLASTED CAREER OF THE MIGHTY
THE QUALITIES OF ARES
THE FATAL WOUND

Chapter 12. THE LAUGHING GODS
MERCURY
APOLLO
POSEIDON
HELIOS
A DIVINE SENSE OF HUMOR

Chapter 13. HOW THE GODS FLY
THE MOVEMENTS OF THE SCENARIO
ELECTRO-MECHANICS OF THE GODS

Part. 3:
THERAPY FOR GROUP FEAR

Chapter 14. THE USES OF LANGUAGE
METER AND METAPHOR
HOMER: EDITOR AND PUBLISHER
TRADUTTORE TRADITTORE
THE THROES OF ORIGINAL PLOT
HUMAN STRESS AND LANGUAGE
THE RULES OF MYTHICAL LANGUAGE

Chapter 15. THE BIRTH AND DEATH OF MEMORY
TRAUMATIC ORIGIN OF MEMORY
THE RULES OF MEMORY
FORGETTING
AMNESIAC PHILOSOPHERS

Chapter 16. THE TRANSFIGURATION OF TRAUMA
DREAMWORK
SEXUALITY AND DISASTER
IN ILLO TEMPORE
THE KERNELS OF HISTORY

Chapter 17. SETTLED SKY AND UNSETTLED MIND
WHAT HOMER REMEMBERED
THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE
A CLAIM OF SUCCESS
FROM SAVAGERY TO SUBLIMITY

Appendix: CHARACTERS OF THE BOOK






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THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS

by Alfred de Grazia


INTRODUCTION

The theory to be expressed here is hardly believable. We discern behind a famous Homeric
scenario about the misconduct of the gods the shadow of a second scenario of
astronomical catastrophe. By pursuing the connection relentlessly, many reasons are
uncovered to suspect that the human drama is unconsciously imitating what the human eye
witnessed as a prior catastrophe in the skies. Chant and catastrophe, dance and disaster
seem to be historically linked.

Can a dance and poem be a piece of astronomical history, tightly, not vaguely, related?
If they are, then an idea that many psychologists have considered: that humans have a
tendency to suppress the memory of terrible events, but also are somehow compelled by
unconscious psychic forces to reenact the events - this idea is supported by our theory.

It appears that the reenactment may take place through religious rites, through wars,
through literature, through individual and group behavior of many kinds. Here it is
through the sublimated medium of poetry and dance. I think that such a process is
occurring in the story of the Love Affair of Venus and Mars. If my readers will agree,
then we shall begin to shape a consensus on a matter of great importance to several
fields of science and the humanities.

The literature referred to is a brief lyric of a hundred lines, sung in Book VIII of the
Odyssey. It tells how the bright-crowned goddess Aphrodite loved Ares, god of battle,
and how they met repeatedly to make love "in the home of fire," until they were
entrapped in a marvelous net made by her outraged consort, the god Hephaestus, and
released only when Ares pledged to reform his conduct.

The lyric tells of a much longer opera ballet sung and directed by the sightless bard,
Demodocus, who, some say, is Homer's self-image. The recital plays to a fascinated
audience at the palace of Alcinous and to his guest, Odysseus, or Ulysses, hero of the
War against Troy. The frank sexuality is Homer's, no matter how often it has been
translated vaguely. The story is the archetype of the adulterous love triangle, as neat
a plot and piece as anyone has ever composed, and a model for a thousand imitations. But
it may also be the masking of a catastrophe visited upon the Greeks from the skies.

I studied the lines and read some translations of them. I rendered them in something
like the original epic hexameter, and shall present them below (Chapter 2) in that form.
Still, examining the words was but the beginning of an investigation that carried me on
odyssean wanderings into various fields of knowledge.

I asked myself what spirit breathed into Homer and saw that it was the goddess Pallas
Athena. Athena moved the Homeric Age. She led the Greeks in the Iliad and guided
Odysseus through his many adventures of the Odyssey. I found her everywhere. She
dominated the skies as a phenomenon, and human strife on Earth.

I concerned myself with the context of the song and discovered that it was a Holy
Dreamtime song, not a sacrilegious burlesque. It was presented as an opera-ballet, meant
to take place among the gods in heaven. The same art form exists today among the
aborigines of Australia.

I asked myself how such holy songs could arise, and found an answer in the modern theory
of catastrophism. Precedents and parallels from many countries and cultures justify
searching for catastrophism behind the lines of the love song of Demodocus. Greek
culture was badly damaged by natural disasters of the eight and seventh centuries before
this era, and Homer's poetry (which I place later than is usual) shows both the effects
of the disasters and the ways in which the Greeks recovered from them.

The song of the love affair of Aphrodite and Ares is to be stripped of its facade. It is
to be considered as a song about planetary gods doing violence to the world. I assign
this Aphrodite of Homer to the Moon, with reservations that I believe are fully
explained herein, rather than to the planet Venus. Ares stands for planet Mars without
doubt. Hephaestus or Vulcan, though male, surprisingly stands for the planet Venus in
this episode. Sea-god Poseidon represents the worried Earth, and persuades Hephaestus to
release Aphrodite and Ares from the invisible net by which he has trapped them. Poseidon
stands bond for Ares. All this suggests the unspeakable horror of natural disasters
brought by these planetary gods upon Earth and humanity.

That Aphrodite was always a great goddess of the Moon is maintained, again with
reservations, for she may also have had her name assigned to other sky-bodies,
especially planet Venus which the Greeks and Romans, following the Orientals, came to
call Aphrodite. We tell of how the Moon-Aphrodite received in Homeric times the wanton,
irresponsible, and imperturbable character by which later ages came to know her.
Aphrodite is tied to Helen of Troy, and Helen to the Hellenes or Greeks. The Trojan wars
evolve psychically into campaigns to recapture the Moon from planet Mars (Ares) by the
followers of planet Venus (Athena).

The stories of the Trojan wars thus use the historical and mundane battles to play out
on Earth the drama of the skies. The skies of the Homeric age must be recent: 776 to 687
B. C. - or so I calculate, taking up Velikovsky's chronology. Although natural disasters
had befallen the numerous settlements of Troy (possibly Hisarlik) throughout its
history, a final major destruction by natural forces may well have occurred during
Homer's boyhood. It was an awesome tragedy to him and others, which could not be
recalled without pain, fear, and distortion.

It is to be expected that the life of survivors of worldwide natural catastrophes would
be fearful and turbulent. Hence I argue that the social psychology of the Homeric Greeks
is framed in a concept of mania and madness, rather than in the conventional view of a
primitive people gradually achieving a higher culture.

Further, as on Earth so in heaven, there must be signs of the cosmic disasters of the
age. I examine the Moon, as the astronauts have seen and sampled it for evidences of
recent disaster, and shall recite indications that it did experience torrid bouts in the
near past involving immense electro-gravitational stresses.

I do the same with the planet Mars, from the evidence of the latest explorations. Mars
has been the victim, it appears, of recent abysmal ruptures and explosions; I explain
how these might have been caused by near encounters with Earth, Moon and Venus. Planet
Venus is played by Hephaestus in the love Affair. He is a stand-in for Athena, director
of the show, who is more frequently identified with the planet Venus than he. Venus is
exceedingly hot, and marred beneath her dense atmosphere by shallow surface craters of
great diameter.

The other gods of the Love Affair introduce to the first modern bedroom comedy its
humor, which can be explained in Freudian theory as yet another cover-up of the
disaster. In reality they too are heavenly bodies. The role of the Sun, Helios, is shown
to be secondary to that of the planetary gods and responsive to their behavior, as it is
pictured in the earliest development of theology everywhere.

If the characters of the Love Affair are to be placed in heaven, their motions too must
be given meaning. The best explanation lately offered has the Sun and planets forming an
electric systems, subordinate to and part of the galactic electrical system. They act as
charged bodies separated from an oppositely charged space plasma by space-charge
sheaths, the rupture of which destroys a balance and creates havoc through discharges
among the bodies. These efforts seem to be discernible in the special motions of the
characters of the Love Affair.

We present physical and historical evidence in general agreement with the love song sung
by Demodocus. How the human mind manages to react to such events in a way to preserve
its own balance, and to give forth its most beautiful literary expressions, needs to be
learned. An examination of the language of the Love Affair, and of Homer generally,
brings forth a theory of myth: to succeed in telling the truth about an unspeakable
event, a myth must fail to convey the truth. This fateful contradictory task is achieved
successfully through the Love Affair.

Homer was probably an editor and publisher of such great myths. He labored to write down
in a fresh and convenient alphabet what he thought should be sung. He was a bringer of
peace between gods and men, and the symbolizer of a unified Greek culture.

Memory, I offer, is of traumatic origin. Human memory begins in horror and the need to
forget. To remember is to forget; to forget is to remember. From the beginnings of true
human nature until now, no one has been exempted from the rules of amnesia, not even the
philosophers whose sublimation of the terrors of becoming a creature of memory have
seemed to carry them very far from particular events.

Myth and dreams coincide, operating according to similar laws. The conscious and
unconscious parts of the mind exchange with each other what is required for a sense of
control to exist so life can go on. Still the balance is scarcely a happy one. Human
nature is imprinted by a deeply buried, unresting, and generalized great fear. The fear
is reflected today and in the earliest human institutions of religion, politics, sex,
schools, commerce, and war.

I concluded in the end that the hundred lines of the Love Affair dramatize
subconsciously the history of a catastrophic encounter of the planets at or near 687 B.
C. Further, the mythical and literary transformations of the event mark a high point in
the development of the European mind and its culture.

I ask the reader - no matter that he may disbelieve me - to pursue his disbelief through
the pages to follow, and acquire, at the least, a reasoned disbelief. To the reader who
is familiar with my ideas, I offer assurances that the revelations contained in this
introduction do not exhaust the surprises that he will encounter, one after another, as
he moves through these pages upon his personal Odyssey.




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FOREWORD
In this book, I extract a dreamy bedroom comedy from Homer's Odyssey, analyze it as a
dramatic form of myth, detect that it might have a real astronomical origin, seek this
origin in world-wide disasters, and assert that an unconscious parallel occurs between
astronomical events and artistic production.

The narrative is well suited to readers of venturesome tastes, who may have a passing
acquaintanceship with the history of the theater and ancient Greece, with
psychoanalysis, with mythology and the ideas of catastrophism and astronomy.

The work was written and offered for publication over a decade ago. Well-founded
criticism from several British experts on mythology, particularly Peter James, Malcolm
Lowery, Brian Moore and Martin Sieff, led me to withhold the manuscript, despite the
encouragement coming from other quarters to publish it. I have indeed held it, to near
the end of the Quantavolution Series, and release it now, benefited, I believe, by the
amendments that my friends induced.

Thanks on this occasion go also to professor William Mullen of St. John's College, whose
advice extended from greek poetic meter to the full ancient oecumene; to Eugene
Vanderpool of Athens, Greece, who was consistently sympathetic; to Dr. Elizabeth
Chesley-Baity, who discussed with me the archaeo-astronomical anthropology of dances,
fire-rites, ballgames, and sword ceremonies; to the late Dr. Zvi Rix of Israel, whose
enchanting letters on problems of mythology kept the book and its author warm over the
years of its hibernation; to George English for his editorial advice and Jungian
interpretations; to my colleague, Professor Cyrus Gordon, for his appreciations of the
values in my approach; to the late Professor Livio C. Stecchini, whose absence from the
scene of ancient history and science is sorely felt; and to Dr. Jay Lefer who responded
keenly to the questions here raised in the field of psychiatry. Finally, I would
acknowledge the inspiration afforded by my friend, the late Immanuel Velikovsky, who
designated the Greek gods as sky-bodies threatening the Earth.





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THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS

by Alfred de Grazia

PART ONE:
SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER

CHAPTER ONE

AN ATHENA PRODUCTION

The Love Affair, as I shall call it, is a story of how the arrogant god of war, Ares,
made love to the Golden Goddess Aphrodite in the bed she was supposed to share with her
husband, Hephaestus, the lame blacksmith god. Hearing of their adultery from Helios, the
sun-god, Hephaestus fashioned an invisible net that trapped the pair in bed. Returning
from a pretended trip, he called upon the gods to witness their guilt and would release
them only on the promise of the sea-god, Poseidon, to stand bail for the disreputable
Ares.

Perhaps this was the first bedroom farce of literature. Its producer, in a manner of
speaking, was the Goddess Pallas Athena, patron of the arts and crafts, daughter and
favorite of Zeus, father of the gods. She was born some centuries before 1500 B. C. [1] 
and was originally envisioned in the planet Venus.

Athena was not only the producer of the 'Love Affair' but also of the Iliad and the
Odyssey, as I shall seek to show: so she was not a novice in the field of dramaturgy.
Her versatility was proverbial. She probably inspired the magnificent setting of
Phaeacia and directed the scene closely. She sang it in the guise of the god-inspired
Demodocus. Like Shakespeare she acted in her own plays: as herself, she planned the
occasion for the story, and in the person of Odysseus, was the honored member of its
audience. "I am Pallas Athene, Daughter of Zeus, who always stands by your side and
guards you through all your adventures," she reminds Odysseus at one point.

Odysseus's name means "troublemaker" or better "the inveterate troublemaker." Writes
George Dimock, "In the Odyssey odyssasthai means essentially 'to cause pain (odyn‰) and
to be willing to do so. '" [2]  In her unruffled and sanguine way, often behind the
scenes, Athena is the world's greatest troublemaker, as we shall soon learn.

Though she is a mistress of disguises, Athena permitted a picture of her natural human
form to develop over the centuries. E. V. Rieu, who has provided one of the many
translations of the Odyssey that are available, writes that "we may think of her as a
tall and beautiful woman, with brilliant eyes, clad in the white robe, with the aegis, a
goatskin cloack, across her breast, a crested helmet on her head, and a long spear in
her hand." [3] Sometimes an owl and a snake accompany her. However, we would warn that
Athena's appearance is as varied as her characterizations, and her names are so many
that some are still to be unearthed.

"Most vivid and alive of Homer's gods," writes Rieu, "she dominates the Odyssey. And
this is true even though there are moments when we are at a loss to say whether the poet
means us to imagine her actual presence or to understand only that his characters are
exercising the motherwit which she personifies."

The whole story of the Odyssey itself can be retold briefly here. The saga begins with
an assembly of the Gods. Athena catches her father Zeus reminiscing on the just killing
of an evil man, and, taking advantage of the absence of Poseidon, reminds him that the
worthy Odysseus has still not reached home, although it is the tenth year after the
destruction of Troy; for seven years he has been detained by the nymph Calypso on an
island. And for three years before then, he had wandered: he had sacked a town, landed
among the lotus-eaters who relished an amnesia-promoting vegetable, and had been
captured by a giant man-eating Cyclops whom he blinded in order to escape.

This proved to be unfortunate. The Cyclops was a son of Poseidon, whose enmity now
marked Odysseus for unending disasters.

The wanderers landed on the floating island of Aeolia where they were treated royaly.
Upon departing, Odysseus was given a bag of rushing winds that was not to be opened, and
granted a fair breeze for home. But his crew, acting in the typically greedy and
impetuous manner that was to destroy them all ultimately, opened the pouch in envy of
its supposedly precious contents. The fierce winds escaped; the way was lost. A landing
among savage Laestrygonians brought a slaughter of many of the company. Fleeing, they
found the island of the witch, Circe. After some difficulties (she changed a number of
the men into pigs for a time), they conciliated her and spent a luxurious year at her
palace.

Upon his departure, Circe gave Odysseus means of discovering his own fate and reviewing
the history of many a departed soul through a visit to Hades and a talk with the seer
Teiresias. Pausing at Circe's island afterwards, Odysseus received further instructions
that would carry him past the seductive Sirens, and through the narrow straits between
Scylla, a grasping monster, and Charybdis, a swallower of ships.

However, he is overruled by his men when he begs them to sail past the Island of the
Sun. They land, and are kept ashore by storms until out of supplies. While Odysseus
sleeps, the crew seize and eat the fat cattle of Helios. The Sun protests to Zeus
(Jupiter) who destroys their ship and lets Odysseus drift alone for nine days until
washed up on the shore of Ogygia, the island of Calypso. Seven years pass.

Then it is that, following upon Athena's plea, the order of Zeus moves him on and he was
sailing well until Poseidon, returning from a visit among the Ethiopians, spied him and
dashed his little boat to pieces. The nymph Ino helped him to stay afloat and Poseidon
turned away, satisfied. Athena smoothed the winds and seas so that he might survive, and
arranged for him to fall into the hands of the Phaeacians.

Now it is to the Phaeacian episode that I shall attend closely, but a few words more
will bring the story to an end. Odysseus is transported from Phaeacia, with many gifts,
and laid upon Ithaca, asleep. Athena appears to him and advises him: his wife, Penelope,
still withholds her choice of a betrothed, though it is demanded of her by her many
suitors, who meanwhile feast at the expense of the palace. His son, Telemachus, also
faithful, is young and indecisive. Odysseus is to go first in disguise among his people,
then to prepare his weapons, then, with the help of his son and two loyal slaves, to
challenge and slaughter the suitors. So he does, and wins back his possessions and his
wife. A final battle with the surviving opposition ensues but Athena calls Odysseus off,
for he is supported but warned by Zeus. "So spoke Athene, and he obeyed, and was glad at
heart. Then for all time to come a solemn covenant betwixt the twain was made by Pallas
Athene, daughter of Zeus, who bears the aegis, in the likeness of Mentor both in form
and in voice"  [4] . Thus ends the Odyssey.




{S : Notes (Chapter 1: An Athena Production)}
Notes (Chapter 1: An Athena Production) 

1. William Mullen, "A Reading of the Pyramid Texts," III Pensee No 1 (1973), 10; pp. 13-
4.

2. George E. Dimock, Jr., "The Name of Odysseus," in George Steiner and Robert Fagles,
eds., Homer: A Collection of Critical Essays, New York: Prentice Hall, 1962, p. 106.

3. The Odyssey, Penguin edition, introduction.

4. A. T. Murray, translator, Homer: The Odyssey, 2 vols. (New-York: Putnam's Sons,
1919), II, 443. Mentor was the lifetime guardian and advisor of Odysseus. He had been
left behind when Odysseus sailed for Troy. (All line references to the Greek text will
be to the Murray translation.)






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THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS

by Alfred de Grazia

PART ONE:
SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER

CHAPTER TWO

THE SONG OF LOVE

Here then is this song of love. It is presented fifth-hand: My literal verse is based
upon a number of translations of what is ultimately a tenth century A. D. manuscript in
Greek (the earliest extant - as written down in the seventh-century B. C. and reedited
in the next century) of Homer's Odyssey, which reports what was sung by a blind harpist,
Demodocus, in a time and place that have been debatable questions for over two thousand
years.

Alcinous the King announced the event: Now, all and one of you dancers, Phaeacia's
finest! form in your corps de ballet so our stranger and guest can tell all his friends
upon going back home, we're surpassing all manner of mankind; We are the paramount
sailors on sea, and in running a foot race, singing of songs, and in dancing. So someone
around us here go, go without loitering, bring to us here for Demodocus's use, that
precious harp that so clearly resounds; it's the lyre carefully standing, it's
somewhere, I know, within one of our great halls." Sacred commands of Alcinous! Quickly
arose a herald, seeking to find and to fetch him the resonant harp from its palace
place. Rising as well were a chosen nine men who were Lords Ceremonial, publically
called, whenever the people foregathered and needed an ordering. These cleared out space
for the dancing to come; they measured a broad ring. Meanwhile the herald returned; he
carried the clear-intoned lyre. Taking the lyre in hand, Demodocus moved in the midst of
the young boys standing there, all of them skilled in the dance though they blossomed
with fair youth. Down stamped their feet on the floor made for beauteous magical dances.
Spellbound Odysseus marveled as dancing feet twinkled in mid-air!



{S : THE SONG LITERALLY RENDERED IN ENGLISH VERSE}
THE SONG LITERALLY RENDERED IN ENGLISH VERSE 

Whereupon the song of the Love Affair begins. Striking his masterly chords in the
prelude to singing his sweet song, Demodocus charmingly told of Ares' love affair and
Aphrodite, Golden of Crown. In secret they lay in the home of Hephaestus. Ares came
carrying all manner of gifts to dishonor the Lord's bed.

Straightaway then went with the news, of course, Helios, who'd spotted them loving.
Shocked and dismayed was Hephaestus to hear of the painful story. Deep down below to the
depth of his forge he proceeded; there, placing a thunderbolt stone on the block of the
anvil, he struck, and struck off unbreakable fetters that no one could hope to dissolve,
for fixing the lovers in bondage, right where they loved, was his fierce aim. Then
having fashioned his snare, imbued with a wrath against Ares, up to his chamber he went,
by his bedstead of love, and all over, everywhere, round the four posts of the bed he
moved, spreading the ligaments, dropping a number of them from above, from the beams to
the floor, too, fine as the web of a spider, so fine that the Blessed Immortals, looking
for them could not see them, such excellent craft was he capable of.

Soon as the bonds had been stretched over all of the lovers' trysting couch, Hephaestus
pretended to move on the way to his well-founded Lemnos, dearly loved island. Wherewith
the unwavering gaze of the Golden-bridled Ares fixed without fail on Hephaestus, Most
Famed among Artisans, going off. And Ares straight made his way to the house of the
Famous Hephaestus, eager for love of Cytherean Aphrodite of the Bright Crown. She had in
fact come before him just now from her father, mighty Son of Kronos, and rested herself
to await his arrival. Ares entered directly the house, reached for her hands, and spoke
calling her name: "Dearest one, come to bed now with me; let us together lie. Hephaestus
is no longer here or about and I do think he's gone. Lemnos must have him; he's gone to
his Sintians who speak like barbarians." He spoke like that, and she was quite thrilled
to lie in his lean arms.

Going to bed, they laid themselves together. But upon them showered the bonds engineered
by versatile Hephaestus, tight drawn. Try as they might, they couldn't remove their
limbs or even move them. Then they did realize no way could be found to escape the close
bonds.

Nearing them now, having turned himself back before reaching his Lemnos, came close the
Famous, the Strong-armed, the God with Disabled Legs. Helios had watched as before and
again had delivered the story. So, to his mansion once more he returned, his heart so
heavy. Standing astride of the door he was seized by a wild anger. Terrible cries went
up; all of the Gods heard his shouting: "Zeus, my father and all of you Blessed Gods who
are Eternal, come down! See for yourselves here a laughable matter, unyielding fact.
Aphrodite, the daughter of Zeus, has ever shunned my lameness, but loved Annihilator
Ares who is handsome and straight-footed, born to stumble that I am! Yet no one to blame
save my parents. Better had they not begotten me. Here you can see how this pair climbed
into my bed and twine around each other so lovingly. I am torn apart by the sight. But
believe me, their desire will vanish. However in love, their lust is gone, and an end to
their fornication. Nevertheless, the trap and the net will not let them go free. Gifts
that I gave for the right to the bride, with her eyes of a spaniel, first must be paid
back to me by her father; fair though his daughter, she is a wanton and reckless." So
spoke Hephaestus, seeing the Gods had now met at the house by its brazen bright
threshold.

Poseidon came, the Mover of Earth, and Hermes the Helper, too. Lord and Director of Far-
removed Works, Apollo: he came. (Goddesses were absent, they remained home, away from
the shameful scene.) Standing around the door, then, were the Gods, the Givers of Good
Things. Laughter arose from the Blessed Gods, inextinguishably gleeful they were at the
sight of Hephaestus' shrewd craft and cunning, saying amongst themselves, glancing at
each other, "Bad deeds prosper poorly. The slow one can catch the most swift. See how
Hephaestus, though slow he may be, has caught up with Ares, fastest of Gods who command
high Olympus. Lame although he be, yet he has caught him by skill, so Ares must pay the
just fine owed by one in adultery." To each other they spoke in this manner.

Apollo, Lord and the son of Great Zeus, said aside to God Hermes, "Hermes, the son of
Great Zeus, and our Messenger, Giver of Good Things: would you be willing, on oath, to
wed with the Golden Aphrodite, even though trapped by strong bonds?" The Messenger God,
Slayer of Argus, retorted: "Would that this happened to myself! Yes, O Master Apollo,
Unfailing Marksman. If unbreakable bindings of three times the number would fasten me
down, yes, and all of the goddesses were to be looking upon the two of us. Would that it
happened that I should be sleeping with Golden Aphrodite!" Speeches like this caused new
laughter to rise from the Heavenly Deities.

Poseidon laughed not at all; he besought on the contrary Hephaestus, Supreme-of-all-
Craftsmen, to let go of Ares, speaking in winged words: "Loose him, I promise, when
ordered by you, to compel him to pay you all that is right, and I swear this before all
these Gods, the Immortals." Famous and Strong-armed Hephaestus replied: "Do not ask
this. Think! Poseidon, Earth-Surrounder. Bail for a reprobate! How can I place you in
bondage among the immortal gods, granted that Ares will avoid both the debt and the bail
and depart." Still the Shaker-of-Earth was insistent; Poseidon declared, "Surely if Ares
shall flee from his debt I shall pay you Hephaestus." Then the Famous, the Strong-armed
Hephaestus conceded in answer: "I am not right to deny you, nor would such an action be
proper." Suddenly, so saying, the Mighty Hephaestus unfastened the bindings.
Straightaway, freed from their powerful bonds, the lovers sprang upwards. Ares proceeded
to Thrace, but Aphrodite, Lover of Laughter, went on to Cyprus, to Paphos, her domain
with her fragrant-smoke alter. There she was bathed by the Graces, who salved her with
oils of immortals, ointment refulgent on Gods who are Deathless. And they clothed her
body. Such was the beauty of raiment, the vision astonished the eyes.




{S : HAPPY ENDING}
HAPPY ENDING 

The opera is over, its audience charmed and relaxed: This was the song that the famous
bard sang and Odysseus rejoiced; glad in his heart was the guest while he listened;
glad, too, the Phaeacians, men of the long oars, famed for their sea-going vessels.
Forthwith Alcinous bade Halius and Laodamas to dance by themselves. No one could match
them. They grasped in their hands a beautiful purple ball that Polybus the Wise One had
fashioned for them and their dancing. One would lean backwards and toss it up high
towards the shadowy clouds. His brother would leap off the ground in the air, and
skillfully catch it, even not touching the ground with his feet until holding it firmly.
Showing their skill at casting the ball straight up high was a prelude; Now they began a
new dance on the bounteous earth, flinging the same ball to and fro, to and fro, as
other youths stood in the wings, beating time. Great was the din that arose! Odysseus
then turned to Alcinous, saying: "Lord and Renowned among mankind, you boasted of your
dancers; best you had said that they be, and true are your words in our full sight.
Looking upon them, amazement takes hold of me here."

Alcinous is gladdened by this praise. He impetuously ordains that all manner of rich
gifts be heaped up for the guest to carry along home when he leaves Scheria.



{S : THE PHAEACIAN UTOPIA}
THE PHAEACIAN UTOPIA 

The "Love Affair" stands as a complete story in itself. More exactly, it is a summary of
a long dramatic presentation which will never be heard or seen. And this long story is
of course part of only one episode of the Phaeacian Adventure.

Phaeacia itself is a marvelous creation of Homer-Athena. If the "Love Affair" as a
literary genre can be called the first bedroom farce, Phaeacia may be called the first
Utopia, to be succeeded by hundreds of utopias in the millennia to come. It has aspects
of More's Utopia, of Campanella's City of the Sun, of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, of
Hilton's Shangrila, of Skinner's Walden II, and of many another.

Phaeacia means in Greek the "Shining Land". It is a new community, now in its second
generation. Its people were once settled in Hypereia, probably far to the East, when
they were oppressed by savage giant neighbors, "a quarrelsome people who took advantage
of their greater strength to plague them", says Homer.

Their first king, Nausithous, father of the present king, the divine Alcinous, "made
them migrate and settled them in Scheria [probably a mythical name, like Phaeacia and
Hypereia], far from the busy haunts of men."

"There he laid out the walls of a new city, built them houses, put up temples to the
gods, and allotted the land for cultivation." They have an abundance of food and water,
and of niceties of civilization. "We run fast and we are firstrate seamen. But the
things in which we take a perennial delight are the feast, the lyre, the dance, clean
linen in plenty, a hot bath, and our beds." The wash is done in "the noble river with
its never-failing pools, in which there was enough clear water always bubbling up and
swirling by to clean the dirtiest clothes." [1]

The beautiful princess, Nausicaa, is impelled by Athena to go with attendants to the
river banks to wash clothes and play games, activities suggestive of the rites of Spring
to at least one authority, Emile Mireaux  [2] . There she inevitably encounters
Odysseus, begrimed from his many days adrift but refreshed from sleep. Her ball falls
near the thicket where he lay, she meets him and he wins her trust. She in turn
reassures her playmates.

"Stop, my maids. Where are you flying to at the sight of a man? Don's tell me you take
him for an enemy, for there is no man on earth, nor ever will be, who would dare set
hostile feet on Phaeacian soil. The gods are too fond of us for that. Remote in this
sea-beaten home of ours, we are the outposts of mankind and come in contact with no
other people." [3]

A town square, marketing-place and meeting place, well-paved, adjoins the Temple of
Poseidon, chief of the gods favoring the city, for he fathered king Nausithous. Poseidon
is not always pleased with his Phaeacians, because they are sometimes too hospitable to
travelers who have offended him, and it was fore-told by King Nausithous that Poseidon
would be jealous enough one day to petrify a vessel of theirs and swing about the
mountains behind them into a ring that would foreclose the sea.

Meanwhile they lived well and gave their energies to the building and sailing of fleet
ships. They held commerce, too, in contempt. Neither grim warriors nor merchants, yet
they enjoyed all the good things of life.

The King's name of Alcinous (Alkynoos) is significant. The central star of the Pleiades,
the gate to Paradise and to the world of spirits, is Alkyone. Alkyonic Lake is the
waters of death leading of Paradise. There has since time immemorial been a worldwide
knowledge, among tribes and great civilizations, about the Pleiades, early November
celebrations occur centering upon them  [4] .

The palace of Alcinous, too, is shining and grand, "for a kind of radiance, like that of
the sun or moon, lit up the high-roofed halls of the great king." The palace enjoys a
large household of retainers and its gardens extend into a bush-enclosed orchard.

Homer is as respectful of women as anyone in this age of brutal male chauvinism. Queen
Arete, mother of Nausicaa, "sits at the hearth in the light of the fire, spinning the
purple yarn, a wonder to behold, leaning against a pillar and her hand maids sit behind
her," [5]  but she is a powerful factor in setting policy for the realm. "If you secure
her favor, Nausicaa tells Odysseus, you may hope to regain home and friends. "On
mother's wishes much depends." [6]

The places of public assembly can hold "many thousands": all of the nobles, their
families and the population. The king is beloved, but ruler by consensus. Social and
political functions are performed by men chosen, perhaps elected, from the aristocracy.
For example, when the performance of "Love Affair" was announced, a committee of nine
official stewards took matters in hand. "They were public servants who supervised all
the details on such occasions."

The Phaeacians are a well-organized community. They have a public opinion. There are
conventional moral standards: gossip, respect, a time for marriage, a place for everyone
and for strangers: these seem all the more utopian as they seem real.

A peaceful people, we are induced to believe, a people beloved by and respecting the
gods, a people who lived serenely under an ultimate belief that their special god,
Poseidon, would take away their sea, their precious sea-fairing way of life.

In the end, we are told, these beautiful people, hospitable, who had sublimated all
terrors to the arts and crafts, were punished as Poseidon had promised: for their
kindness to Odysseus, their returning ship was frozen to stone and a range of mountains
was about to encircle them.




{S : Notes (Chapter 2: The Song of Love)}
Notes (Chapter 2: The Song of Love) 

1. Ibid., VI.

2. Vol I, chap. X.

3. Loc. cit.

4. R. G. Halliburton, 25 Nature (Dec. 1, 1881) 100-1; E. B. Tylor 25 Nature (Dec. 15,
1881) 150-1; R. G. H., 25 Nature (Feb. 2, 1882) 317-8.

5. A. T. Murray, op. cit., I, 229.

6. Robert Fitzgerald, Homer: The Odyssey (New York: Doubleday, 1961).





{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS}
{P PART 1: }
{Q SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER}
{C Chapter 3: }
{T THE LOVE AFFAIR AS THE MASK OF TRAGEDY}
{S - }


THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS

by Alfred de Grazia

PART ONE:
SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER

CHAPTER THREE

THE LOVE AFFAIR AS THE MASK OF TRAGEDY

The song is sung. The play is over. Now the question is, "What does it represent?" It
represents, I think, and I must take the rest of this book to explain myself, a shocked
spell amidst conditions of horrifying natural disaster. The Greeks experienced it,
suppressed its memories, remembered it subconsciously, and converted it ultimately into
the symbolic form of a comedy.

The Greeks assumed the Love Affair took place in the sky nor could it have any other
location. The gods move swiftly from place to place, the Sun is one of the actors, some
of the brilliant imagery such as of "the brazen bright threshold" suggests the heavens,
the gods involved are all sky-gods, and the decor and associated games are celestial.
Hyginus is not alone in speaking of the play as going on in the sky; speaking of Venus
exciting Mars, he writes that "since she inflamed him violently with love, she called
the star Pyroeis, indicating this fact." [1]

Hyginus' Poetica Astronomica also says that: When Vulcan married Venus he watched so
Mars could only follow but never catch her.

This indicates the nature of the "love-affair" as a planetary engagement and hints at
prior close encounters of Vulcan with Aphrodite and then a relationship such that Vulcan
would always be closer to Aphrodite than Mars could be.

Effective planetary encounters must be accompanied by grave disasters.

Probably the primordial elements of The Love Affair were composed of the incoherent,
intense feelings of people in a frenzy of despair and fright  [2] . Words of today
cannot express their feelings. The biblical prophets convey some impressions of the
state of mind in the throes of disaster. The mind of today, developed in the imagery of
nuclear bomb devastation, can perhaps understand something of their feelings. Accounts
of historically experienced natural disasters such as Vesuvius, Krakatoa, the Pestigo
(Wisconsin) forest fire, and the great Lisbon earthquake lend analogous material.

What had really happened had probably caused repeated surges of disjoined symbols and
thoughts. The poetry must have sprung originally from a chaos of sounds, sights and
human babel and ejaculations, uttered by many tongues, over hours and days of time. A
"normal" adult would probably have been reduced to bodies of expression such as follows:

     The worst is happening... just as feared!... all sacrifices failed... here it is...
     annihilator... oracles... monster-body... war... death sun... red dogs, blood...
     Aphrodite... sex... moon... darkness... thunder... trumpets... golden... Ares... Zeus...
     sword... stretched fireballs... moon rape... heat... god, god... who... suffocation...
     stinks... stand still... run... hide... don't move... a giant in the sky calling... he
     was away... his flares are out... moon is his... we give it... pray take it... all this
     can't happen... we did not mean it... abah, awah, abah... we are dying... glowers...
     shakes... where is he going... where has she gone... din... deafness... the sky and land
     are afire... Poseidon stop it... shake them off... take everything... let us be... uh.

And so on. But the horror once past paved the way for music and literature. The state of
mind of the audience of Demodocus can be reconstructed into a more coherent story in
which the matching of a new plot with the original real story is nicely achieved. The
original memories and anxieties are blended and smoothed over by the new story so that
they erupt under control. History cannot be forgotten, but it can be made tolerate. The
Song of Love is telling something that only the collective unconscious can understand,
and which the unconscious rarely permits to be verbalized. I shall try, nevertheless, to
force to emerge some of the unexpressed and unconscious feelings of the people of
Phaeacia as the Love Affair is sung and played. To do so I may resort to a rhetorical
device.



{S : AN ANCIENT PRIEST EXPLAINS}
AN ANCIENT PRIEST EXPLAINS 

If an old priest of Delphi were to be instructing acolytes about events of the song, we
imagine that lecture-notes upon his discourse would read as follows:

     We know these gods for what they are, uncontrollable and primeval; we cannot say what
     we think of them; we must not even say who they are or where we first met them; we must
     not say what they did to us or in any way accuse them; we must not even remember too
     much lest we feel agony and panic. The rhythms and the chords keep our feeling under
     control, reinforcing the screen of words alone. The story, as Demodocus signs it, is
     familiar. Yet it contrives to excite and appease us. We shall feel better afterwards.
     That is because otherwise we might be compelled to confront the true story, which is
     rather like what follows, although we cannot be sure that it is more than a terribly
     realistic dream.




{S : THE HIDDEN STORY}
THE HIDDEN STORY 

     Ares and Aphrodite are the planet Mars and the Moon. The Planet Mars is ruddy and far
     away now, but was then close to the Moon who was bathed in her golden aura. Hephaestus
     is the planet Venus. He is not married to Aphrodite. He approached her on various
     occasions in times past, and ourselves too, our Earth, and was terribly destructive. And
     the Moon was disturbed and drawn to him and then was drawn back, and so we gave her in
     marriage, or rather Zeus gave her in marriage, for how else could they be legitimately
     coupled save by the ruler of the skies and of humanity, who has for three thousands
     years dominated us.
     
     Mars and Moon are not in love, nor do they make true love. They are destroying each
     other and us. Mars' huge body which once seemed like a flaming sword interjects itself
     between Moon and Earth. And the whole primal violence of extreme sexual activity occurs
     on a world scale. The bed of Earth shakes, the skies glare brilliantly, electricity is
     all-pervasive, the Moon disappears and reappears. A massive rape is occurring.
     Hephaestus is far away. It is night but for the brilliance of the scene, secret night
     when sex flourishes and Aphrodite, the Dark One, makes love. Perhaps if he would return,
     he would divert the assailant Mars and spare us from total destruction. We would
     ourselves imitate this orgy, if we were engaging in an alternate mood of anxiety-
     therapy, or we would propitiate by sacrificing ourselves or what belongs to us or
     whatever and whomever we can lay our hands on.
     
     We know what "gifts of Ares" are. They are meteors. They are the steeds of Mars. They
     have struck us and are showered upon Moon. When our King Nausithous led us out of
     Hypereia, it was because of the stone-giants which Mars and his horde had hurled upon
     our land.
     
     The secret will be exposed. Helios the Sun is rising. He never takes part. He cannot
     rescue us. But he will attract the attention of the Planet Hephaestus and perhaps an
     intervention will occur.
     
     It does. Planet Hephaestus looms large, in blazing anger, his immense arms and stunted
     legs making him look like a comet. Then he disappears. He does not approach the lovers
     closely. He goes to the other side of Earth. We wonder whether he will reappear. The
     destruction upon Earth is terrible. Mars is twice the size of the Moon. We are struck
     repeatedly by his "gifts"- gases, stones, quakes. The waters are disturbed. The tides
     are high, the volcanos are erupting. Will the other gods do nothing? Now the Moon and
     Mars are behind us, leaving us rocking and quaking. But Hephaestus is once more in
     sight. He is as large as Mars, brilliant, and trailing electric sparks even against the
     gray sky. But if his legs drag, not so his arms. His huge arms flap as they hammer out
     the sparks. The whole sky around him is brazen. He drops flashing clouds over our heads
     and from the corner posts or pillars of the sky.
     
     But again he departs and again come Mars and Moon. She had returned separately to the
     region of Jupiter and comes back once again to meet Mars who has come flying along
     parallel to us. Moon attracts Mars once more. Great electric sparks envelop them. They
     are perturbed. They pause and move, pause and move. Now Moon appears in an unusual phase
     or position, now she disappears behind Mars and he moves ahead showing another part of
     her. Mars is closely following the Moon, which is to say that he is moving swiftly
     parallel to the Earth.
     
     But Hephaestus now approaches, even larger than he was a few hours ago (who can measure
     such agonizing time?) A thunderous noise fills the heavens, like the enraged shouts of
     the cuckolded husband. It is something to cause ugly laughter; it is a tangible, an
     enormous, a highly visible fact, this entanglement of the two.
     
     We shall now witness the catastrophe, as we Greeks call the end of an age and also that
     part of a drama which brings the culmination of a plot.
     
     "The Gods of the Sky must come!," says the thunderous noise. The scene must attract
     them, for it is their milieu. It is the end of the age, the end of the world. They will
     be our salvation or our doom. Hephaestus is lying. He knows he is not the son of Zeus
     but was cast down by Jupiter and took his strange misshapen form (compared with the
     other Olympians) from the accident. The bed of Hephaestus is by the Moon, not as it is
     today, even though he is often far away and invisible in the northern sky.
     
     But Mars has climbed upon this bed and is trapped in the invisible electrical-
     gravitational net. The sex bout has ended with the bodies suddenly largely stilled. Our
     Earth also pauses.
     
     Hephaestus hovers in the sky, glowering, raging, exchanging bolts with Mars. Mars tries
     to emerge from the bed of the Moon. Hephaestus demands his brideprice back from Jupiter.
     They are the same "gifts" as Mars, which Hephaestus had showered upon Moon in olden
     time, when the marriage was first consummated and we have not recovered from that
     marriage of the gods yet.
     
     Jupiter stays away. He is retiring more and more. He has claimed to set up the order of
     the skies, such as it is. He is scarcely responsible, it seems to us, for he should
     return to strike Mars with thunderbolts and drive him away. Instead of the conflict
     being adjudicated, it will have to be compromised.
     
     Other gods gather. Actually they do not. But memories of them do because of the terror
     of our experience. New terrors pile upon the old and explode them. Here we see Hermes
     and Apollo, the lucky and the wise. What can we except from them? Hermes is the helper.
     We say he is so, because we hope he will help and because once long ago he had been near
     us when we were going through a similar crisis; he fled to safety and we followed; so we
     say he led us.
     
     But now he is tormenting us. Prompted by Apollo, he tells the grim truth as a sexual
     joke; he is an old lover of Moon too, and great is the ruin they brought upon each other
     and ourselves but great also is the attraction these gods of the sky have for one
     another. They laugh at the tragedies of others because they suffered the same themselves
     and no one consoled them.
     The goddesses stayed away, "out of shame", we sing. The goddesses are not ashamed; it is
     male conceit. Their names are taken by the male gods whenever they please. Artemis "is"
     Apollo. Hera "was" Poseidon and "is" now Jupiter. And Athena? Well, Athena "is"
     Hephaestus, the only planetary female, so she is here in fact and deed.
     
     Hephaestus-Venus will stay married to the Moon. We know how it will end. The only
     question is whether Mars should pay anything. Apollo remains aloof and laughing. But for
     Earth and Sea it is no laughing matter. Poseidon stands for Earth when Mother Earth is
     absent, as well as for the all-encircling seas and waters. He is The Earth-Shaker! He
     repeatedly beseeches the Planet Venus on our behalf to uncouple Mars and Moon. Earth is
     already paying its price and willing to pay more if only the disasters will cease.
     
     The tension is terrible to bear. Fortunately Venus-Hephaestus is about to move away. The
     disaster cannot continue. He therefore accepts the offer of the Earth-Shaker who may be
     growing tired of his own exertions. More will be paid by Earth to the Planet that shines
     in daytime. This bodes ill. More songs, more dances, prayers, sacrifices, suffering will
     be required in the future, from Venus as well as from Mars.
     
     So the two bodies are loosed and spring up and away. Thank the Gods! The break happened
     fast. As Venus withdrew, Mars speeded away in a new orbit to the Northwest, propelled by
     the planets Earth and Venus, and the Moon, violently abused, flew Southwest where all
     smoke and fires were quickly quenched and she emerged soon, appearing as round and
     golden as she did before but she now carries new pocks and scars. The character of the
     Moon is unchanged.

     The Gods are uncontrollable; we must not offend them; we must not pretend to be like
     them; but we cannot help but sing and dance about them. It is one of the few things we
     can do to prevent our utter destruction in the future and suppress our intolerable
     memories of the past.


And the old priest would conclude with a warning to the acolytes: "Someday you will
understand this, but what I have told you must always remain a secret from everybody."

The song, the music, and the dancing are ended. The transition to the ordinary frame of
mind occurs. The sons of the good King Alcinous perform a dance to lighten the minds and
hearts of the audience. They cast a beautiful purple ball far into the air, leaping to
catch it. It seems to reach the shadowy clouds. They seem to touch the sky, to be as
light as air. This heavenly sphere has no counterparts on earth. Perhaps it is a
stretched and round-stitched bladder or skin filled with feathers, fashioned by a master
hand, or a round-shaped gourd ball. It makes contact with the celestial spheres-Sun,
Moon, Planets. They keep them up and leap after them; all is done quickly; it is a
trompe l'oeil, a dazzling coda.



{S : AUTHOR'S CODA}
AUTHOR'S CODA 

If the preceding replay of Demodocus' song as a representation of the unconscious
contains both a new "real" parallel plot and a certain "madness," one need not be
repelled or even surprised. Literature was not invented by humankind out of boredom with
spending long nights in caves. It emerged as a method of controlling psychological
distress.

Both the "real" story and the "madness" will come in for more lengthy discussion. One
asks here simply for a beginning of understanding. As the plot breaks down under
analysis, it should evidence some well-known psychoses of which the mind is capable
under stress. In its suffering and terror the mind engages in many forms of delusional
thought. An important effect is the belief that the skies and the earth are alive with
beings who resemble oneself and are similarly motivated. This anthropomorphism helps the
transfiguration of the uncontrollable and huge forces into the images of sex, social
power, and property that the mind is accustomed to dealing with.

Ambivalence to the gods erupts quickly, once the gods are born out of nature. Hate is
just as quickly suppressed and turned upon oneself, for fear that one will be terribly
punished if it becomes known to the gods. A persecution complex occurs instantly; one
cannot evade the mighty punishers. Symptoms of schizophrenia are abundant: attempts at
shutting out the real world; attempts at reconstructing quickly a new world of one's own
in which events are controlled only by the mind.

Forgetting and distortion proceed quickly. As soon as possible, means will be invented
to screen off both the real story and its effects on the psyche. Literature, songs, and
games will be invented. Wars will be waged, for one must handle the urge to punish
oneself by moving out wildly and attacking others. Temples and palaces for the provision
of security and order must be erected; these will celebrate, in a different screening
language, of course, the events of those days; they will see to it that the right food
is eaten and digested and the proper mating and reproduction will occur.




{S : Notes (Chapter 3: The Love Affair as the Mask of Tragedy)}
Notes (Chapter 3: The Love Affair as the Mask of Tragedy) 

1. Poetica Astronomica, II 42. The root "pyr" denotes "fire."

2. Alfred de Grazia, "The Palaetiology of Fear and Memory," (Lethbridge, Canada:
University of Lethbridge, 1976), Part I.






{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS}
{P PART 1: }
{Q SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER}
{C Chapter 4: }
{T CATASTROPHE AND SUBLIMATION}
{S - }




THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS

by Alfred de Grazia

PART ONE:
SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER

CHAPTER FOUR

CATASTROPHE AND SUBLIMATION

One may dare to suppose that the Love Affair stands for a tragedy of humanity if there
is borne in mind a larger theory, already considerably developed, even if not yet widely
employed. The larger theory, the modern scientific theory of ancient catastrophes -
quantavolution - functions as a kind of general engineering scheme to guide the
reconstruction of the song of Demodocus. It is both chronological - telling what
happened when - and analytic - telling how it happened. As a consequence of work done in
quantavolution, many ancient and recent discoveries have come together, attracted as if
by a magnet.



{S : THE GENERAL THEORY OF CATASTROPHE}
THE GENERAL THEORY OF CATASTROPHE 

I state here the several components of the general theory of ancient catastrophes and
quantavolution, shaping it to present needs to a degree, and illustrating it to the
minimal extent required for its comprehension. Ample documentation and qualifications
are to be found in the "Quantavolution Series" [1] and other works - of a controversial
nature, to be sure.

1. Grave catastrophes have befallen the planet Earth. The evidence of geology.
oceanography, meteorology, paleomagnetism, and archeology are continuously bringing
forward new evidence, and rediscovering old evidence, that in times past the Earth
suffered repeated devastation by quakes, floods, fires and winds whose dimensions are
fantastically beyond any historical experience of the last 2700 years. The surface of
the Earth has been twisted and turned, sunk and raised, scoured and ploughed on a
continental scale. The orbit of the Earth, the rotation of the Earth, and the axial
inclination of the Earth to the plane of the ecliptic have changed suddenly, with
frightful consequences. 2. The catastrophes have been initiated in great part by changes
in the solar system. Planets have changed their orbits and other motions, nearly
collided, acquired or discarded satellites, become heated and cooled, accumulated and
discharged electricity, and, on some of these occasions, involved the Earth in their
titanic activities. One planet, Venus, may even have been newly created out of Jupiter.
The number of meteors that have struck Earth is large but responsible for only a portion
of the catastrophic damage, since atmospheric, electrical, tidal and seismic
disturbances can occur with or without body impact.

3. Some catastrophes have had large effects upon mankind. They have been allocated to
past periods during which hominids and humans lived, whether these are traced back
thousands or millions of years. The last ice age has been moved up to a point where homo
sapiens is readily recognizable, and has been given by many geologists a huge, abrupt
beginning and/ or conclusion. All agree that, on occasion, as far back as the fossil
record may carry and up to the dawn of history, many species were quickly and
concurrently wiped out or reduced to a few survivors.

4. Some catastrophes have occurred at times within the capacity of humanity to transmit
their memories to successive generations. All peoples have myths of chaos and creation,
and of the destruction of civilizations and their recreation, in a set of cycles. As one
moves from earlier to later catastrophes the linkages between oral (and transcribed)
myths and factual reportage, recognizably modern in form, increase. Additional
corroboration comes from the developing science of myth-analysis, contributed to by
classicists, anthropologists, philologists, psychologists, and archaeologists. In
addition, archeology has disclosed periods of total and simultaneous devastation of
existing civilizations in areas stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to China, and from
Mexico to Peru.

5. Wherever symbolic and linguistic evidence is available, and usually also where only
oral traditions are preserved, the catastrophes suffered on Earth and by humanity were
attributed to changes in the celestial system, and particularly to Ouranos (the Sky),
the planets Saturn, Jupiter, Apollo (now transmuted beyond ready identification),
Mercury, Venus, and Mars. The latest catastrophes are associated with the erratic and
destructive behavior of Mars in the years 776 to 687 B. C., ending that is, 2662 years
ago. These precise years, which Velikovsky initially proposed, cover the scenarios of
this book, and in my view are generally acceptable.

6. Putting aside the sudden destruction of many civilizations in the course of thousands
of years and granting that the sheer survival of these species was all-important,
retroactively considered, and furthermore leaving to my book Homo Schizo I the question
whether a highly significant mutation took place among proto-humans in a cerebral or
endocrinal form that contemporary paleophysiology can barely recognize, the greatest
effect upon humanity of the catastrophes was their contribution to the making of the
human mind and human nature.

The exceedingly heavy experience of disaster from all forms of elemental turbulence,
with its associated disruption and dissolution of human communities, caused widespread
amnesia. As much as they could and as quickly as possible, surviving humans suppressed
the memories of those times.

But the fear and the anxiety produced now by one and then by another catastrophes could
not be forgotten and surged repeatedly to the surface of consciousness. The massive
collective anxiety was displaced onto many different subjects, altered the ways in which
these subjects were viewed and treated, until finally our modern human nature emerged,
replete with a variety of sublimations, that is, the continuous and partly controlled
discharge of the never-to-be forgotten experiences and fears of disaster  [2] .



{S : THE DISPLACEMENT OF AFFECTS}
THE DISPLACEMENT OF AFFECTS 

The sublimations of catastrophic anxiety diffused into three major areas: expressive
communication; passive controls; and active controls.

In the area of expressive communication, the primitive language was expanded and grew
more abstract and conceptual to describe the behavior being observed in the skies. The
astral events were associated with prior experiences of the closest analogous types,
especially sex and conflict, and humanized. The terrific visible skyforces were
understood then to be human-like but superhuman to the nth power. (" The Lord made the
mountains skip like rams," recited the Hebrew psalmist.) All manner of recounting the
events was called for; no matter which mode, it was bound to be loaded with anxious
affect.

The different modes were sorted out, the most heavily charged from the less, the most
denotative from the more connotative. Different formulas were worked out for handling
the modes of expression; those that were the most direct or challenging to the
superpowers had to be the most carefully licensed and regulated. Little by little,
songs, ballads and fables were developed that could be granted more freedom of
expression. So began the history of literature, both liturgical and profane.

Passive controls include the incorporation of catastrophic anxiety into prescribed
conduct, whether personal or social. The governance of behavior by taboos, fixation of
archetypes and stereotypes, and the performance of rituals alone and in crowds received
so much impetus from the catastrophes and their aftermaths that they practically may be
said to have sprung from them. If a word had to be chosen to represent the motivation
for all of these passive controls, it might be an obsession, which may be defined as the
inability to move one's conscious attention from the centerpiece of one's anxiety
without enchaining the attention.

The greatest taboo of all is to forget the circumstances of disaster. One freezes like
death, like the possum, like the soldier against a brilliant flare, like the humans who
were turned into statues by the Greek gods, like the Judaic sect whose members
immobilize at the first moment of the Sabbath, in the position of the moment, until the
Sabbath passes. A great proliferation of ideas and customs can come from this attitude
but they will all be deductively connected to the primeval chaos and creation. "Good"
education comes to be making the young both as fearful and as habituated as oneself.
People think, "If I do something new, it, the thing, nature, god, will do something new"
and therefore it isn't worthwhile; it is taboo in fact, to try to do so [3] . The third
great area affected by catastrophe governs human efforts at active control of other
people and the environment. Here is included the sharp growth of the power motive (and
corresponding ability) in individuals that start up the centralized kingdoms (and which
prospers from the passive control behavior just noted). The urge to wage destructive
warfare is enhanced, but also the proliferation of invention: all in imitation of the
celestial forces who hammered, shouted, put on dazzling displays of light, showered down
many types of materials and objects, and changed many species of animals and plants.
"For the Spartans," wrote Lucian, "Lycurgus drew from the sky his ordering of their
whole polity." [4]

The Love Affair is an example of the first area of sublimation, the expressive
communication, and of one kind of myth, the holy dreamtime song. But, as has become
already apparent, the words alone are an inadequate description of the event. It dwells
upon what was the last or nearly the last of the great catastrophes. Every major element
of the general theory of ancient catastrophe put forward above is represented in the
song, its latent meaning, and its physical and social contexts. At the same time, every
element of the general theory of catastrophe had happened before in earlier disasters,
as in the case of the repeated incursions of Venus upon the Earth's orbit, which
occurred between 1500 B. C. and the time of our story and which have been described in
detail by Velikovsky, by the "Quantavolution Series," and in related works. And it all
happened again and again before 1500 B. C., which is a vast and difficult history only
now being told.




{S : Notes (Chapter 4: Catastrophe and Sublimation)}
Notes (Chapter 4: Catastrophe and Sublimation) 

1. The reader is referred to the volumes of my Quantavolution Series (Metron
Publications : Princeton, N. J., 1981-4), especially Chaos and Creation and its
bibliography.

2. These matters are discussed at length in Homo Schizo I and II.

3. Cf., e. g., Eliade, Myth and Reality, pp. 6-7 et passim.

4. From "Astrology," p. 367, Vol. V of Works (Loeb ed., Harvard University Press, 1936).




{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS}
{P PART 1: }
{Q SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER}
{C Chapter 5: }
{T HOLY DREAMTIME}
{S - }




THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS

by Alfred de Grazia

PART ONE:
SACRED SCANDAL AND DISASTER

CHAPTER FIVE

HOLY DREAMTIME

Before the Love Affair had been played and sung Odysseus was reduced to tears by
Demodocus' singing of the Trojan War. And, later on, hours after the Love Affair has
been played Odysseus offers a gift to Demodocus and addressed him:

     Demodocus I proclaim you the most distinguished of all mortals. Either the Muse,
     daughter of Zeus, instructed you, or Apollo you directly. For you chant the fate of the
     Achaeans absolutely according to its proper ordering: What they did and had done to them
     and what distress they suffered - as if, in some way, you had been present yourself or
     had heard it from someone who was there  [1] .

One may wonder whether, although Odysseus does not recognize it, the Love Affair, too,
is sung "absolutely according to its proper ordering," and as if Demodocus "had been
present" himself "or had heard it from someone who was there."

Strange it is that Odysseus, when the song is ended, has been transported and is
joyfully at ease. One would imagine that the story of an adulterous love triangle might
have reminded him of his own plight - long away from his palace and beset by rumors of
his wife's unfaithfulness. One might believe that the song was in bad taste, or that
afterwards he might gnash his teeth and rend his garments. Not at all. Homer and he
obviously did not feel any such connection between the performance and his plight.

When the singer, Demodocus , "struck the chords in prelude," his audience was already
entranced. He himself is blind; Homer, whose image he may reflect, is also called "the
Blind." He is Homer's "good minstrel, whom the Muse loves above all other men, and gave
him both good and evil; of his sight she deprived him, but gave him the gift of sweet
song." [2] There is a hint here that ancient bards were sometimes blinded, as smiths
were ritually lamed, and young singers castrated, to heighten their symbolic role and
competence. No god might then envy the bard, especially not Apollo, and his blindness is
an assurance that he will not see what is divinely forbidden to see. Athena, too, was
known to play tricks with human sight [3] . Furthermore, his audience will not be
discomfitted at being viewed in their musing mood by a sensibly alert musician. And, of
course, a blind man may develop epic powers of memory. An alternative, less radical,
would be to sing with eyes closed, or blindfolded.

The audience is settled around as an organized community, king and queen, nobles,
council of state, the citizens and retainers, and the Hero, Odysseus. The dancers
continue their movements, acting out the scenes of the sacred play. Those who have
competed in sports rest, their aggressiveness dissipated, their minds relaxed to receive
now a flow of aesthetic communication.

The singer carries the melody; it is sung in long, measured lines. His lyre was
originally a gift of Mercury and Apollo, and is a beautiful instrument; its strings are
attuned to the heavenly bodies, as Pythagoras will demonstrate mathematically a century
hence. Although the earliest lyres held three strings, the age of seven-stringed lyres
may have already arrived. The rhythms are supplied by the ballet who stress movements of
the opera.

The production is a drama, not a ballad or folk song. Its plot is conventionally
complete, perhaps the earliest of the dramatic plots of what is to become the literary
history of Classical Greece, therefore a great invention, with a pair of protagonists,
an antagonist, the development of a line of conduct, its interruption, a climax, a
resolution, a disposition of participants and values. All happens in a time span close
to what Aristotle discovered, centuries later, to be the ideal unity of dramatic time.

One notes particularly, in the jargon of literary analysis employed from the time of the
early Greek tragedians, the "catastrophe." The word means "the climax," "the point of
denouement;" in general, the word means "the turning-down point," and also "the end of a
period of time." Yet it was historical experience that lent itself to the definition of
plot, not plot of history. It was first an unconscious invention, then a conscious one,
that ordained the classical climax of drama. The archetypical plot is that when the end
of an age arrives, the gods foregather, and societies turn abruptly downward, after
which the cycle begins once more. The Love Affair is a relic of the end of the Mycenean
Age of Greece.




{S : THE SCANDALOUS LITTLE PIECE}
THE SCANDALOUS LITTLE PIECE 

What has been made of the Love Affair? It is at least a song, for it was chanted to the
chords of a lyre, to the accompaniment of rhythmic dancing. Perhaps, first off, I should
stress that its 'songness' has been variously imparted. In the version by the famous
Alexander Pope, one would sense a different spirit. The bard, Demodokos,

     The loves of Mars and Cytherea  [4]  sings; How the stern god, enamour'd with her
     charms, Clasp'd the gay panting goddess in his arms, By bribes seduced

And as Hephaestus traps the lovers, Pope's Homer sings:

     Stern Vulcan homeward treads the starry way: Arrived, he sees, he grieves, with rage
     he burns: Full horribly he roars, his voice all heaven returns. "O Jove, (he cried) O
     all ye powers above, See the lewd dalliance of the queen of love! Me, the awkward me,
     she scorns; and yields her charms To that fair lecher, the strong god of arms."

Translation of the Odyssey are numerous. One that interested me to the point of inquiry
was by Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679,) prepared when he was in his eighties. His long life as
natural philosopher and political scientist carried him through the extensive
revolutions and religious debates of the times and up to Newton and Whiston. This was
the Hobbes whose view of mankind included the famous phrase that in a state of nature
man's life was "nasty, brutish, and short." Poetically, I must agree with Pope, who said
that Hobbes' version of Homer was "too mean for criticism." [5]  But did he treat the
Love Affair in some unusual way? Not at all - though it contains a touch of unwarranted
political expertness:

     And the judges rise In number nine, who had elected been By public-vote, of games to
     hold assize, And order took for large room in the middle, And made it to be planed well
     and even. [6]

But, as a I shall explain, even if beautifully rendered, the lines of Homer must read as
the pale representation of their original pronouncement and context.

Experts upon Homer have generally denied serious consideration to his song about a love
affair. It seems to be what Alexander Pope makes it out to be, burlesque entertainment
for a visiting sailor. One seems to hear the typical commentator: "A bit scandalous, but
then you know how lightly the Greeks took their gods and goddesses!"

One translator, Professor Murray, indicates conscientiously that "the whole passage was
on moral grounds rejected by some ancient critics." [7]  Walter Otto tells us that "even
in antiquity many readers, Plato among them, found this story offensive, and in modern
times it is generally regarded as a frivolous burlesque." [8]  Professor Finely, an
expert upon the society and economy of Homeric Greece, speaks of "the little pieces,
like the myth of the adultery between Ares and Aphrodite" [9]  that infiltrate the
Odyssey. George Sarton, the encyclopedic historian of science regards the whole of the
Odyssey, indeed, as a story of peace, a gentle romance  [10] . Such observations can
only reflect the nostalgia for one's school-days: the blood and guts spilled in the
Odyssey, and the terrors entailed, would put to shame the authors of a typical evening
of violence and horror on American commercial television. T. B. L. Webster mentions the
possibility that "the light-hearted treatment of the gods in some Egyptian stories may
have influenced Demodokos' lay of Ares and Aphrodite in the eight book of Odyssey." [11]
E. V. Rieu, introducing his translation of the Odyssey, says that "in the famous Lay of
Demodocus" Homer provides "a treatment that we can only regard as humorous."

This merely betrays, he claims, "a very tolerant understanding of their motives and
frailties," not an absence of respect for the power and beauty of the gods  [12] .

But, then, the distinguished Robert Graves, premature women's liberationist that he is,
says: "though masquerading as an epic, the Odyssey is the first Greek novel; and
therefore wholly irresponsible where myths are concerned." Graves tends to agree with
Samuel Butler, author of the utopia, Erewhon, who, in another book, Authoress of the
Odyssey, ascribed the work to a young and talented Sicilian noblewoman of the district
of Eryx [13] .

Experts can be piled "Ossa upon Pelion" without reaching heaven. Otto's elaborate
concern over reason and respect reminds one of a prude explaining why his sister is
loitering on a Piraeus street corner. "The story is naturally not a moralizing sermon,
but that does not make it frivolous. Its tone of lofty humor removes it from both
moralizing and frivolity." Ares is a bloody savage, disliked by everyone. "All interest
centers upon the discreditable role played by Ares... And Aphrodite? If we consider the
story carefully we suddenly realize that she receives no attention whatsoever." His
final gaff regarding Poseidon is monumental: "Poseidon is so touched by Ares' situation
that, unable to laugh, he prevails upon Hephaestus to release his hapless victim and is
so kindly as to provide a guarantee for him." [14]  This comment would perhaps have made
the surly Poseidon laugh for once.




{S : BURLESQUE OR RELIGION?}
BURLESQUE OR RELIGION? 

One cannot be satisfied with these explanations: a little piece, a casual ballad, a joke
at the expense of the gods, or a pardonable escapade. Suppose the passage is reread,
beginning with the paragraph before the song commences.

"Sacred commands of Alcinous." Do godlike kings incite simple public pornography?

"Quickly arose a lithe herald, seeking to find and to fetch him the resonant harp from
its palace place." Are treasured instruments of music employed casually? "Rising as well
were a chosen nine, men who were Lords Ceremonial, publicly called, whenever the people
foregathered and needed an ordering." These are nobles. They are nine, the magic number
of days in the week may then have existed or once existed in a 36-day or 27-day month
[15] . They are chosen representatives of the community, a council of ministers of
public order. Are these august personages activated for the sake of a ditty?

"They cleared out space for the dancing to come; they measured a broad ring." Is a large
dancing ring being readied without apprehension and excitement?

Demodocus "moved in the midst of the young boys." He is the star performer, blind,
revered, also godlike (of these qualities we read in other passages). "All of them
skilled in the dance though they blossomed with fair youth." This is not to be
improvised. The performers know their places. They have all achieved high competence.

"Down stamped their feet on the floor." The rhythms begin, even before the lyre sounds.
"Spellbound Odysseus marveled as dancing feet twinkled in mid-air!" The little song is
introduced, it is clear, as a full court opera. The preliminaries portend a significant
event. Odysseus, and the rest of the audience, have become transformed by the rhythm,
flashing movements, and apprehension into an unusual state of mind, a new mood.

The mood is not vulgar or profane. It is not lecherous. Something more profound is to
occur. The audience has experienced it all before; their contagion affects Odysseus. The
incident, from its very beginnings, portends an affair of state, not a moment of
minstreling, a story of significance rather than cocktail hour music. It is to be even
rather sacred, I think.

Perhaps reassurance is needed. Is this behavior, this kind of performance, unanalyzed in
science? Not at all. It is universal and has been generalized. Mircea Eliade, a
distinguished religious ethnologist, would lend his support:

     All dances were originally sacred;... they had an extrahuman model... The model may
     have been revealed by a divinity (for example the pyrrhic, the martial dance created by
     Athena) or by a hero (cf. Theseus' dance in the Labyrinth). The dance may be executed to
     acquire food, to honor the dead, or to assure good order in the cosmos. It may take
     place upon the occasion of initiations, of magico-religious ceremonies, of marriages,
     and so on... What is of interest to us is its presumed extrahuman origin (for every
     dance was created in illo tempore, in the mythical period, by an ancestor, a totemic
     animal, a god, or a hero.) Choreographic rhythms have their model outside of the profane
     life of man; whether they reproduce the movements of the totemic or emblematic animal,
     or the motions of the stars; whether they themselves constitute rituals (labyrinthine
     steps, leaps gestures, performed with ceremonial instruments) - a dance always imitates
     an archetypal gesture or commemorates a mythical moment. In a word, it is a repetition,
     and consequently a reactualization, of illud tempus, 'those days. '" [16]

The Love Affair appears then as a sacred song, not bawdy lyric; or at least its context
is unmistakably holy, putting aside its plot and words. One cannot be sure of either its
full context or words, of course, because Demodocus tells of another, apparently long
operatic ballet that we are not privileged to watch and hear.




{S : THE PIOUS DRAMATIST}
THE PIOUS DRAMATIST 

The Phaeacian audience is in illo tempore. It is in Holy Dream-time, a state of being in
the past and in the present, where a great event is happening and still away from it in
the here and now, in the presence of those who were involved in the action. One cannot
watch the Phaeacians as R. M. Berndt did the aboriginal Australian Wonguri in a similar
format and mood [17] , or as other anthropologists have observed primitive tribal
performances; one must imagine them with the aid of all the evidence that can be brought
to bear upon the scene. If one is successful, it will be owing to another scholar, in
this case Giovanni Patroni, whose total immersion in ancient Mediterranean sources has
permitted him elaborately to reconstruct the format of the song of Demodocus. He says:

     The most important observations that the singing of Demodocus merits (and has too long
     awaited) concern the generic type of the song, its aim and function in Homeric and pre-
     Homeric society, the probable frequency and importance of recitations analogous to that
     we see held in the agora of Scheria by Demodocus with the aid of a corps de ballet or a
     chorus that will interpret the narrative of the singer (but we do not mean exclusively)
     through the medium of movements and dance figures.
     
     This is not epic poetry. Nor is it a song, nor a fragment of a song, nor an episode of
     an Achaean saga... Neither, for that matter, notwithstanding that its subject concerns
     exclusively the gods, a sacred hymn. If it is the last, it reflects the higher personal,
     profound and polemical religiousity of Homer; in this sense it should be entitled: 'The
     triumph of Mediterranean religion over the foolish and sacrilegious heresy of Olympia.
     '" [18]

By this, Patroni means that Homer adores the ancient Great Goddess, detests the single-
minded destructive god Ares, and upholds the peaceful sovereignty of the female
principle that antedated the barbarous incursions of the Achaeans into Minoan and
Mycenaean civilization.

In effect, says Patroni, the Song is not sacred poetry because one could not come out
openly and formally to the greater glory of Aphrodite, even though the Song carried her
through a tedious trial at the hands of a repulsive husband and a mindless warrior
lover.

So Patroni classifies the cantata of Demodocus as "opera theatre," midway between our
ballet and melodrama with dance, a musical satire perhaps.

But, in fact, Patroni goes beyond his own real interpretations, so prejudiced for the
archaic Mediterranean religion is he (and alike to Robert Graves in this regard). We
must insist that he stay with his own judgement - it is sacred poetry even if influenced
by the personal religion of Homer. It is sacred enough, as he points out immediately, to
prompt extraordinary preparations, measure the magic circle, place the venerated poet in
the center that is to be occupied many years later by an alter of Dionysus, use the
sacred instrument of religious and funereal singing of the Minoans, and employ the
incredible acrobatic dancing of the bull-leapers of Tyrins and Knossos. The song, he
knows, is the abbreviation of a long performance, and takes place in the halls of the
prince. Indeed, such is the enthusiasm of Patroni for what he believes must have
occurred in the opera-theater of the Love Affair that he uncovers ultimately the vast
majority of criteria that for anthropologists and psychologists denote the Holy
Dreamtime. And he forgets that he has for a moment faltered and said that the hierarchs
could not allow a religious character to be granted the triumph of Aphrodite.

He gives, actually, a full set of stage directions for the production of the Disastrous
Love Affair of Mars and Moon. Dancers leap high into the sky. The Sun mandates a
messenger to Hephaestus (for the sun, reasons Patroni, cannot move from its course).
Direct quotations are sung by actors, the rest by Demodocus. The climax brings together
all of the actors to determine the resolution of the plot, and the finale must be
beautiful and ecstatic; Ares is summarily dismissed, but Golden Aphrodite, unabashed,
flies to her island where she is perfumed, beautified, and made virginal altogether.

     The goddess - impersonated by an actor - hid herself momentarily in the base of the
     tower that had been put at the disposition of the spectacle, while the music and ballet
     entertained the audience; and, from another exit that gave upon the sea (at Scheria the
     agora was next to the arsenal: it was the same in all the maritime cities; elsewhere the
     sea was simulated by pulling a boat with a pulley) she embarked on a boat kept in
     readiness and reappeared from the other side, landing and reentering the arena with all
     of her cortege, quickly then joined by the entire corps de ballet which, having given
     further proof of its unmatchable competence, composed itself for the final scene. And
     what could be the meaning of the scene if not: The Triumph of Aphrodite?

The answer to his rhetorical question would disappoint him. It could be, it was, the
Triumph of Athena the Producer and Director of the opera. Zeus said to Hera in the Iliad
when Hera proposed to fight Ares: "Go to it then, and set against him the spoiler
Athene, who beyond all others is the one to visit harsh pains upon him." [19]

The chorus of this Mycenaean drama moved directly into the classical Greek chorus, says
Patroni (p. 250). Here is one more indication of the interface between Mycenean and
Greek, rather than a five hundred year chasm of barbarism. The circle we see in Scheria,
too, persisted in the theatre at Epidaurus.

Patroni's informed visions of the dramaturgy of Homer are captivating. The production of
the Love Affair in Scheria was complete and elaborate, as much so as the Dreamtime
production of the Moon and the Dugong that I mentioned above, though relative to the
culture of the indigenous Australians. Patroni's assertions, that Homer was heir to the
Minoan and Mycenaean theatre, and that he was a fully experienced choreographer and
dramatist, are acceptable too.

The anthropological and mythological evidence should induce Patroni to acknowledge his
own immense cultural panorama and to grant that the "marveling" and "spellbound"
Odysseus, along with the Phaeacian audience, was in the state of Holy Dreamtime, midway
between the pomp and circumstance of the religious "mass" and the nearly secular games
that preceded the spectacle.

Here Emile Mireaux has hit the target briefly and sharply:

     Choral lyric poetry naturally remained closer to its religious origins. It was really
     the poetry of the sacred songs, with their accompaniment of music and dancing... (It
     included the hyporcheme which involved mime dancing. The mischievous story recited by
     Demodocus... may be simply a hyporcheme... All these collective displays were designed
     to 'inspire' the community and lead to the exorcizing of the 'demons' of envy, discord
     and civil strife  [20] .

The Olympic Games themselves, agglomerates of athletics and poetry, had been instituted
in the year -776, and no one doubts their religious and cultural aims. Then and at the
time of the Love Affair, the Greeks, of many ethnic subcultures with local versions of
the gods, and with all manner of archaic and foreign vestiges, were pulling themselves
together. The divine Homer was striving to lead them.




{S : Notes (Chapter 5: Holy Dreamtime)}
Notes (Chapter 5: Holy Dreamtime) 

1. Odyssey, VIII,* s. 487-91.

2. VIII, I. 62-4; V. I, 263 in Murray, op. cit.

3. Graves, I, 23: I, p. 87.

4. Cytherea is one of the epithets given Aphrodite. Cytherea was the holy island which
the newly born goddess touched while floating towards her destination of Cyprus.

5. The English Works, Vol. X (London: ed. 1677; John Bohn, 1844, W. Molesworth, editor),
p. iv.

6. Ibid, p. 376.

7. Op. cit., p. 276.

8. The Homeric Gods, trans. by Moses Hadas (London: Thames and Hudson, 1954).

9. M. I. Finley, The World of Odysseus (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1954, 1967,
1972), p. 40.

10. A History of Science: Ancient Science through the Golden Age of Greece, 1958 (New
York: John Wiley and Sons, 1964), p. 135.

11. From Mycenae to Homer (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958, 1964), p. 88.

12. Page 5.

13. The Greek Myths, 2 vols. (New York: Braziller, 1957). Cf. v. II, pp. 376,365.

14. Op. cit., p. 245.

15. Immannuel Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, hereafter cited simply as W in C, (New
York: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1950), pp. 343-4.

16. The Myth of the Eternal Return, originally in French, 1949( Princeton, N. J.:
Princeton University Press, 1954, 1965), pp. 28-9. As a well worked out case, see R. M.
Berndt, "A 'Wonguri-Manzikai Song Cycle of the Moon-Bone," XIX Oceania (September, 1948,
16-50)

17. Ibid., and see my note on this song in The Burning of Troy.

18. Commenti Mediterranei all'Odissea di Omero (Milano: Marzorati, 1950), p. 249

19. Richard Lattimore, The Iliad of Homer( Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1962), p.
148.

20. Daily Life in the Time of Homer, trans. by Iris Sells from the 1954 French edition
(New York: MacMillan and Company, 1959), p. 102.









{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS}
{P PART 2: }
{Q GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS }
{C Chapter 6: }
{T THE RAPE OF HELEN}
{S - }




THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS

by Alfred de Grazia

PART TWO:
GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS

CHAPTER SIX

THE RAPE OF HELEN

It began during the furious quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles at the rich feast of
the gods, sings Demodocus, "for it was at this very moment that calamity began to unroll
upon both Trojans and Danaans by the plans of the Great Zeus." [1]

The Iliad is sung as the wrath of Achilles on one level - the Poet says so - but is of a
type with the battles of the sky gods recited in Scandinavian, Finnish, Hindu, Mexican,
Babylonian, and other epics. The Greek gods of the Trojan Wars engage in plain
soldiering, hurling rocks and spears, shooting arrows, and driving chariots. They make
onslaughts from heaven; they launch disasters upon Earth: plagues, fires, hurricanes,
earthquakes, floods, hail of stones and arrows, famines, fogs, and darknesses in the
day.

The gods negotiate amongst themselves and with humans. They engage in fighting,
trickery, argument, and bribery amongst themselves. They build morale and conduct
psychological warfare; they provide military intelligence but also distort information
for the good of their favorites. They counsel the warriors on tactics. They enforce
rules of warfare that they sometimes themselves violate. They manufacture weapons. They
promote and reverse events, battles, and decisions of leaders.

Whole sections of the Iliad are devoted to the warring of the gods. On the Achaean side
there range Athena, Hera, Poseidon, Hephaestus. On the Trojan side, the line-up includes
Ares, Aphrodite, and Apollo. The victory is with the Achaeans and their gods, although
the Homeric element ends with Achilles' killing of Hector, the burial of Hector, and a
mere pause in the struggle; however, all known versions of the rest of the story,
occupying the tenth year, agree that the Achaeans "won the war" and razed Troy. Whether
or not Troy was actually destroyed by the Achaeans cannot be told from the ruins of the
city. Troy VI and VIIa are the best candidates for the historical city; Schliemann's
Troy (now referred to as Troy IIg) is not regarded anymore as a possibility; I have
written of this case in the Book, The Burning of Troy. Troy IIg was destroyed by an
atmospheric conflagration; Troy VI by an earthquake; Troy VIIa by an atmospheric
conflagration. These, to Homer and his audiences, would be the gods in battle, the
effects of "a divine-kindled fire of stones" (Iliad) and other superhuman operations.
The "Fall of a City" is a legendary symbol in various cultures for a disaster, that is,
the disruption and end of a celestial order. It is likely that the Fall of Troy was such
a catastrophe, in which human agency played less of a role than the divine.



{S : THE INDESTRUCTIBLE LADY HELEN}
THE INDESTRUCTIBLE LADY HELEN 

Some of the Trojan story is reported in the Odyssey, by Demodocus no less, and by
Odysseus from Hades. There and elsewhere the post-war adventures of the Achaean heroes
are recounted and it would appear that for the most part they received very little for
their pains except more suffering, mishaps, treachery, and misadventure.

But let us examine, with Finley's words, the case of

     Helen, who is a very peculiar figure. Helen, daughter of Zeus and Leda, was
     Aphrodite's favorite, and thanks to the gifts of the goddess she succeeded in embroiling
     Greeks and Trojans in a gigantic struggle that cost both sides dearly. Helen was no
     innocent victim in all this, no unwilling captive of Paris-Alexander, but an adulteress
     in the most complete sense. For Paris there was no atonement ... But Helen received no
     punishment, and scarcely any reproach. She ended her days back in Sparta, administering
     magical drugs obtained in Egypt, interpreting omens, and participating in the life of
     the palace much like Arete [queen of the Phaeacians and a strange, powerful figure] and
     not like a proper Greek woman  [2] .

The "enigmatic" and "complicated" image of Helen, that Finely alludes to, has a simple
solution. Helen of Troy stands for the Moon. She represents the goddess Aphrodite.
Paris-Alexander, Prince of Troy, represents the god Mars-Ares. The Moon that had been
"embraced" over centuries by Hephaestus (Athena-planet Venus) in his encounters with the
Earth is taken away from him; Athena-Hephaestus and their allies must repossess it.
Helen is the Moon Goddess and the world is the male version of Helen, father of the
family of all Greeks. Etymologists have also indicated a connection between "Selene" and
"Helios," the latter deriving from the same Indo-European root as sun and solis  [3] .
Thus she symbolizes in the battle of the gods the coming of the Hellenes into their
revived nationhood in conjunction with the triumph of the Athena faction of the family
of Zeus.

Let us read in Graves briefly:

     The Ionians and Aeolians, the first two waves of patriarchal Hellenes to invade
     Greece, were persuaded by the Hellads already there to worship the Triple-goddess and
     change their social customs accordingly, becoming Greeks (graikoi 'worshippers of the
     Grey Goddess, or Crone'). Later, the Achaeans and Dorians succeeded in establishing
     patriarchal rule and patrilinear inheritance, and therefore described Achaeus and Dorus
     as first - generation sons of a common ancestor, Hellen - a masculine form of the Moon-
     goddess Helle or Helen ... Aeolus and Ion were then relegated to the second generation,
     and called sons of the thievish Xuthus, this being a way of denouncing the Aeolian and
     Ionian devotion to the orgiastic Moon-goddess Aphrodite - whose sacred bird was the
     xuthos, or sparrow, and whose priestesses cared nothing for the patriarchal view that
     women were the property of their father and husbands  [4] .

Hans Jones, author of The Gnostic Religion, may also be quoted. For he has traced a very
old belief in the connection between Moon and Helen:

     "Some Greek mythological speculation seems to have associated the Homeric Helen with
     the moon, whether prompted by the similarity of Helene and Selene, or by her fate
     (abduction and recovery) interpreted as a nature myth, or by Homer's once comparing her
     appearance to that of Artemis. One story had it that the egg which Leda found dropped
     from the moon; and the late Homer commentator Eustathius (twelfth century A. D.)
     mentions that there are some who say that Helen fell down to earth from the moon, and
     that she was taken back up when the will of Zeus was accomplished. When and by whom this
     was said, Eustathius does not state; neither does he say (or imply) that in this form of
     the myth Helen served as a symbol of the anima..." [5]

The plot of the Iliad, then, would become the plot of the Love Affair, where the central
action concerns the recapture of Aphrodite from Ares by Hephaestus (Athena). The theory
would explain many problems (and no doubt will create some). The question raised
endlessly by students, "How could people of little discipline fight so murderously and
for so long over a mere woman in an age when women were nearly ordinary chattels?" is
answered. Beautiful Helen, eternally unravisheable and unconquerable, was Moon-
Aphrodite. Aphrodite was also a Great Goddess, and retained qualities of a Great Mother
Goddess; so the psychic prize was not only the Moon and the beautiful women, but also
the Mother of Greece.

The connection between the two wars - one of men, the other of gods - is often explained
as a form of hyperbole and egocentrism: it "heightens the glamour of the human
warriors." This kind of explanation would no longer be necessary. The two wars are
inextricably and originally linked now; they must be told together because they happened
together. As for the city of Troy and the Trojans, it is as much a mythical place as the
Shinning Land of Phaeacia. The Trojans are the Moon-capturing followers of Ares.

As has been argued increasingly for two decades, the Trojans may have been Greeks who
were set up by Homer to provide a counterforce to the Achaeans. Perhaps no saga in all
mythology treats the enemy so objectively, even with positive sympathy. An epic singer
usually delights his audience by heaping sins and defeats upon the enemy. Even Achilles
may have to assume a new character, that of Athena-Hephaestus, triumphant, but falling
finally through a wound of the foot from the arrow of Paris-Ares-Apollo-Aphrodite.

If this were generally so, and it is not to be demonstrated here, then at least the Love
Affair portion of the Odyssey may be fixed as concurrent with the Battle of the Gods in
the Iliad. It has been affirmed that the Love Affair is a late piece of the Odyssey. We
would not contest this placement at all. We are thinking of the middle 7th century for
the composition of the Iliad, and of the culture and the skies being both of the
preceding two generations.

Yet one more theory needs to be put forward respecting the Odyssey, before agreeing that
the work may well be composed of older materials and have its own hidden plot. Compare
the strong affection that Athena holds for Odysseus in the Iliad. He has her traits. See
him again in the Odyssey. Again he has her traits.. From beginning to end, the work of
the Odyssey is the divine work of Athena. She was not only the producer of the Love
Affair, and of the Iliad, but also of the Odyssey as a whole, and as she was the
principal actor in the first two, so she is once more the principal actor. For the
Odyssey is, in its latent plot, the story of the wandering planet Venus between 1500 B.
C. and her final settling in her present orbit, personified in her human mirror-image,
Odysseus. She it is who saves him at the beginning from the enraged Sea-Earth god,
Poseidon, and places him safely in command of his royal sphere in the end. If the Love
Affair is a Holy Dreamtime cycle, and the Iliad is sacred History, then the Odyssey is
to be categorized as Sacred Saga.

For all of this we praise Homer and his kind. He chose for the leitmotif of his works
the natural history of seven centuries. He rationalized the sky-gods for the Greeks and
transfigured unbearable truth into tolerable myth. His myths coordinated the basic
activities of sexuality, subsistence, respect, power, technology, and wealth into a
consistent cultural pattern and created the archaic Greek character. He restored to the
Greeks an ethnic identity consistent with the changed nature of the Gods and heaven.




{S : THE AGE OF MARS}
THE AGE OF MARS 

"When the gods fought" was a stock phrase among the ancient Greeks. Or they referred to
"the strife of the Gods," meaning something that was not simply confined to passages of
the Iliad but was a historical event. According to Velikovsky, the period 776 B. C. to
687 B. C. experienced at least four catastrophes at fifteen-year intervals that were
felt throughout the world. There were probably six terror-filled episodes.

This disastrous agenda began with an earlier event, which he dealt with in the first
part of his work called Worlds in Collision and in his Ages in Chaos. The former amassed
evidence that the planet that we know as Venus appeared before our ancestors as a comet
and nearly destroyed life on Earth around 1500 B. C. Thereafter the eccentric orbit of
the planet threatened the Earth at intervals of fifty-two years. The comet was
worshipped as a god, Pallas Athena, in the Greek world. Sometimes before 776 B. C. and
perhaps close to that year, Venus, in a diminishing elliptical orbit, encountered Mars.
Thereafter, and until both planets were impelled to take roughly their present safe
orbits, now one and now both approached Earth and Moon with consequent devastation to
the participating bodies.

Awe-inspiring celestial phenomena accompanied the founding of the Greek Olympic Games in
- 776. Hercules is supposed to have organized the games, ushering in what later came to
be a quadrennial all - Greek spectacle of religion, athletics, and poetry. The Greek
Mythikon calendar ends in - 776. The Historikon calendar begins. But Stecchini says that
it may have actually begun, or soon was redone, in - 748/ 7  [6] . And this would
conform to those who say that Hercules did not enter upon the games until they had been
operative on eight prior occasions.

In the west, the town of Rome was founded in - 748 or - 747. Some say - 753. It was a
period of commotion. Fabius Pictor's ancient adoption of the date - 747 seems most
likely to have been accepted for an event which probably did not take a single day but
had best, for patriotic reasons, to accompany some climactic events.

The founding of Rome was in the name of Romulus who was sponsored by Mars. Romulus was
the direct descendant of Aeneas, hence of Aphrodite, mother-protector of Aeneas. Aeneas
founded towns in her names on his long journey to Italy. Barely had the Trojans become
latinized when Rome was founded. Once more, the revised chronology connects well with an
ancient tradition. In the time of Romulus the week and month were reckoned long, and the
early calendar began with the month of Mars and proceeded in four nine-day weeks for ten
months, a total of 360 days. Romulus himself disappeared on the occasion of a natural
tumult during which, says Ovid, the earth shuddered, clouds obscured the heavens, and
the sky was riven by flames; "The people fled and the king soared upon his father's
steeds to the stars." [7]  (His "father" was Mars.) No people on earth came to be
dominated more by Mars and imbued wit the spirit of ruthless, single-minded warfare
personified by Ares-Mars.

In a study of the validity of carbon-dating in ancient times, H. E. Suess has come upon
"a most conspicuous and so far unparalleled irregularity in the *C14 as a function of
time. There was a "rapid C14 increase at the beginning of the 8th century B. C. and the
sharp maximum between 780 and 770 B. C... It is also the time of a general climate
change that took place on the North American continent... The climatic change was not a
temporary one; it marked the beginning of a completely new climate epoch." [8]  So
severe a change introduces the probability of extraterrestrial encounters, for reasons
that I have advanced and supported in The Lately Tortured Earth.

In Egypt it was the time of the Libyan and Ethiopian dynasties. These were foreigners,
whose domination over the greatest of empires has not been satisfactory explained,
except as a consequence of natural disasters. In Italy, Vesuvius exploded with a fury
not to be approached until the milder eruption that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum. In
Judah, heavenly commotion excited the populace and brought destruction in the times of
Uzziah (783-742), Ahaz (735-717), and Hezekiah (717-687); the kingdom of Israel was
dissolved and its people dispersed at this time. The Assyrians were under six different
kings, the last of whom, Sennacherib, saw his army blasted to death before the city of
Jerusalem in a single night of the year -687. It was the period of a Babylonian-Chaldean
empire; of Laomedon and Priam of Troy; of the destruction of the now Greek-speaking
Cretans at Knossos; of the destruction of Mycenae; and, at the end of the period, there
came Homer and Hesiod. They are the oldest known Greek writers, and the first whose
writing have appeared in the classical Greek script and alphabet. The adoption of a new
calendar by the Assyrians in -747, the beginning of the "Age of Nabonassar," suggests
that heavy disturbances occurred in the first and second encounters; probably the
Earth's orbit, rotation, and axis all underwent changes.

Thales, one of the great "seven sages," calculated the Greek calendar, perhaps shortly
after Homer and possibly around -600. But, as Velikovsky points out, Thales re-
calculated the seasons and year after the period of turmoil and changed celestial
periodicities. For, "all around the globe the years following -687 saw activity directed
towards reforming the calendar." [9]  Velikovsky asserts, too, that the day shortened in
-717 and lengthened in -687. These would indicate orbital changes, axial tilts, changes
in rotational speed, or a combination thereof.

Accordingly, in the Greek-speaking and Middle East areas, crushing damage to late
Mycenaean and early Hellenic civilization occurred in the period -776 to -687. One or
more of the type of encounters pictured in the Love Affair took place, with Moon and
Mars largely barren of atmosphere, and susceptible to nearly complete destruction on the
faces that they turn to Earth.

Velikovsky dates the last disaster as centering upon 23 March -687. It is noteworthy
that the Romans celebrated the festivals of both Minerva (Athena) and Mars about the
same time. The Exodus has also been assigned this day by Velikovsky, over seven
centuries earlier. Probably this is more than a coincidence, and the double celebration
is evidence of both bodies participating in an encounter about 23 March -687. That the
same date would also correspond roughly with the spring fertility rites in which the
Moon would have long played the major role would stress, too, the occasion.

This Seventh Century date would put the story that Homer writes down and Demodocus sings
in the period of heavy Greek colonization of the Western Mediterranean. The physical
destruction of the pre-existing civilization, the movements of people, the loss of their
written language, the capture of initiative on the part of the uncouth survivors, the
loss of memory (that is, loss of will to report the disaster), the revival of poetic
forms, the mastering of the forms and then the Homeric collection and integration of
them in writing would have to take place in no more than a hundred years. Only a radical
reformulation of the nature of Homeric studies would permit this. But one must pursue
this approach, for, in the words of Lucian, "It is the conjunction of Venus and Mars
that creates the poetry of Homer."




{S : Notes (Chapter 6: The Rape of Helen)}
Notes (Chapter 6: The Rape of Helen) 

1. Od. VIII, 81-2.

2. The World of Odysseus, p. 150.

3. So I am informed by the linguist, Malcolm Lowery, who adds, "conversion of original s
- to h - is also exampled by hex-six and hepta (septem, seven).

4. Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths, Vol. I., p. 161.

5. (Boston, Beacon Press, 1958) Fn. 9, p. 109.

6. "Astronomical Theory and Historical Data," in Alfred de Grazia, ed., The Velikovsky
Affair (New York: University Books, 1965), pp. 158-9.

7. My source is a discussion with Stecchini. On nine-day divisions of the months, see in
Worlds in collision, II, viii citing Sicke (1892), Kaegi (1891), Kugler( 1907), Naville
(1875), Roscher( 1903, 1904); and Ovid; for the ten -month year, he sites Schiefner
(1857), Male (1846), Nilssen (1920), and Frazer (1931) together with Plutarch, Eutropius
and Procopius.

8. "The Three Causes of the Secular C14 Fluctuations. Their Amplitudes and Time
Constants," Radiocarbon Variations and Absolute Chronology (Proceedings. 12th Nobel
Symposium at Uppsala Univ. 1969), ed. Ingrid V. Olsson (Almquist and Wiksell, Stockholm,
1970), p. 602, quoted in Pens‚e, Fall 1972, p. 41.

9. Worlds in Collision, p. 358.





{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE}
{V THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS}
{P PART 2: }
{Q GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS }
{C Chapter 7: }
{T CRAZY HEROES OF DARK TIMES}
{S - }




THE DISASTROUS LOVE AFFAIR OF MOON AND MARS

by Alfred de Grazia

PART TWO:
GODS, PLANETS, MADNESS

CHAPTER SEVEN

CRAZY HEROES OF DARK TIMES

It was early Springtime  [1]  in Pylos, a Mycenaean town of the Peloponnesus, facing
the western sea. The year was between 776 and 687 B. C. It may even have been March 23,
-687. A force of 800 men was posted along 150 kilometers of shoreline. With them were
liaison officers from the Palace of King Nestor. The famous old sage of the Achaean
warriors himself would have been home from the siege of Troy.

A clay tablet, one of those inscribed "immediately before the destruction which baked
them and rendered them durable" [2] begins, "Thus are the watchers guarding the coastal
regions." [3] What could they be watching for? Obviously no enemy had been sighted nor
could the men be in fighting formation, so thinly dispersed were they. It might be as
in Jerusalem around this time, when Isaiah the Prophet was answering the call,
"Watchman, what of the night?" [4]

Another tablet may have been the last:

     A single large tablet bears evidence of haste and changes of mind during its writing.
     
     The retention of such an ill-written document in the archive might occasion surprise,
     unless it was in fact only written in the last day or two before the palace fell. The
     meaning of some key words is still uncertain, but there is no doubt that it records
     offerings to a long list of deities. The offerings are in each case a golden vessel,
     but the principal deities, if male, receive in addition a man, or, if female, a woman.
     It has been suggested that these human beings were being dedicated to the service of
     the deities, but the grisly possibility that they were human sacrifices cannot be
     lightly dismissed. At all events the offering of thirteen gold vessels and ten human
     beings to a whole pantheon of divinities must mark an important occasion; and what
     occasion more likely than a general supplication on the receipt of news of an imminent
     attack? [5]

The "occasion more likely" is catastrophe. Tidal waves were to be watched for, and the
setting of the sun behind the flaming horizons. Matters quickly worsened. The news was
bad. The gods and goddesses had taken to the skies. "The whole pantheon of divinities"
was supplicated, with the richest offerings; gold and human bodies. Not a solitary god
of the sea, or a single god of the hearth, or of love, of battle. All of the great sky-
gods seem to have been involved.

So Pylos perished. The Palace was destroyed in a "holocaust" which "consumed everything
that was inflammable within it, and even melted gold ornaments into lumps and drops of
metal." The flames melted brick and stone into "a solid mass... as hard as rock." In
one room two large pots were fused "into a molten vitrified layer which ran over the
whole floor." Everything that a human invader might desire was reduced to
shapelessness. Stone was burned into lime  [6] . No human hands and hand-set fires
could have wreaked such ruin. Only blasts from the sky-electrical, gaseous or both.



{S : THE SAGE WHO BRIDGED THE DARK AGES}
THE SAGE WHO BRIDGED THE DARK AGES 

The name of King Nestor graces both the annals of the siege of Troy in the Iliad and
the Linear B tablets. Which came first, the burning of Troy, or the disaster at Pylos,
or did they occur simultaneously? If Pylos were consumed by fire at the same time as
Troy was, than its King Nestor would have been away at the siege of Troy. He would have
been, shall we say, fifty-five years old, with plenty of fire left in him. One day,
before the gates of Troy, he told a long story, whose irrelevance is only seeming.
Professor Denys Page refers to it significantly as "a brilliant piece of late Ionian
composition, but it has a continuous pedigree ascending to the Mycenaean era." [7]
That is, ascending 400 years or so, by his reckoning; by mine, Nestor was a Mycenean in
the Homeric Age of 800 to 650 B. C.

When Nestor was a child, Hercules had descended upon Pylos and a battle of the gods
ensued. Hercules and Athena were on one side, while Ares was on the other, and Hercules
bested Ares. "Herakles had come in his strength against us and beaten us in the years
before, and all the bravest among us had been killed. For we who were sons of lordly
Neleus had been twelve, and now I alone was left of these, and all the others had
perished."

Little by little the Pylians had recovered until they were able to raid their northern
neighbors and revenge themselves somewhat for the ravages of old. The revenge came when
Nestor was still young - shall we say fifteen years older? Perhaps he was nineteen, for
he had been warned from the fight because of his youth, yet had become its hero. If he
was fifty-five in -700, say, he would have been nineteen in -736. The disaster that
killed all but a few Pylians would have come around -747.

Working in the other direction, one learns something else about the wise old time-
clock. Nestor lived to entertain Telemachus, son of Odysseus, shortly before the
latter's homecoming in Ithaca. Therefore, we would add ten years to Nestor and ten
years of life also to his palace. It could not have been destroyed when the city of
Troy was. Supposing Pylos to have been consumed by an atmospheric disaster, and Troy
VIIA by the same (for it was indeed incinerated), it is possible still then that the
end of Troy VI, which was wrecked by earthquake, might have marked the end of the
Trojan War and the departure of the Greeks. We recall two stories of the war: Poseidon
battered down the famous Achaean defensive wall near the sea after the Achaeans
departed; further, the breech in the Trojan Wall was made to admit the Trojan Horse,
which may have been the symbol of Horse-Tamer Poseidon, whose tides swept over all
barriers like charging steeds.

If such were the case, Pylos and Troy VIIa would go down in -687, along with pitiable
Phaeacia. Troy VI would go down eleven years before. And the War of Pylos involving
Hercules, Ares and Athena would be set around -747.

We may take this occasion also to tie in the "neighboring giants," who made life
impossible for the Phaeacians when they lived in Hypereia. These were probably astral
phenomena of monstrous shape who hurled debris upon them from the skies. The
Babylonians were chanting in their hymns to Mars-Nergal: "Great giants, with awesome
members, run at his right and at his left." [8]  This may have been part of the
terrible destruction wrought in Asia Minor in -747 in the time of King Uzziah  [9] .
For King Nausithous led them to Scheria, and he was the father of their present King,
Alcinous, who is in the prime of life.

The excavations of Schliemann and Blegen at Hisarlik were valuable as ordinary
archaeology; they contributed almost nothing to solve "the Homeric Questions." What we
derive from their reports is an important negative: if either Schliemann's Troy or
Blegen's Troys were "the real Troy," then Troy was destroyed not by the Achaeans, but
by "the gods" - by earthquake and by conflagrations exceeding any possible human agency
[10] .

Unfortunately, one cannot at this point be certain of how many celestial encounters in
the period -776 to -687 involved simply Mars alone. As we shall see, the years -687 and
-747 are candidates for the triple encounters.

If the Battle of the Gods and the Love Affair took place in 698 then, accepting the end
of the Trojan War in its tenth year and then years of wanderings of Ulysses, one would
have the destruction of Pylos and Odysseus' killing of the Suitors  [11] occurring at
the same time, eleven years later, 687 B. C. On both occasions, both Venus and Mars
were active in the sky. This is not impossible. Venus was "seeking" a circular orbit.
Mars may have been "knocked out of the ring" of its more regular orbit. Professor Earl
R. Milton and I discuss this matter in Solaria Binaria. Two encounters with Earth as a
participant might have been needed.

This interpretation is preferable to one that would dissolve the Odyssean temporal
sequence and have Pylos come crashing down at the same time as Troy, with Nestor in two
places at the same time. The scene at Pylos upon which Telemachus, son of Odysseus,
happens, when in search of news of his father, is convincing. Nestor tells him that he
himself had hastened home from Troy (wise old man that he was) in fear of divine wrath,
and that those who tarried suffered greatly. Now we find the King and his whole people
on the seashores sacrificing a hundred rich cattle to Poseidon. The skies and Earth
have not settled. It may be that a month later, Pylos will be destroyed by "star-fire"
or astro-flame. If we check back upon Velikovsky's accounting of concurrent events in
the Middle East, we see that Sennacherib's Assyrian Army was blasted in 687 B. C. but
also that the army of Esarhaddon, his son, fled in terror of astral phenomena on a
successive invasion of Palestine  [12] . Here again, the puzzle was whether to unite
the two events or treat them successively, and Velikovsky chose the latter course, as
do we.

The present state of speculation may be conveyed in tabular form:

The Pylos story is not ended, however. There is more to it, and it fashions a warning
to scholars who have accepted faithfully the theory that a Mycenaean age was ended
about 1200 B. C. by barbarian invasions and a "Dark Age" set in that was to be
illuminated by the great poets, Homer and Hesiod, finally around 800 B. C. The Love
Affair holds a light to the Dark Age and the disposition of the Dark Age provides a key
to the Love Affair.

To return to the story, we call upon the research of Isaacson on Pylos. The destruction
of Pylos has been compared with the destruction of Gordion, in Asia Minor. The city
whose Gordian knot was later cut by Alexander, perished also in a disaster. Pylos was
of Mycenaean Greek culture: Gordius was Phrygian. At Pylos were found ceramics that
resembled Mycenaean ware that was associated with Egyptian ware and therefore assigned
the Egyptian dates because these were the basis of Near Eastern chronology. The
Phrygians, however, are honored by their own archeological and historical dating system
and Gordius is said to be of the eighth century before Christ. 

Table 
Hypothetical Benchmarks: Planetary Encounters and Historical Coincidences


Calendar 	Elapsed time	Nestor's 	Personal events 			Other events			Sky encounters		  
(B. C.)* 	between 	possible
		periods		age
	 	 	 
================================================================================================================================================

776		- 		-		-					Olympic Games Founde 		Venus/ Mars/ Earth-Moon

761 		15 		-		-					Hercules Destroys Troy 		Mars/ Earth-Moon
											and Wins Olympic Games

747 	15 	5				Nausithous Moves to Phaeacia; 		Pylian War of Gods 		Venus/ Mars/ Earth-Moon
						Iliad and Odyssey begin Career 
						as Epic Cycles; Hercules and 
						Heralids in Peloponnesus 
						(Nestor Sole Survivor)

732 	15 	20				Atreus and Thyestes; 			Pylians Raid Elians 		Mars/ Earth-Moon
											(Nestor a Hero)


717 	15 	-				Alkinous Becomes King of Phaeacia					Mars/ Earth-Moon


702 	15 	45				Nestor and Odysseus at Troy		Start of Trojan War 		Venus/ Mars/ Earth-Moon 

698	-	55				Nestor at Troy; Agamemnon Fights 	Troy VI destroyed 		Mars/ Earth-Moon
						Memnon the Ethiopian Prince (Egypt)	by Earthquakes (War of Gods)

687 	11 	66				Demodocus Sings - Odysseus Returns. 	Troy VIIA Destroyed by Fire; 	Venus/ Mars/ Earth-Moon 
						Nestor and Telemachus at Pylos. 	Pylos Falls (Last War of Gods); 
						Homer Born.				Phaeacia Falls by Earthquake; 
											Sennacherib's
											
											Army Destroyed at Jerusalem	Skies clear 

670 	-	-									Greek Alphabet Developed 	Calendars Reordered; Earth Trembles 

630 	-	-				Iliad Revised and Transcribed by Homer 					Present skies 
						Odyessey Revised and Transcribed by Homer





     *The six major intervals are 15 years each, placed largely on the reasoning of
     Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, pp 362 ff., that Mars' present orbit is in "favorable
     opposition" respecting Earth every 15 years. Since Mars had a different orbit before -
     776 and might have changed its orbit at every encounter between -776 and -687, we must
     of course ultimately use historical evidence to plot all of the encounters. We must
     bear in mind, too, that the geological and ecological aftermaths of disaster provoked
     by celestial behavior can continue for some time. Here, also, we have reasoned that
     only an 11- year interval separated the last two disaster, that is. Mars was on its way
     to becoming an outer planet and suffered two encounters close together. Although the
     problem is not insoluble it will require a great deal of research to established
     empirically the dates of several peak disasters and the rate of subsidence of
     disturbances in the aftermaths. (Worlds in Collision, 274-8).

Charcoal of both burnt-out sites was tested at the same laboratory at the same time to
determine its carbon-14 loss. For it is by living that a plant or animal ingests carbon
14; after death the ingestion stops and a decay of this radioactive substance begins.
Measuring the loss of Carbon 14 in charcoal samples of the two towns, the investigators
discovered what they had expected: the samples of each site could give dates that
conventional archeology had already established. But to do so, the investigators
performed miracles of purification of the Gordian sample to reduce its age by several
hundred years, while they let the samples of Pylos go by polluted and unchallenged
because they "proved" what was expected.

Not content with casting the Pylos samples back into the ash-heap, Isaacson advanced
three further conclusions from the materials of these two towns far apart, whose dates
may now be said to be close together. He discovered that the C14 dates of the olive
pollen in a core from the bottom of a lake near Pylos conveyed eighth century readings
when the pollen was at its peak. Reasoning that Pylos was tending a maximum of olive
trees when the town was flourishing, and that there would be little cultivation in the
"Dark Ages" when the population would be sparse, Isaacson logically deduced that the
maximum of the short-lived pollen in the eighth century could mean that Pylos was in
full flower then as well, although, once destroyed, it remained uninhabited ever after.

He went on to a second point. Analyzing the famed reports of the University of
Cincinnati excavations at Pylos, he read in their pages accounts of the mysterious
mixing of Mycenaean pottery and geometric pottery in strata where neither could have
intruded upon the other. Yet these two types of ceramics were supposed to have been
fashioned centuries apart.

Now the basic and perhaps the only unassailable law of geology and archaeology is the
law of superposition. Unless proof of accident if brought forward, what is on top is
younger than what it rests upon. The Mycenaean and the Geometric Ages then had to be
contemporaneous! The "Dark Ages" of 400 to 500 years appeared to have been squeezed out
at Pylos. Pondering this point, one is led almost reluctantly to the third point of
Isaacson. Gordion of Phrygia in the 8th century has walls that strikingly resemble the
walls of Troy VI, which were devastated by earthquake. Archaeologists who are faithful
to their conventions must bargain with an architectural similarity that flatly denies
their 400 years' or more gap between Gordius and Troy.

Isaacson's work was following a trail already laid by Velikovsky, who had observed that
archaeologists of the 19th century had somehow lost their way. Velikovsky exposed the
problem and its probable solution in 1973 by the long-deferred publication of his
manuscript on the famous rampant lions gate of Mycenae  [13] .

In 1881, W. M. Ramsey had noted that the Gate closely resembled a Phrygian tomb gate of
the 8th century. Flinders Petrie, the renowned pioneer of Egyptian archaeology and
history, had established an authoritative chronology of Egypt which could be applied
wherever Egyptian artifacts were discovered, or conversely when foreign artifacts were
discovered in Egypt. Petrie discounted Ramsay's evidence, because Mycenae had already
been "dated" by the association of its artifacts with those of Egypt. Resemblance or
not, the Lions of the two cities were moved four hundred years apart.

Petrie's Egyptian chronological imperialism, spreading over the Near East and the
Mediterranean island, compelled scholars to invent a long period of Hellenic culture in
which "little happened," barbarism prevailed, the Greeks were illiterate, the arts and
sciences were lost - the Dark Ages of Greece, in short, conventionally dated between
1300 or 1200 B. C. and 800 B. C., a span of perhaps 500 years. Not until Velikovsky
[14] challenged the Egyptian chronology frontally could any scholar imagine that
various baffling puzzles of Phrygia, Mycenaean Greece, and Homeric Greece would have
ultimately simple solution; the Gordian Knot was cut. Isaacson's studies of the
excavation records at half-a-dozen famous sites, following Velikovsky's hypothesis,
have shattered the empirical foundations of the theory of the Dark Ages  [15] .



{S : SOCIETY IN SHOCK}
SOCIETY IN SHOCK 

Speaking of the aftermath of catastrophe, Plato declares of the survivors; "At first,
they would have natural fear ringing in their ears which would prevent their descending
from the heights into the plain." [16]

If one were, at this pint, to take up in order the authoritative works of history and
archaeology it might be shown that they are in every case affected by a blind spot in
regard to the Dark Ages. This method would be repeating much of Isaacson's work and
would expand unduly the present text. It may be better to fashion a new model of the
Homeric Age and, by demonstrating its consistency and efficiency, to buttress the
theory that the Love Affair portrays an astral and earthly disaster that had recently
occurred. Let us call this model, "The Crazed Survivors of Disaster."

It stands in contrast to the conventional "Greek Dark Ages" model. The latter holds
that the Mycenaean Age collapsed over the period of a century because of barbarian
invasions and that these barbarians in the course of centuries acquired the mentalities
and facilities of a civilized people.

The "Crazed Survivors" model is constructed from the theory that a general catastrophe
involving great ecological and cultural damage is followed by a shocked society. The
shocked society would exhibit a complex of expected behaviors that distinguish it from
stable or moderately changing or even revolutionary societies, or more significantly,
from a society that is slowly evolving from a "primitive" to a "civilized" culture. In
the societies of crazed survivors, personal and mass self-destructiveness and
destructiveness of others and of culture increase as terror and guilt interact on a
complex and massive scale. Depending upon the extent of the disaster, a totally
amnesiac and stupefied society of cultural degenerates may ensue or a more furious
cultural coping that may eventuate in a flowering of religious institutions, crafts,
and arts.

The Homeric heroes, Odysseus and Achilles among them, typified the bands of survivors
of the extensive Mycenaean civilization that was largely destroyed in the catastrophic
interventions of the planets Mars and Venus in the Earth-Moon system in the 8th
century. The plots of the Iliad and Odyssey, despite 2700 years of trying to make
something else of them, clearly po