A few folks have appropriately made connections between The Odyssey and the evolution of consciousness.
Julian Jaynes commented on the lack of a distinct ‘I’ in the poem’s statement: ‘am Odysseus!’
Jean Gebser, decades before Jaynes, emphasized the latency of the ego in that statement, as well as the telling phrase: ‘awakening shore.’
The Odyssey, according to Gebser, reveals certain ‘mythologemes’ at work in ancient consciousness. These are transformative tensions at work beneath the surface. Homer’s myth describes and imparts the process through which the ego wrestles with the oceanic forces of psyche and awakens to itself. The ancient and prevailing mythic consciousness is overturned as the new ‘mental’ consciousness comes into being.
But lest we presume this is some developmental order or teleological sequence, it is more appropriate to compare what is happening to the dynamic and interdependent transformations of living systems: like the emergence of eukaryotic cells, and the upending of the more ancient prokaryotic world. These are not neat developmental advances but complex re-arrangements of the world that bring forth new morphologies and new possibilities (as well as new challenges).
Many more analogies from evolutionary biology could be used as our example, but the emphasis here, I’d like to suggest, reveals something about the nature of this transformation—and indeed all major transformations in cultural evolution.
Odysseus is called polytropos, ‘one who makes many turns,’ but also one who is continuously turned about.
He is a man of mental consciousness - cunning, clever, someone who can circumvent the old order of things. Ego consciousness makes things happen, it acts upon the world in a way that directs it, sets it to order. But to turn the world is invite being turned by the world.
To shatter the old ways is to initiate oneself into a cosmogenic process that the ego, alone, can never be prepared for—and thus another latent tension and future reversal is born.
The new, which turns the world, anticipates yet another turning-to-come: a more integrative consciousness which can transverse sea and shore, waking and dreaming, symbol and sign. [Incidentally, this also raises our attention to Iain McGilchrist work, who states as much in his own terms]
Cultural transformations are enantiomorphic in that they contain many turns and reversals. They are polytropic. Whether or not one presumes to be in relation with the world, and whether or not one presumes to have usurped the gods, the gods have their ways of living in the crossroads and cracks. They, too, have their way of bending and turning the heroism of mortals into strange new possibilities.
The Odyssey reveals that the transformations of consciousness continue to be latent with the generative tensions and enantiomorphic reversals that, in their restlessness turning, fashion and re-fashion the cosmos.
In this most recent ‘turning’ of worldview, however, perhaps we should take Marshall McLuhan’s invitation seriously: let us make this turning more than ‘awake’ or ‘a wake,’ but something more transparent and lucid, capable of dreaming and waking, making happen and letting happen.
To wrap up this little meditation: perhaps it is appropriate that The Odyssey is re-entering popular discussion. We are still in the telling. Penelope is still weaving and unweaving her husband’s mask.
The mental world, after all, is polytropic, and we are still being turned about.
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Jeremy's essay beautifully captures one side of Gebser's vision, especially the dynamic character of consciousness as a series of creative reversals, tensions, and "turnings." His emphasis on latency, enantiomorphism, and the mythopoetic unfolding of culture is genuinely Gebserian. However, I think he goes too far in resisting developmental directionality. Gebser certainly rejected simplistic notions of linear progress or mechanistic evolution, but he did not reject the fact that consciousness unfolds through identifiable mutations. The movement from the archaic to the magical, mythical, mental, and integral structures possesses a clear directionality. This is not Darwinian adaptation, nor Hegelian inevitability, but neither is it merely a "complex rearrangement." Each new structure discloses capacities that genuinely transcend and include what came before. Odysseus embodies that transformation into the egoic-mental mode that would influence generations for millennia.
More significantly, Jeremy's interpretation remains almost entirely within the mythopoetic register. Like many contemporary Gebserians, he seems drawn toward neo-shamanism, earth enchantment, imagination, and the symbolic life of culture, while placing far less emphasis on the emergence of egoic-mental strength, let alone contemplative realization. The result is an account of consciousness that beautifully explores the transformations of the dream, yet says remarkably little about awakening from identification with the dream itself. His "integrative consciousness" remains primarily a richer mode of participation in the world rather than a realization of the ever-present Ground that is prior to every structure of consciousness. I believe this reflects the lapse that our neo-psychedelic culture has woven for us today in reaction to the directional forces of science and mental clarity. Truth be told, we need both: dreaming and waking! But beyond both lies Awakening from every state—waking, dreaming, and deep sleep.
From my perspective, Jeremy is describing the bottom "half" of the picture extremely well—that is, the evolutionary Arc of Becoming, with its stages of cultural mutation—yet he gives comparatively little attention to the Arc of Being, the Ever-Present Ground from which all states and stages arise and from which we find our true Freedom. Indeed, at times he almost seems reluctant to acknowledge the full emergence of egoic consciousness, preferring to emphasize continuity and reciprocity over genuine developmental transcendence. Yet the deepest realization is not becoming better at dreaming, nor merely becoming lucid within the dream. It is awakening from identification with the dream altogether, even while continuing to participate in it. Without the contemplative realization of the Ever-Present Ground, cultural evolution remains an endlessly fascinating account of the movements within the dream, rather than an account that also includes the possibility of awakening to the Reality in which the dream itself appears.