Island Three Isle of Minotaurs, Heroes and Bicameral Visitations

(Extract from: Muse of the Long Haul Thirty-One Isles of the Creative Imagination)

Copyright, Dr Ian Irvine, 2013 all rights reserved. All short extracts from the texts discussed used under fair usage related to review and theoretical critique under international copyright law. Vase image of the Minotaur being slain by Theseus is in the common domain. Second image of islands by Caleb Irvine-King-Smith, all rights reserved (using Topia world design software), 2013.

Publisher: Mercurius Press, Australia, 2013. NB: This piece is published at Scribd as part of a series drawn from Ians soon to be published non-fiction book on experiential poetics entitled: Muse of the Long Haul: Thirty-One Isles of the Creative Imagination.

Island Three Isle of Minotaurs, Heroes and Bicameral Visitations

The Hauraki Gulf frames Auckland Harbour to the North-Eastit is dotted with dozens of islands, small and large. I visited many of them during my late adolescence living in and around Aucklands northern beaches. They are beguiling places, many probably of historic importance to the Maori peoples of the region. To my mind they came to resemble the charmed Mediterranean islands that feature so prominently in Greek mythologythough of course New Zealands flora and fauna is quite different. From our home above the North Shore beach town of Browns Bay, I could usually make out the waters of the gulf and a number of those magical islandsthey glinted in the sunlight or brooded under thick rain clouds. From the upper rugby pitch of our secondary schoolRangitoto Collegewe had a clear view of Rangitoto Island with its towering ancient volcano. The island seemed to guard the entrance to Auckland Harbour. Sometimes strange cloud patterns gathered about the inactive volcano and it would all but vanish under low-lying clouds or sea mist. Now and then, mostly on clear winter mornings, I remember observing a vast carpet of sea mist in the gulfoften it would obscure the lower reaches of Rangitoto Island. On such occasions the peak of the volcano sometimes remained relatively free of cloud. The result was a strange two-tiered optical illusiona mountain floating high in the heavens as though disconnected from earth and ocean. A sacred mountain floating on an ocean of clouds. Probably many people living close to mountains witness such phenomenaperhaps the ancient Greeks did as they looked up at Mount Olympus abode of the Olympian deities that have so dominated the Western imagination down the millennia. For a long time these deities, and the many colourful myths and legends associated with them, stood as the essential link to the Wests pagan-polytheistic origins. If you werent a monotheist or a philosopher but nevertheless saw divinity in the natural world, in mountains and caves, in rivers and lakes, in forests or swamps if too you felt a certain kinship with plants and animals and had the occasional urge to monitor the flight patterns of migrating birds for signs of the future, or to perhaps drop a coin in a sacred stream and make a wish, there was always the Renaissance man option of developing an interest in classical mythology. The texts of the ancient Greek and Roman poets and playwrightsHomer, Hesiod, Virgil, Sophocles, Ovid etc.provide a useful grounding. Unfortunately, however, at the root of the old understanding of Europes pagan European origins stood the somewhat muscular Indo-European hero with a thousand faces that Joseph Campbell famously celebratedan Odysseus or Achilles, a Hector or Hercules, a Jason or Theseus. In our childhoods we often come across the story of Cretes infamous labyrinth built by King Minos to house the monstrous offspring of Pasiphae and a marvelous white bull given to Minos (on the proviso it be sacrificed immediately) by Poseidon. The bull had helped prove the young mans partial divinity and thus had secured for him the ruler-ship of Crete. Being a greedy fellow Minos had reneged on the sacrifice part of the deal (substituting a lesser creature) and the result had been an unnatural lust in the new kings wife, Pasiphae, for the white bull. Daedalus, probably the ancient worlds greatest inventor figure, engineered a bizarre contraption worthy of a modern day house of ill-repute and after a safe insemination of the queen by the said beast a monstrous creature half man and half bull was soon gurgling and snuffling at its human mothers breast. Seeing the consequences of his earlier error Minos had Daedalus build a home for the poor forlorn baby-thing and the kingdom began to thriveeven so, the story goes, subjugating

the Athenians who were forcedas tributeto provide an annual sacrifice of seven young maidens and seven young men to the hungry creature locked up in the labyrinth. A situation ripe for a hero, you might say, and sure enough Theseus lands the mission. He journeys to Crete with a batch of Athenian Minotaur tribute and promptly accepts secret aid from Ariadne (daughter of Minos) in the form of a ball of string capable of getting him out of the labyrinth should he be able to slay the Minotaur. He also possesses a magical sword or dagger. At the centre of the complex Theseus wrestles the unhappy, and probably hungry, creature to the straw before killing it with the magical weapon. He then uses the unraveled string to find his way back to the everyday world. All very exciting, but unfortunately Theseus himself eventually becomes something of a Minos, something of a Minotaur even, upon his return home. He dumps Ariadne, despite her loyalty and love, and soon begins to exhibit the usual autocratic, even ruthless, traits common to patriarchal polytheistic rulers. These old stories about the legendary King Minos, his wife Pasiphae, their daughter Ariadne, the Athenian hero Theseus, the inventor Daedalus and the Minotaur turn out to be, on the evidence of modern archaeology, but a small part of a much larger and more ancient cultural narrative. On even the simplest modern reading of the origins of the story it conceals a second more ancient narrative concerned with the gradual flowering then destruction of a Pre-Hellenic matrifocal/matrilinear civilisation on Creteone perhaps dominated by the ancient Mother Goddess we discussed in chapter 2 of this book. Eventually an andocratic, warrior civilisation dominated by a more militaristic king replaced the earlier civilisation. The King, who nevertheless took the name of the islands ancient dynastic line (i.e. Minos), saw himself quite differently to the long line of priest-kings (some say judges) that had preceded him. According to the archaeological evidence the earlier priest-kings had been subservient to the great goddess and her female attendants, whereas the later King Minos, by all accounts something of an autocrat, owed his ruler-ship to Zeus and Poseidon as is plainly stated in the final version of the legend (i.e. Gods representative of the patriarchal polytheism that came to dominate classical Greek civilisation). If the name Minos was indeed dynastic, rather than unique to one later ruler, then there may be multiple versions of King Minos awaiting disintermentlikewise, multiple palaces of King Minos, perhaps even multiple Minotaurs and labyrinths. Something of the sort is suggested even in the Homeric descriptions of King Minos. In The Odyssey, for example, he appears as both: a) a ruthless tyrant and b) a patron of the arts and sciences, and an honorable judge of the dead. The differences between the two character sketches are inexplicable if we fail to take into account the long evolution of religion and culture on Crete. The differences are not unimportant to our modern notions of what it means to be a real mana masculine hero type. Heroes, as is well known, are dependent upon the monsters they confront and hopefully overcome. The period described in The Odyssey and The Iliad is often termed the Age of Heroes. It was also an age, as we now know, of male religious and social ascendance. The story of the labyrinth as a hellish place built to house a blood-thirsty bull monster (God?), is perhaps best understood as a symbol of the new haunted collective unconsciousthe new underworldbirthed by Mycenaean patriarchal polytheism. Many older historic palaces of Minos (stretching back to 2,000BCE) await disinterment and thus ghost the legendary palace we encounter in the later narrative. They will no doubt speak of another kind of labyrinth, a less

hellish place, a place of layered, complex cultural histories, a place where-in ancient Minoan, even Neolithic, religious rites centered upon the great Goddess were acted out. These days we can choose from several versions of the (priest)-King known as Minos, likewise, several Minotaurs. Similarly, the labyrinth proves to be a much more complex story symbolperhaps even a multifaceted symbol pertaining to the development of human consciousness itself. All of this may demand that we change our concept of the hero as he figures in the Greek texts dealing with the Age of Heroes. We might even consider putting less emphasis on Theseus and his ilk and more emphasis on the priestesses that served the Snake Goddess (among many other forms) in any number of Minoan temples. However, to uncover the civilisation of the Cretan Mother Goddess we first have to come to terms with (archaeologically and perhaps psycho-spiritually) the Mycenaen and Greek Dark Age cultures. In a sense then, we have to excavate such warrior cultures for earlier models of masculinity that might be useful to men in an age of feminism and the ever present threat of nuclear annihilation. Perhaps this is the only way for modern writers to move beyond the hero with a thousand faces that still dominates mainstream Hollywood movies. Strange as it may seem, for me it took an encounter with Tolkiens Lord of the Rings and a bizarre night on an island (in World War II military tunnels) to begin to free me from the hero figure so dominant in the post-Minoan, post-Neolithic, West. Although back in 1983 I was still acting out a contemporary version of the hero narrative on cricket pitches across Australasia, and, soon after, England, I was also beginning to search unconsciously at firstfor a more authentic sense of identity. By the end of 1983 I was looking for an escape hatch from the modern world in all sorts of strange placesGraves bizarre book The White Goddess, touted as a grammar of poetic myth, seemed to me to point the way (see Island Two of this series) and thus inevitably I started to read material designed to either prove or disprove his thesis. At first I looked at the usual suspects, i.e. Europes Celtic, Norse, Greek and Roman traditions. In the old Greek stories I came across the figure of the Minotaur and was immediately fascinated by the stories around him. Interestingly I gave Theseus, who had to deal with this monster, only cursory attentionI wasnt looking to European paganism for a hero. The Minotaur is relevant to the narrative of this book in a straightforward way since, conveniently, he lived on island. He also spent quite a lot of time undergroundand since childhood Id been drawn to tunnels and caves, dungeons and underground rivers. In the language of mythology, the Minotaur had a chthonic aura about him. Though nominally a monster, he taught me quite a bit about the shadow side to the heroic impulselikewise, I half suspect that he has his origins among the totemic creatures of the European Neolithic, maybe he is kin to the underground shamanshalf human, half beastdepicted in some of the upper Paleolithic caves. In late 1983 as I struggled to make sense of Graves vast but perplexing tome on the Muse or Triple Goddess, I also delved into The Iliad and The Odyssey for the first time. Although I wasnt overly impressed with the war theme that seemed to dominate The Iliad (and thus skipped a hundred pages out of boredom) I do remember being fascinated by the actions of the Gods in both textsparticularly The Odyssey. A question was brewing that has puzzled me all of my adult life: What exactly is a God? I was also interested, at the time, in explaining a strange experience Id had with that geekiest of early 80s adolescent male pastimes: fantasy role playing.

Dungeons and Dragons role playing was all the rage among some of my closest school friendspart of the culture involved consuming vast numbers of fantasy novels. We were all methodically working our way through Stephen Donaldsons Thomas Covenant series, Frank Herberts Dune series, Robert Silverbergs Majipoor/Valentine books and even Terry Brooks Shannara series, among others. At the root of the entire craze, however, was of course Tolkiens Lord of the Rings trilogythe three books of the series plus The Hobbit and The Silmarilion functioned as the unofficial canonical bedrock of any true early 80s fantasy readers library. Posters of hobbits and citadels would often be located near-by (some framed), and if you were a real devotee you might even own sets of little metal fantasy figures, painted or otherwisewizards in flowing robes, dragons with a box of treasures between their talons, perky looking elves and so on. In the first role playing session I remember experiencing an intense, and, in retrospect, strangely destabilizing, heightening of my imagination. As the dungeon master began to guide a group of us into a deep dark cave complex full, as it turned out, of trolls, evil wizards and goblins I felt the games board, the little figures, even my friends parents lounge-room gradually fade from consciousness and for long moments I really felt myself to be in a kind of dungeon under attack from mythic creatures with bad breathe, rude manners and hairy armpits. 1 My imagination, long dulled by math equations, sport and crappy television suddenly came to lifeand the feeling would prove addictive, even a kind of refuge from the anxieties of my late adolescence. Besides, a friends sister was also part of the group and already I was feeling attracted to her. We would meet every Sunday morning to role-play and socialise. School eventually finished and most of us ended up across the bridge at Auckland University studying engineering, commerce (in my case) or computer degrees. Part of the fun was the group dynamicdepending on how you felt about your mates at the time you could either help/protect or hinder/betray them in game playI died many times over that period and occupied many strange bodies! The only constant was the capacity of the game to exorcise our aggressive impulses whilst awakening our imaginationswe skewered, power-blasted or roasted dozens of poor unsuspecting monsters (intent only on eating us, turning us into zombies, or imprisoning us as spirits in magical swords etc.). In retrospect we were probably engaged in some kind of late adolescent sand or play therapy. At the height of my addiction, in the middle of my second year at university, and with my interest in accountancy and economics waning rapidly, a group of us hooked up with likeminded university fantasy freaks and boarded a ferry for one of the gulf islands for a weekend of more realistic underground role playing. On the island were large tunnels built during the 1940s to protect Auckland against Japanese invasion. Id never heard of them before and had no idea what to expect from the approaching night underground as the group of third year Uni dungeon-masterswho would presumably be directing proceedingscalled it. Late in the afternoon, as the sun began to set over the land and ocean to the West of Motutapu Island, we piled into ancient jeeps and clapped out hippie mobiles and were driven to a wild spot overlooking the sea and only populated, as far as I could tell, by cows and sheep. We arrived equipped with warm clothes, tramping boots and a back pack. In the pack we had food, a good torch (with back up batteries), a copy of the rules (with short descriptions of the personality, magical powers etc. of our given character), a change of clothes and a sleeping
1

I found out later that role playing had been used by counselors in the US to provoke cathartic, healing responses from Vietnam vets.

bag. I remember feeling somewhat apprehensive as our group of six or seven (four of us were friends) stared into the huge concrete tunnel entrance that signaled the beginning of our adventure. Id chosen the character of a wizard (I wasnt much into the warrior characters) but had had virtually no time to memorise the spells contained in the scroll I possessed. Similarly, the flimsy paper dagger Id been given only added to my sense of vulnerability. When they told me just prior to entering the tunnels that: To cast a spell you have to drop your shield and dagger. I almost laughed. I remember feeling quite philosophical about the approaching night underground and resolved to dump the wizard persona a.s.a.p. and filch any decent (cardboard) broadsword I could lay my post-Merlin hands on. Standing on the threshold, with a deep bass monster choir rumbling up at us from deep within the tunnel, I began to regret not having scouted the countryside around this old military complex for a comfortable spot to sleep in the event of an early exit from the game. Wed been told that there were no pubs or homes in the vicinity and that wed basically be here in the wilderness until morning. I was convinced Id die earlyprobably slashed to pieces by some gigantic underground monsteraka, pimply-faced engineering or computer student dressed in some kind of gaudy paper mache monster outfit. The first dungeon pest turned out to be a gigantic worm that chanted its cheerless, bloodthirsty, and eminently inarticulate (and echoing), worm-song as it charged our pack of stunned elves, useless wizards and wannabe Aragons. We didnt know what hit usthere had to be seven engineering students under that paper mache contraption of a beastall of them chanting like theyd joined the police anti-riot squad (famous at the time for breaking up antiSpringbok protests with long-batons and group chants of Move! Move! Move!) As expected my scroll was next to useless, but to make matters worse the previously brave dwarves, men and elves beside me immediately dropped their torches out of fear at the vehemence of the onslaught. Given a jab from a worm in a flesh spot signaled the loss of a hitpoint by the referee accompanying us, I wasnt about to drop my shieldthe only protection I had against the little wooden paddles the creature flicked at us all throughout the mle. Every now and then the worm did something strange and un-wormlike. From deep inside its papery body I heard ill-humored and badly muffled exhortations, exclamations or commands such as: Did you count that? I got the bastard on his arm! Adjudicator! Did you see that? Of course we were also claiming multiple hits on the worm and given the ref (as I called him) could see very little himself in the cramped, dark conditions the whole episode descended into farce. Eventually we lost a young soon-to-be qualified doctor, after he broke the lens of his glasses during the first monster assault. Despite complaints from the wannabe beefcake hero-warriors of the group (many of whom were already puffed from the exertion being mostly computer students in the real world) I inherited the trainee doctors marvelous fake silver (that is plastic) sword. Given the seven or eight fellows behind the worm had pursued their acting roles with rather more earnestness than seemed appropriate I had a quick discussion with my three friends and we changed our game-plan somewhat. We complained to the ref and began threatening the bully-boy worm (Minotaur?) now preparing for a second assault at other end of our long, cold tunnel to hell. The plan was to make it/them as frightened as wed been during the initial charge.

So went the night. Most of the time we had no idea how far underground we were and how many more kilometers of tunnel (riddled it must be said with vampires, goblins, ghouls, etc.) we still had to explore. The dungeon masters had turned the place into a vast medieval labyrinthan achievement, it struck me at the time, worthy of a theatrical company. The tunnels themselves were long, dark and dampand around eight feet high with occasional stairways going up or down. Here and there the circular concrete tunnels were broken by entrances to eerie concrete storage bunkerssome quite elaborately decorated. The entire complex smelled of piss and was littered with rubbish here and thereparticularly near the entrance areas. Many of the bunkers contained large pools of monster-infested waterquite unhealthy places looking back. When dawn finally broke our group had been reduced to two friends and myselfthe last adventurers alive. The fellowship of the buggeredall we really wanted to do was find a good spot to sleep! Wed participated in some bizarre climax scene a magical ritual involving a revived skeletal Dark Lord who did and said things in his skeletal outfit that neither the referee, the actors, nor the increasingly tired adventurers, comprehended (obviously someone had written this scene whilst stoned on something or other). We were then blessed by his equally boney bishop and permitted to return to our kinfolk loaded down with bags of fake gold and silver coins, and, as I recall, more plastic jewels and magical items than we could poke a stick at! Despite the fun and games, something important happened that nightthis is sometimes how life works. Absurdity conceals depth. Padding my way through dew-wet grass past sleepy cows and meditative sheepobserving too the sun rise to the EastI realised that the symbols of the labyrinth and the Minotaur (given my recent reading they seemed to summarise my experience underground) were richer, denser more relevant to me than I perhaps wanted to acknowledge. At some level I suspected that an important part of me was trapped, psychologically, in just such an infernal place and with no easy exit. Obviously, Id been looking for more in fantasy role playing than mere entertainment, i.e. a good excuse to traipse about the place dressed in weird outfits. Although Id had fun the experience seemed curiously disappointingperhaps I was becoming aware that the escape hatch of immersion in fantastic literature (really neo-Romantic literature) was no escape hatch at all. I was about to fail university units for the first time, I was in the wrong course heading for the wrong vocation and I wasnt doing too well finding a girlfriend. (No wonder, I imagine some readers thinking, after all you did enjoy traipsing around an island in the role of a useless wizard!) The experience of being charged by half a dozen third year engineering thugs dressed up as a gigantic worm hadnt helped. Their use of intimidating crowd dispersal techniques borrowed from Aucklands police force during the anti-Springbok demonstrations had brought to my attention uncomfortable parallels between the real world and the so-called fantasy world Id been attempting to escape into. In truth Id seen fear in the eyes of some of my friends as the thugs had attacked us, and theyd shattered the glasses of one of the guys in our group and pushed others against the huge rusty hooks that lined some of the tunnels. In short, I was done with popular fictions warrior heroesViking, Trojan, Norse, sporting, military or otherwise. Instead, I gradually became more and more interested in antiheroes. Ive read only a handful of fantasy novels in the thirty years since. Never-the-less that sleepless night underground somehow fuelled a dormant passion for the humanitiesthough it would take seven years to act on that passion. Given I hadnt at that stage encountered the concept of the unconscious I had no words for the changes taking place in me. Interestingly,

although I had lost interest in beefcake heroes with cumbersome swords (or cricket bats!), I did not lose my interest in Gods and Goddesses and what they represented in the human psyche. What exactly is a God? By early 1984 Id also become interested in Sumerian, Babylonian and Egyptian mythologies. Nevertheless, it was I guess the sheer domesticity of the Gods in The Iliad and The Odyssey that most puzzled and fascinated me. Particularly the way they intervened in human affairs for personal reasons that would have been most unbecoming to the monotheistic deity Id heard so much about in my childhood and youth. In The Iliad B(ook V lines 28-39) we read: Grey-eyed Athena took the fierce war god, Ares, by the hand and said to him: Ares, bane of all mankind, crusted with blood, breacher of city-walls, why not allow the Trojans and Achaeans to fight alone? Let them contendwhy not? for glory Zeus may hold out to the winner, while we keep clear of the combatand his rage. Even as she spoke she led him from the battle and sat him down upon Scamander side. Now Danaans forced back the Trojan lines, and every captain killed his man. Both books are full of these powerful (but importantly not all powerful), shape-shifting presencesbeings that manifest as visions, dreams and the like or even possess mortals at crucial moments of the story. They are willful creatures, like humans, and often experience sympathies, prejudices etc. that act as motivations to meddle in mortal affairs. Interestingly, none of them ever got things entirely their own way, none (not even Zeus) had free reign to determine the progress of events in either the divine or the human worlds. Naturally, I began asking a range of questions about these gods. Most obviously who are these Gods? Did the Greeks and Romans really believe they existed as described in Homers works? If so why do we no longer routinely see, hear, talk with etc. such figures? What happened to them? There are many other questions besides, but the three listed above were perhaps the most crucial. The puzzle deepened when I began to realize through research that routine interactions with supernatural entities were fundamental to many historical and contemporary indigenous cultures. The Greek Gods were but one example of a global, trans-historical polytheistic and animistic psycho-spiritual paradigm. Unlike many of the Celtic deities whose characters and stories had been obscured by historical events, in The Iliad, The Odyssey and other ancient Greek, Roman and Ancient NearEastern texts the deities were on display in all their archaic glory and mystery. I have to confess I soon fell in love with those sometimes gaudy, impetuous, opinionated, querulous, deities. Like all lovers I had no time for doubters and naysayers with their humourless and colourless hyperrationalist twentieth century scientific (structuralist, Marxist, post-structuralist, classical psychoanalytic, etc.) explanations for the Gods.

I guess if they really existed I was keen to meet oneperhaps whilst walking in a local forest as when Hermes, in a matter of fact sort of way, approached Odysseus as he threaded his way through the enchanted glades that led to the witchs castle in Book X of The Odyssey: Where are you off to now, my poor fellow, he said wandering alone in the wilds in unknown country, with your friends there in Circes house penned like pigs in their crowded sties?2 Or perhaps Athena might visit me, as she did Odysseus son Telemachus, who was sleepless with anxiety about the fate of his father (Book XV). In the text she gives him advice by way of a rather long but detailed monologue that appears in the text as follows: The bright-eyed Goddess came up to his bed. Telemachus, she said, it is wrong of you to linger abroad and leave your property unguarded with such a rabble in the place. They might well share out and eat up all you have There have certainly been times in my life when it would have been nice to hand over the burden of making life decisions to a bright-eyed woman of the dream world. However, we moderns are disposed to claim all such interventions as our ownas workings of the unconscious mind perhaps. But there was no word for the unconscious in the Ancient world. I wanted to know whether these decision making moments were really understood among the Greeks etc. as discussions between Gods and mortals, or whether Homer had merely presented them as such for literary purposes. One of the first books I consulted to answer this kind of question was The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. I still have my original copy from the mid-1980sit is covered in black tape and scarred with the thumbprints and musings of my younger self but I treasure it. In it he theorises an evolution from bicameral consciousness to something like modern individualist consciousness during the 2nd millennium BCEa time, we note, of general political and social crisis for Mesopotamian and Mediterranean civilisations. Interestingly, Jaynes contrasts the role of the Gods in The Iliad with their role in The Odyssey suggesting that in the latter they have less of a say, that, in essence, Odysseus is closer to the consciousness of modern man: Odysseus of the many devices is the hero of the new mentality of how to get along in a ruined and god-weakened world.3 With The Iliad, on the other hand, he argues that the Gods are still strong and very much in control of proceedings products of an intact bicameral civilisation. Nevertheless, as is evident from the two examples discussed abovei.e. the interventions of Hermes and Athena in Books X and XV of the Odysseythe bicameral mind had not vanished entirely from the world described in the Odyssey, rather, according to Jaynes, it was in the process of breakdown. From a technical perspective he notes a change in the types of words used to describe the interior world of individualsin particular a shift from mere observation of external action (part of what he calls the Objective or Bicameral stage proper) to awareness of ones own subjective experience of things (what he calls the Internal Phase when the Bicameral mind begins to break down). He states for example that in the shift over from The Iliad to The
2 3

Homer, The Odyssey, p.163, Penguin Classics, Trans. E.V.Rieu, 1965. Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind , p.273.

Odyssey: [there is] a very definite rise in the frequency of references to phrenes (the lungs), noos (to see) and psyche (to breathe), and a striking drop in the use of the word thumos (relating to the external actions of others). Though the argument is complicated and linked to the fact that Jaynes relates the External Phase to a tendency to hallucinate Gods, he concludes that these changes in word usage represent the beginnings of a poetry of personal conscious expression. He also notes other changes as we move from The Iliad to The Odyssey, e.g. increased spatial interiority, increased spatiality of time, an increase in the ratio of abstract terms to concrete terms and also increased self-referential statements. In regard to the new mentality of The Odyssey Jaynes concludes: the whole long song is an odyssey towards subjective identity and its triumphant acknowledgement out of the hallucinatory enslavements of the past. More hauntingly he raises the question as why the Muses should be singing their own downfall, their own fading away into subjective thought. I dont know that I completely agree with Jaynes argument, but the important feature of it is its attempt to locate the death of the polytheistic deities (associated with what he calls the bicameral mind) to particular historical epochs, events, texts and so on. Something happened to the way in which people perceived the world that somehow erased the Gods from consciousness. Whether it was a positive development or not is another question entirely, as is the question of whether they remain buried somewhere in our psychophysiology. Either way, the consequences of their eventual passing were enormous for literature since the changeover roughly corresponds with the development of complex writing technologies among Mesopotamian, Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean peoples. Although Ive yet to meet a God face to face, so far as I know, my long-term acquaintance with Jungian psychology, as discussed elsewhere in this book, has tuned me to certain archetypal unconscious entities that frequently seem to turn up in my poems, stories and songs. It is for this reason that I remain fascinated by ancient mythologies and increasingly feel that the public loss of these presences may well be a central reason for some of the major imbalances afoot in the contemporary world. I have before me as I write three poetry collections based upon retellings of the ancient Greek and Roman myths found in Ovids Metamorphoses.4 Such contemporary retellings are proof of the timelessness, forgive the clich, of these ancient polytheistic narratives. In one of the poems, Creation/ Four Ages/ Flood which is based upon a story in Ovids text, Ted Hughes perhaps speaks for an impulse in many a labyrinth ensnared modern when he writes: I call on the supernatural powers/ Who first invented/ These transmogrifications/ In the stuff of life./ You did it for your own amusement./ Descend again, be pleased to reanimate/ This revival of those marvels. What do you think Hermes? Is he onto something?

After Ovid: New Metamorpohosis edited by Michael Hoffman and James Lasdun; Tales from Ovid by Ted Hughes, and Metamorphoses by Dianne Fahey.

Author Bio (as at April 2013)

Dr. Ian Irvine (Hobson) is an Australian-based poet/lyricist, writer and non-fiction writer. His work has featured in publications as diverse as Humanitas (USA), The Antigonish Review (Canada), Tears in the Fence (UK), Linq (Australia) and Takahe (NZ), as well as in a number of Australian national poetry anthologies: Best Australian Poems 2005 (Black Ink Books) and Agenda: Australian Edition, 2005. He is the author of three books and co-editor of three journals and currently teaches in the Professional Writing and Editing program at BRIT (Bendigo, Australia) as well as the same program at Victoria University, St. Albans, Melbourne. He has also taught history and social theory at La Trobe University (Bendigo, Australia) and holds a PhD for his work on creative, normative and dysfunctional forms of alienation and morbid ennui.