Why Odysseus Came Home Dressed Like a Stranger, by Henry Abramovitch

The Odyssey is one of the most thrilling stories ever composed. The very word for a journey of daring and endurance is embodied in its name, an odyssey. Memorable episodes have left their imprint on the European cultures and languages and within the human psyche: sirens, the Trojan horse, lotus eaters, caught between Scylla and Charybdis, rosy fingers of dawn, descent to the underworld, and more.

Homecoming and its difficulties are the unifying themes of Homer’s epic. In the first half of the epic, Odysseus has all his memorable adventures. The rest of the master poem takes place on Odysseus’ home isle of Ithaca. What is most puzzling is that when Odysseus finally does arrive, he is asleep and unconscious. When he awakes, he does not recognize where he is. Home is strange. His beloved Ithaca is disguised. As he struggles to regain home, he appears as a stranger in his own land, in the guise of a ragged old beggar man. When asked, “Who are you? Where do you come from?” he lies, deceives, and confabulates. One would expect a majestic, returning hero to reveal himself in homecoming glory, but Odysseus does not. Even after he does reveal himself to his son, nurse, swineherd, and wife, in turn, he almost cruelly hides his identity from his pining, elderly father, Laertes. Why does Odysseus come home deliberately disguising himself as a stranger?

The reason given within the Odyssey for Odysseus’ deception is self-protection. Greedy suitors have invaded Odysseus’ house and plan to force his wife to marry one of them. They are actively conspiring to kill his son, Telemachos, the one male threat to their plot. If Laertes’ son was discovered, undisguised, those recklessly greedy young men might well murder him. This is reason he gives his son, nurse, and swineherd, but we know that Odysseus is an ever-crafty, unreliable, super-trickster. In Homer, Odysseus is described as polytropos, a man of many plans and deceits—cunning, resourceful, resilient, never at a loss. For a polytropos, can one ever take his reason at face value? Are there not deeper reasons that connect homecoming with disguise?

Surprisingly, many traditions link disguise and homecoming. In the Indian epic, the Mahabharata, the five Pandava brothers must spend an entire year in disguise before they are allowed to return home. In the Bible, the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Judah, and Tamar, as well as David, all involve the theme of disguise, trickery, and exile/homecoming. Superman is a modern superhero whose life story is also based on the double identity as Superman and Clark Kent. It is played out against the impossibility of homecoming since Superman’s native world was destroyed. At the last moment, his father rocketed him to safety. Significantly, the one thing that endangers Superman’s magical powers and life force is kryptonite, the remnant of his annihilated homeland. For exiles who have remade themselves into a powerful new assimilated identity, any contact with the lost home can be undermining, even deadly. These Indian, Biblical, Greek, and superhero stories suggest there does exist an archetypal pattern involving danger, disguise, and homecoming.

The Odyssey is the sequel to the Iliad where Odysseus first appears. The Iliad is the seemingly endless epic struggle between the Trojans and the Greeks. As an epic, the Iliad is based on the values of the first half of life, what Homer called kleos, lasting fame and heroic glory. For warriors, glory matters most. Within that world of kleos, there is no possibility of a real homecoming. The end of one war is only the prelude to the next, as Odysseus himself describes in one of his false cover stories. Perhaps that is why The Iliad ends with the struggle for Troy unresolved, reflecting the emotional reality of the warrior’s masculine identity that is never resolved. A young masculine hero needs to prove and reprove that he is a “real man” over and over. The Iliad’s ending may be understood as a subtle moral critique of the hero myth. Heroic values take one away from home, but they cannot bring one back. It is impossible to come home solely through the masculine values of bravery, strength, and courage. Ironically, only in the Odyssey does one learn that it is not courage or kleos that brings victory to the Greeks but Odysseus’ cunning.

Although the epic is named for Odysseus, he does not make his actual debut until the fifth book of the Odyssey. His fame, however, goes before him. Helen, (whose beauty triggered the Trojan War) makes the most successful (and improbable) homecoming. When Odysseus’ son comes looking for word of his father, she slips her husband and Odysseus’ son, Telemachus, an ancient, tranquilizing wine, drugged with an herb that banishes all care and sorrow. She then tells of how she met Odysseus inside the walls of Troy, covered with wounds and bruises and dressed in rags, but he was really a spy in disguise. (Ironically, this disguise is very similar to how Odysseus will arrive at Ithaca.) Only Helen recognized him. But Odysseus was too cunning for her. He forced her to swear a solemn oath not to betray him until he had returned safely to his own camp. Helen washed, anointed, and gave him new clothes, foreshadowing the process of renewal of his persona in his subsequent homecoming.

Helen’s husband, Menelaus, then tells the story of how Odysseus invented an enormous hollow horse large enough to conceal a Greek fighting force that was brought to the gates of Troy as a “gift from the gods.” The Trojans, uncertain whether the horse is Greek or Divine, sent Helen to examine the horse. Helen, a sophisticated tricksteress in her own right, devises a test based on a fighting man’s yearning for wife and home. She walks round the wooden structure and imitates the voice of the wives of each Greek hiding inside. As each armed man is about to respond to Helen’s impersonation, Odysseus clamps shut their mouth and saves them all from premature exposure. Odysseus’ role is to suppress those nostalgic feelings that, if expressed at the wrong time, can be fatal for the warrior.

The Jungian perspective on Odysseus usually sees him as an irrepressible trickster-warrior who must encounter the feminine. Without the help of his lover-goddesses, first Calypso and then Circe, Odysseus would have never come home but died the death of a lonely refugee. The first glimpse the epic gives of Odysseus on the isle of the goddess Calypso, with whom he has lived for seven years, stridently sets the theme. He is sitting on the seashore weeping, suffering severe nostalgia. Nostalgia, “a painful yearning for home,” is a condition first used to describe Swiss exiles who suffered torment because they were far from their mountain homeland. A yearning for home, we now know, is a pan-human condition. Homesickness reflects person’s longing for a certain existential space that bears the imprint of home. The Chinese poet Li Po gives exquisite expression to this longing. His poem begins:

Before my bed there is bright moonlight

           So that it seems like frost on the ground:

Then concludes:

Lifting my head I watch the bright moon,

Lowering my head I dream that I’m home.

The phrase “I dream that I’m home” touches the soul of anyone on the road, whether traveler, migrant, exile, or refugee. We are always dreaming of home (even sometimes when we are at home).

Home is not only a physical location but also a cluster of feelings associated with a specific place. These feelings may include a participation mystique attachment to nature, soil, childhood, customs, community, a way of thinking, dress, food, and so on. Wittgenstein might argue that it is difficult to say clearly what home is exactly, yet one can point to it. Home resembles the “home base” in a children’s game, a place of absolute safety where no harm can touch us. It is like “home plate” in baseball, the place where we start from and where we seek to go: our origin and our destination, from our first home in mother’s womb to the last home on Mother Earth. A haiku by that famous Japanese wanderer, Basho, expresses the bonding between origin and homecoming. The haiku begins:

Coming home at last

At the end of the year

Then concludes:

           I wept to find

My old umbilical cord.

At his Tower in Bollingen, Jung felt “in midst of my true life, I am most deeply myself.” Home provides a natural container for the Self. When I am feeling most grounded, most centered, most understood, most at peace, most “at home,” there is home. The German language has an especially rich vocabulary concerning relationship to home: heimat, means home or homeland but really much more; heimatliebe, love for home; heimattreue, being true to home/homeland; heimatgefühl, feeling of attachment to home; and heimatort, place where ancestors became citizen. The Chinese ideogram for home is said to represent a roof over a pig, since nothing is at home as a pig in its sty. We are most ourselves when we are most at home.

Archetypal experience of home includes the security, protection, nest warmth, and the food base of the mother, as well as the boundaried, division of inner and outer, belonging to the father. This tension between these masculine and feminine aspects of home is well expressed in a poem by Robert Frost. A farmer’s wife tells her husband that a wayward hired hand has come home to die. The farmer responds, “It all depends on what you mean by home.” He continues with what is one of Frost’s most famous lines:

Home is the place where, when you have to go there,

They have to take you in.

The farmer’s view epitomizes a masculine view of home as a necessary, ultimate refuge. It is the home of last resort, where duty and logos reign. His wife, speaking in the feminine voice, counters that home is “Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.” Home is one’s emotional birthright, the realm of unconditionally accepting eros. As the seat of the Self, home is therefore strongly protecting and accepting, requiring and nurturing, strong walls around the warmth of the hearth. It is intensely masculine and profoundly feminine. For home, or indeed a therapeutic space, to work, all these opposites need to be held together well.

The dilemma arises when we leave home. How do we hold on to “home” when we leave it? We carry within us an internal “home image,” which links and roots us in home while we are away. Some cultures use a special ceremony to permanently (through ritual) root a person in their home soil. The Betsimisaraka are a people who live in the rainforest of the east coast of Madagascar. After birth, the placental expulsion, or afterbirth, is buried immediately adjacent to their very simple hut (made entirely from the “Traveler’s Plant”): one side for girls, the other for boys. The placenta, which had served as the baby’s first home, is buried into the earth, the domain of the powerful ancestors. It provides an existential grounding for the person’s soul. The Betsimisaraka claim that not to bury the afterbirth risks madness, a condition they conceptualize as ungrounded homelessness. These Malagasy people believe that to forget or be detached from the homeland is a kind of madness. Yet, it is just such an anti-nostalgic “homenesia,” or amnesia for home, that threatens Odysseus and his men again and again during their circuitous voyage. The men who eat of the lotus are like drug addicts who forget where they are going and where they have come from and become rooted in the homelessness of the present. The madness of home-forgetting recurs repeatedly in the Odyssey. When Circe’s magic turns men into pigs, Odysseus forgets his destination for a full year, and again, for even longer, when seduced by the charming Calypso. These stories of seduction reveal the ever-present danger concerning homecoming, namely, that settling into a cozy existence, one forgets there is a home to come home to.

Once a homecomer does return, he faces a double anxiety. He yearns to return to the exact home he had left behind, crystallized in an idealized image of home. Yet, inevitably, he will find that home has changed. How the homecomer copes with those home changes will largely determine the success of the fundamental project of returning home. In the background, there is a silent terror that the home he knew is gone: distorted, betrayed, or even lost forever. No wonder the process of homecoming can be so long and complicated, as it was for Odysseus.

One such well-known complication is reverse culture shock. Most people expect to feel culture shock when they travel to strange locations, but few expect to feel strange when they return home, as Odysseus does. It is doubly disorienting because the unexpected sense of strangeness is embedded in an expectation of familiarity. I expect to feel at home, but I do not. The difficulty of reverse culture shock in the process of homecoming is poignantly illustrated in the tragic story of Honi, a Talmudic Rip van Winkle. The story begins that one day, Honi saw a man planting a carob tree:

“How many years does it take for this tree to bear fruit?” he asked the man.

“Seventy years.”

“Do you think you will live seventy more years?”

The man replied, “I found a world containing carob trees, and just as my ancestors planted those trees for me, so too will I plant them for my descendants.”

Honi sat down and drowsiness overcame him and he fell asleep. Some rocks rose to cover him, and he became hidden from sight.

He slept for seventy years, and when he woke up, he saw what looked to be the same man picking fruit from the carob tree he had planted.

Honi asked him, “Are you the man who planted this tree?”

“No, I am his grandson.”

Honi said, “I must have slept for seventy years.”

He went to his home village and asked, “Is the son of Honi still alive?”

He was told him, “His son is no longer alive, but his grandson is.”

He said to them, “I am Honi.” They didn’t believe him.

He left and went to the house of study (beit hamidrash) where he heard a rabbi speaking about his wisdom and teachings.

Honi said to them, “I am Honi.”

They did not believe him and did not treat him with the honor and respect due him.

Honi became anguished. He prayed for death and died.

The editor adds: hence the saying, “either friendship or death.” Honi was not able to fight his way past these strangers who had taken over his home. Left on the outside, looking in, his life lost its meaning. From this perspective, one can understand Odysseus’ determi nation to fight his way home.

Claire Cooper Marcus who wrote an imaginative and insightful book, House as a Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home, tells how she came to write the book. Her sudden divorce left her feeling a “profound degree of insecurity, pain, grief, and anger, all rolled into one,” which profoundly changed her experience of her own home. She became terrified that someone would break in and kill her and her children. She had to symbolically fight her way through it and retake home. Once she had succeeded, home again became a place that “can protect, heal, and restore us, express who we are now, and over time, help us to become who we are meant to be.

It is important to recall why Odysseus’ return sea voyage took so long. Odysseus and his crew arrived at the island of the one-eyed Cyclops, where one of these giants devoured six of Odysseus’ men. To save himself and the rest of his men, Odysseus tricked the man-eating monster into drinking sufficient wine until he was dead drunk, rather like Laius or Lot. With great passion, Odysseus drove a fire-hardened stake deep into the giant’s eye, blinding him. There is a comic element. Odysseus had introduced himself as “No one,” so when the blinded giant awoke, he cried out, “No one has blinded me.” Brutality and burlesque. Once Odysseus escaped, he revealed his true name to the Cyclops in a misguided bravado of kleos. For this hubris, Odysseus paid dearly. The blinded Cyclops prayed to his father, Poseidon, Lord of the Waters, to avenge the wound, so that Odysseus would never return home, or if he did, it would be without any ship or any crew companions. For the entire homeward journey, Odysseus had to sail and struggle against this curse.

From a symbolic perspective, Odysseus’ act can be seen as a sin against consciousness (symbolized by the eye) and in violation of the collective unconscious (symbolized by the sea). It is Odysseus’ own lack of consciousness that repeatedly prevents him from returning to Ithaca. When almost in sight of home, he falls asleep, allowing his greedy men to open the bag of winds and send their ship into swift reverse. At two other times, a similar sleepy unconsciousness allowed his men to violate the sacred order by pillaging or by eating the sacred cattle of the Sun. Odysseus’ men act like an autonomous, impulsive complex, unconstrained by ego awareness. Only after his last total shipwreck, where he has washed up alone and told his story, does he fall into a different and deepening sleep.

There are other shadow homecomings that haunt Odysseus. The most horrific is Agamemnon’s. Agamemnon, the commander-in-chief of the victorious Greeks, returns, only to be murdered by his wife and her lover. Instead of a place of primal safety, home for Agamemnon is the most dangerous place on earth. His wife is waiting for him, not with an embrace, but a dagger. How does Odysseus know that his Penelope is not waiting to do the same?

The reader knows that Penelope is the embodiment of a faithful wife, weaving by day and unweaving by night to keep her marriage safe. But Penelope herself has a dilemma. Penelope’s conflict with the suitors (and herself) is whether she is an aguna. An aguna, in Jewish tradition, is a woman whose husband has disappeared without firm evidence that he is definitely dead and literally means “a woman chained to her marriage.” She is forbidden to divorce, mourn, or remarry. The aguna is, therefore, someone in marital limbo. Civil law allows one to eventually declare a missing spouse legally “dead” and free an aguna. Such an option does not exist in Jewish religious law.

Penelope is an aguna; Odysseus is MIA, missing-in-action. MIA families also live in agonizing limbo of perennial anxiety of homecoming. Will he come home or not? Will I never know his fate? To mourn the missing father/spouse/brother/son is to betray him and hope; not to mourn is to live a life on permanent hold, to be a symbolic, if not a literal, aguna. Those who never come home represent a serious, collective danger. These unincorporated dead become hungry, wandering, restless ghosts, who pose a symbolic danger to the social order. Their unresolved fates, like those of Odysseus’ shipmates, represent a chaotic destructive force from the collective unconscious. They pursue the memories of the living, demanding recognition, demanding their share, and if forgotten, seeking revenge.

The Betsimisaraka, mentioned above, understand this dilemma well. They carve a simple wooden sculpture in the shape of a “standing man” for those whose bodies are never found. These statues stand for the bones of the deceased and provide their spirit a place to reside where they may be nurtured and contacted by the living. In this context, one can understand the importance of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. These massive constructions serve as repositories not only for the bones of “soldiers known only to God” but also for their wandering souls. These Tombs gives them a space to which they may come home and so let themselves, and us, rest in peace.

When Odysseus reveals his husband-identity to his wife, Penelope, one would expect Penelope to rush over to welcome her long-absent husband. She does not. Instead, she is frozen, numb, silent, sitting opposite him, unmoving. The scene depicts what I call the Martin Guerre dilemma, based on an extraordinary case of disguise in 16th century France and made into the celebrated movie, “The Return of Martin Guerre.  A man, calling himself Martin Guerre, returns from the wars and is accepted by Martin Guerre’s wife. They even have two children together. Ultimately, doubts appear about his identity, and the man is charged with fraud as an imposter. His trial continues, until, at the very last minute, the real Martin Guerre dramatically appears, exposing the counterfeit husband. One of the poignant questions is at what point did Martin Guerre’s wife know that the imposter was a fraud, especially since the imposter was a more sensitive and loving husband than her original husband, who was more than a bit of a brute. The film, subtly, replays Penelope’s dilemma: How can a wife know if the man who returns from the wars in those filthy rags is really her lost love or a sophisticated fraudster? The Martin Guerre dilemma is not limited to romantic reconciliations. It may apply to any situation whenever recognition is at risk.

After this first meeting, Odysseus avoids his wife. Instead, he plans new deceptions in order to gain time before the inevitable revenge attack by the relatives of the massacred suitors. Odysseus, bathed, oiled, and dressed, as he had with Helen, now reemerges in his restored persona, “looking more like a god than a man.” He confronts his wife again. Still she does not respond. Odysseus calls her an unfeeling woman, with a heart of steel. In frustration, he asks his old nurse to prepare a bed for him to sleep alone. His request gives Penelope her chance to resolve the Martin Guerre paradox.

Penelope, trickster in her own right, needs to discover if this man knows secrets known only to her husband. Penelope, casually, asks the old nurse to make up their marriage bed for Odysseus outside the bedchamber. The bed, handcrafted by Odysseus out of a living olive tree, cannot be moved. Only Odysseus knows this unmovable secret. How does he respond? Odysseus, for the first and only time in the entire epic, loses his cool. He becomes angry, claiming no living man can move such a bed. Why did Odysseus, normally so restrained, become enraged? The living marriage bed was a crucial part of Odysseus’ home image, which sustained him during those years of wandering homelessness. To lose the bed is to lose the sacred center of their home, to have no wife and home to return to. Odysseus, knowing the bed secret, regains his wife, his home, and his identity. Penelope melts. She rushes to her husband and confesses she feared he was an imposter. Odysseus, the great trickster, is tricked by his own trickster wife, into revealing who he really is.

One might think that this moment of unmasking brings the Odyssey to its natural endings. But there is one more, exquisitely painful, episode of homecoming anxiety. Odysseus visits his aged father and finds him pruning trees in the country. He wonders if his father will know him when he sees him. When he spies his father, Odysseus, with tears in his eyes, wonders what should he do? Should he throw his arms around him, kiss and tell him the whole story of his homecoming or not? Odysseus, too, in is in the Martin Guerre dilemma. He decides to pretend to be someone else. This episode has puzzled readers and scholars alike who have difficulty understanding Odysseus’ seemingly cruel deception. Yet it makes sense within the logic of disguise as a pathway to homecoming. Only if Odysseus is masked can he be unmasked. Consider the shadow scenario. Odysseus rushes up to the father, who refuses to believe the embracing one is his returning son. Eventually, he does say to his father, “I am the man you are looking for.” He reveals the thigh wound and the names of the trees promised to him in childhood as the indisputable signs of his true identity.

After he has come home, reunited with son, wife, and father, Odysseus must perform one final act of penance to reconcile with angry Poseidon. On his voyage to the Underworld, the prophet Tiresias commanded him to take an oar on his shoulder from his ship and to walk inland until a person will ask, “Why are you carrying a winnowing paddle?” At that exact spot in a land that knows nothing of the sea, or sea salt, Odysseus must build a Temple to the Lord of the Waters and offer him sacrifices. Then his trials will be over, and he can come home to a comfortable old age and an easy death.

How can one understand this strange penance? Odysseus’ deliberate blinding the Sea God’s son in symbolic terms can be seen as destructive act toward consciousness. His actions with the oar can be therefore understood as representing an expansion of consciousness. He brings Poseidon-like energy into a new territory of the psyche. Odysseus’ last odyssey brings together not only land and sea but also surface and depth, knowing and unknowing, and even sin and forgiveness. Having gone so far into unknown territory, he can finally come home.

From Why Odysseus Came Home as a Stranger and Other Puzzling Moments in the Life of Buddha, Socrates, Jesus, Abraham, and Other Great Individuals,

by Henry Abramovitch
 

Henry Abramovitch is a teaching analyst and the founding president of the Israel Institute of Jungian Analysis in honor of Erich Neumann. He is Professor Emeritus at Tel Aviv University and past president of the Israel Anthropology Association. He is author of Brothers & Sisters: Myth & Reality, Why Odysseus Came Home as a Stranger, and Panic Attacks in Pistachio, a detective story. He has contributed numerous essays and has co-authored a series of plays with Murray Stein, including The Analyst and the Rabbi, Speaking of Friendship, and Eranos, all available on YouTube. A native of Montreal, he lives and practices in Jerusalem.