Finding Our Way
Posted: October 30, 2026 Filed under: Child Centered Activities Leave a comment
“Telemachus,” said Athena, “if you have indeed one drop of your father’s blood in you or one portion of his spirit, if you are as he was – one ready to fulfill both word and work, your voyage shall not be in vain. If you are different from what he was, I have no hope that you will accomplish your desire. But I have seen in you something of the wisdom and courage of Odysseus.”
Telemachus, the son, went in search of his father, while the father was wandering, struggling to return home – both guided by the Goddess Athena. Thus begins one of the great epics of world literature.
The Adventures of Odysseus and the Tale of Troy, a retelling of the Odyssey was assigned by the Magister, and I have been reading along with my son. This telling was written by Padraic Colum, a leading figure of the Irish Literary Renaissance, who ranks among the many who have retold this foundational tale. Virgil reworked the story to chart the founding of Rome. Dante reimagined it, placing Odysseus damned in the Eighth Circle of Hell, where he recounts sailing past the Pillars of Hercules to his doom. Tennyson and James Joyce created their own masterpieces inspired by it, while Nikos Kazantzakis, the modern Greek poet, penned 33,333 lines detailing an Odysseus grown bored with Ithaca who took to the open road once more.
In cinema, Kirk Douglas starred in a 1954 adaptation – the highest grossing film in Italy that year. The Coen Brothers changed the road home to Depression-era Mississippi. Recently a three-hour IMAX blockbuster grossed over $1 Billion worldwide. Fascination with the Odyssey never lets up.
With Padraic Colum’s book in hand, my son and I embarked on a homeschool field trip. We went to the movies. Three hours for an R-rated film is no small undertaking. I wondered how my son would hold up.
Around the two-hour mark, after great battles and killing, I whispered, “We can leave if this is too much.”
My son replied, “I will let you know….”
He watched the entire film, Odysseus slaying the suitors, Telemachus assuming the throne. Walking to the car afterward, he asked, “Is that story based on real life?” I explained the history of Late Bronze Age Troy, introduced the word “epic” and together we explored myth, poetry, and a civilization’s collapse.
A father and son at the end of the Late Bronze Age speak directly to a father and son at the dawn of the post-literate age. Across 3,226 years, we find ourselves navigating a similar path.
INNER & OUTER
What does it mean to find our way home when the world we know is coming apart? Odysseus must recover not only his kingdom but himself. Telemachus must become a man in a world that has lost its bearings. I must prepare my own son for a rapidly changing future that no one can predict. The Odyssey suggests that the way forward depends on something more than strength, intelligence, or the will to prevail.
The Odyssey can be read simply as a travel adventure, across storm-tossed seas. More profoundly, it is an odyssey across the ocean of the human soul – everyone’s internal journey through trial and conflict to find their solitude of conscience.
Mateus Soares de Azevedo, writing at the Sacred Web, describes the struggle to embrace the human soul:
“…monsters and enchanted islands symbolize the phantoms of pride, passion, vice, and forgetfulness, against which the soul struggles to avoid losing itself. The decisive battle to reclaim our place in the world – our Ithaca – demands, apart from necessary force, the wisdom of patience and timing, the austerity of detachment, and the moral courage to become ‘Nobody’.”
Through the lens of the Perennial Philosophy, Odysseus’s decade-long return is a universal allegory of inner transformation, a jihad al-akbar, the ‘greater holy war’, as Sufi tradition terms it. The soul’s return to its divine source demands that one confront and conquer the ego, caprice, and worldly desires. Amidst the stormy ocean which is life, there are alluring islands of contentment, but the homecoming must go on through trials and purification.
Allegorical stages of Odysseus’s homecoming are outlined in Homer, Poet of ‘Maya’, an essay by Charles Upton.
- Lotus Eaters: A metaphor for addiction, this is the “World Trance” where sensory distraction blinds the seeker to spiritual reality. Ignorance is not bliss but stagnation.
- The Cyclops (Polyphemus): Polyphemus represents the dawn of awakening consciousness. His single eye – like Shiva’s third eye – is raw volatile energy. Matthew 6:22 reads, “The light of the body is the eye. If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” The Cyclops is the struggle to channel that light. Odysseus claims he is “Nobody” – the self-annihilation required for wisdom – but after blinding the Cyclops, he shouts out his true name, asserting his ego, and incurs Poseidon’s wrath. He loses everything.
- The Underworld (Nekuia): Odysseus sails to the western edge of the world, to the underworld, where he offers libations and invokes the blind seer Tiresias. Tiresias – having lived both as man and woman – transcends earthly duality. Blind to worldly illusion, like Homer himself, Tiresias advises Odysseus on the Path while warning of the fate of those who fail: “division and death, in a world woven on nothing but division and death, the world of the double cloak.”
- The Sirens, Scylla, and Charybdis: The Sirens embody seductive spiritual beauty that overwhelms mortals not centered. Charybdis, the whirlpool, symbolizes the engulfing cycle of samsara – birth, death, and multiplicity. Scylla, the multi-headed sea monster, represents painful choice among competing material demands. Following the counsel of Circe, the divine sorceress, Odysseus chooses Scylla over Charybdis although it costs him more men.
The women who shape Odysseus’s journey all weave and the loom becomes a symbol of how a life’s story takes shape. The foundational threads of the epic are woven into rich fabric by these women:
Helen of Troy – “the face that launched a thousand ships” – embodies the worldly allure that deceives men, the catalyst of conflict. She weaves a double purple cloak depicting the Trojan and Achaean conflict, which is dualism and worldly power. But she becomes a nurturer. Back home in Sparta, after the war, when Telemachus visits and memories bring grief, she slips an Egyptian drug into the wine of the weeping King Menelaus and his men. Composed and seeing clearly, Helen consoles the men. She seems no longer afflicted by the worldly attraction that led her to Troy.
Penelope weaves a burial shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes. Her own cunning is to unweave at night what is woven by day. Helen’s cloak celebrates a King’s dominance, while Penelope’s shroud acknowledges the King’s death. Helen and Penelope are opposites. Penelope is the destination and goal of the reunited whole. Her enduring symbol is the marriage bed, which Odysseus built around a living olive tree, sacred to Athena, and rooted deep into the ground. Only the two of them know the bed cannot be moved, and so this symbol of constancy, loyalty and stability proves to Penelope that her husband has, at last, returned.
Circe is weaving and singing when the crew land on her island. She transforms the sailors into pigs – a symbol of their surrender to the lower passions. But Odysseus resists her charms and she is transformed: first restoring his crew back into human form, and then counseling him on how to complete his homecoming.
Calypso, a weaver, is daughter of the Titan Atlas, thus a goddess. She offers Odysseus immortal life. The price, however, is to lose his earthly identity and family. He spends seven years with her, until – urged by Zeus – she reluctantly helps Odysseus build a simple raft. She protests the double standard: the male gods take mortal lovers while the goddesses cannot, but she relents. A threat to the male world, Calypso is both enchantress and the one who enables Odysseus’s homecoming. Both Circe and Calypso are threats who become his guides. He sets sail.
Athena is the goddess of wisdom, war, and weaving who guides both father and son. She masterminds the Trojan Horse ruse, and directs Odysseus’s homecoming. Disguised as Mentor, a trusted family friend, she appears before Telemachus, inspiring him to confront the suitors and seek his father. In a patriarchal heroic age, it is the divine feminine that restores order, justice, and harmony.
While Odysseus wanders, Telemachus follows his own coming of age passage. Visiting kings Nestor and Menelaus, feasting at their high tables, he is told that his father lives, held on Calypso’s island, but gains no more information. His journey brings insight into how a leader acts, speaks, and commands respect. He learns diplomacy, evades a suitor ambush, and returns home transformed.
Odysseus arrives on Ithaca stripped bare: his fleet, crew, and spoils of war gone, and his royal palace overrun by suitors biding their time until they can marry his wife. The suitors have usurped the political order, consumed without accountability, and treated his home as their private possession. Disguised as a beggar, dressed in rags, he re-enters his home. Guided by the feminine, he must defeat the suitors to reclaim his home, which represents his world.
These weaving women – both mortal and divine – hold together the world Odysseus seeks. Their work – to weave, preserve, counsel, remember and discern – is what supports and makes possible the heroic quest. And the home to which the hero returns is not merely a place to possess or defend, but a fabric of relationships that must continually be maintained.
Athena could reunite one family and mend its fabric, but she alone could not keep the civilization from collapse.
FACING THE DARK AGE
Odysseus was wandering and Telemachus came of age during the Late Bronze Age, which came to a catastrophic end. Palace economies were burned, abandoned, and destroyed. Trade routes were severed. Linear B writing vanished, and centralized authority dissolved, plunging the Mediterranean into centuries of darkness.
As a Boomer raising a Zoomer, I watch our own world fracture. The post-World War II order built on trust and alliances gives way to multipolar instability: a world where might makes right, a world on fire. Artificial Intelligence inspires awe and anxiety, some calculating the probability of existentially catastrophic outcomes. Our children, nicknamed the “Anxious Generation,” grow up tethered to screens, soaked in digital noise, promised technological wonders of flying cars and life on Mars.
The post-war era – the Great American future – was built on unprecedented prosperity, cheap energy, and institutional trust. That legacy is now strained by wealth concentration, political polarization, hyper-individualism, and a warming climate.
How is a father to prepare his son for the future?
Anacyclosis (ἀνακύκλωσις) is a word that means, literally, “turning around in a cycle.” Polybius, a Greek historian, used the word to describe a cyclical succession of constitutional governments, shifting from public-minded to self-serving, from noble to corrupt.
The cycle begins with a wise monarch ruling for the common good. Hereditary succession, however, leads to greed and arrogance, which is tyranny. Leading citizens rebel, forming an aristocracy, the benign rule by the few. But over time, civic virtue loses to the pursuit of wealth and status, power among the few, creating oligarchy. The oppressed rise up and overthrow the oligarchs, seeking democracy, until the rule of law fails, mob rule follows and then might makes right. The authoritarian strongman ascends, providing order at any cost.
“The Iron Law of Oligarchy” was developed in 1911 by Robert Michels, a German sociologist. Governments, however noble or egalitarian they begin, inevitably consolidate into oligarchy. Ancient Athens and Sparta, the Roman Republic and the Republic of Venice; the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the French Revolution, Russian Bolshevik revolution, and post-colonial Africa and Asia have seen noble promises devolve into corrupt oligarchies.
I assign reading materials about Anacyclosis. My son asks, “Wait, didn’t the Greeks have democracy? So they had both?” Yes, I reply.
About “The Iron Law of Oligarchy” he pauses, then says, “So…the people who don’t like democracy, how could they vote in favor of the person they want? And those people in office would stay there?” I mention Russia. He mentions North Korea. The idea seems less remote to my son than to people my age.
The suitors are oligarchs in miniature, but Odysseus has his own version of their flaw. Odysseus reminds us the greatest danger is not always the monster we face, but the part of ourselves that cannot resist claiming victory. Having told the Cyclops he is “Nobody,” Odysseus announces his name. The desire for recognition undoes the wisdom of restraint. Power that cannot limit itself, wealth that cannot recognize sufficiency, and leaders who mistake personal glory for the common good threaten the very order they claim to defend.
My challenge with my son is to cultivate inner awareness, to focus on cooperation rather than competition, to find a balance between masculine and feminine aspects. Civilizations can and do collapse. But individuals can gain the skills and inner knowing to navigate their way through the wreckage, and to help build anew.
Patterns repeat over millennia. What if civilizational decline is not destiny, but a choice?
The America in which my son comes of age seems at a breaking point. The story of Telemachus and Odysseus reminds us humanity has stood at this precipice before—and can find its way home.
