Islands in the Sky: The Four-Dimensional Journey of Odysseus Through Space and Time

Homer provides an enormous challenge to the student; the potentialities of these lengthy texts are legion and the scholarship vast. The writer has relied upon her knowledge of symbolic discourse to make a fresh study of the Odyssey, prioritising early neighbouring religions, their mythology, and shamanic practice. The latter has yielded particularly rich material concerning the axis of the world (axis mundi) as a route to the stars and the world of the gods. Man's shared experience of the night skies has also provided a some remarkably consistent patterns for the geography of an Otherworld in the skies and the means to reach the gods residing there. By applying world-wide motifs of the soul journey, the initiatory process and established points of transformation along a solar path, it has been possible to recast the hero's sea voyage in cosmic terms and give a celestial homeland to the many islands visited by Odysseus and his companions. The result gives a surprising twist to the meaning of the epic and reveals Homer the poet as both philosopher and student of the cosmos. The wine-dark sea is revealed as none other than the night sky which serves as backdrop to the hero's Adventures among the stars, and Ithaka itself with its many conflicts finds a place at the very centre of the known universe of Bronze Age Greece.