Homer, Dante Homer and Dante

Homer, Dante Homer and Dante In Homer's, the Odyssey and Dante's, the Inferno, we see the universal quest of the hero. But there is a difference. The Odyssey is an epic adventure that would certainly be deemed heroic in its very being. The Inferno, on the other hand, is less overtly so. It is more of a personal journey, told in first person by the writer himself, Dante Alighieri. But in this difference we find the synthesis of universal truths and see that they are both heroes' quests nonetheless.

The theme is of the hero's journey of first deconstruction, the journey out, and then reconstruction, the journey back. It is the deconstruction of old ways and habits of everyday thinking that are thrown to the wind. Then the reconstruction is of the personality in light of this new awareness in the depth and breadth of the universe. The hero then has been changed in the light of a new understanding of life and the possibilities of what reality is and can be.

Both tales start rather oddly; their beginnings are not quite beginnings, but middles. In the Inferno we find Dante saying that he is, "In the midway of this our mortal life, I found me in a gloomy wood, astray Gone from the path direct..." (Alighieri 1). He is saying that he is in midlife, and at the time he was actually thirty-five years old. Also that he is lost. One hesitates to use the term "mid-life crisis," but perhaps it is not so strange.

After all it is usually a crisis of some kind that necessitates the journey in the first place. Then in the Odyssey we discover that the hero of our tale, Odysseus, has already been on his quest for ten years, and that he is lost as well. "Of the cunning hero, the wanderer, blown off course time and again" (Homer 1). In fact he does not even show up in the narrative until the fifth chapter.

What does this say about the hero's journey? It is that children or young warriors are not yet equipped to handle the more mythical nature of this quest, they lack the patience perhaps. It is only after a good deal of time and experience spent in this world does one have strong enough footing to travel into the world of myth, or in psychological terms, the subconscious, a later life rite of passage. The hero's journey, by and large, is composed of certain universal steps.

The master mythologist, Joseph Campbell, expertly laid out these steps in his book, the Hero with a Thousand Faces. All these heroic adventures, by natural course, begin in what we call the phenomenal world, the real world that surrounds us. Then through the course of the tale we often come to question our perceptions of the real world. The second step required step is a call to action or a quest and that is where these two tales begin.

One of the striking differences in these two quests is that one is full of a pantheon of gods and goddesses and the other is full of people. Homer gives us a lesson in Greek mythology and introduces us to many of their gods, yet they are somehow familiar. These gods have all too human attributes of love, greed, jealously, pride and so on. They are in essence human except for the fact that they are immortal and have power over nature.

This reminds one of Jungian Archetypes, large scale emotional and psychological myths that represent the subconscious in human beings (Jung), except that these gods have the power to make their needs a reality, while humans may only be able to dream about it. However, this dreaming, these myths, reveal a panorama of psychological depth that is unattainable otherwise. In Dante's Inferno we find the more personal aspect of these gods embodied in the population of hell.

This seems at first in opposition to the lofty symbols of the Greek gods as presented in the Odyssey. However, the archetypes here are also easily recognizable and familiar. But what is hell? Cardinal Dulles gives us the generally accepted Christian view: As we know from the Gospels, Jesus spoke many times about hell. Throughout his preaching, he holds forth two and only two final possibilities for human existence: the one being everlasting happiness in the presence of God, the other everlasting torment in the absence of God.

(Dulles) The Hades of Homer is the original representation of hell before Christianity. There it is called the underworld and truly reminds one of the subconscious in many ways. For the Greeks, this is just one aspects of life after death. In some sense it seems more closely associated with the Christian idea of limbo. Heaven has its counterpart in the Elysian fields. In the Inferno hell is again representing the subconscious, but in it's more visceral and active and judgmental aspect.

In general the "nature" of man to be violent, deceiving, etc. is found in hell in varying degrees. Yet one has some pity for many of its inhabitants, the same as in the Odyssey. But why these visions of gods and hell by these authors? Jung points out that the introversion necessary to look within is the common factor: The visionary phenomena, produced in the first stages of introversion, are grouped among the well-known phenomena of hypnagogic vision.

They form, as I explained in an earlier paper, the foundation of the true visions of the symbolic autorevelations of the libido, as we may now express it. (Jung 197) So, in mythology in all its aspects we find these "autorevelations," the spontaneous creativity of the libido and psyche of the author creates, often unawares, the vision of truth and the need for knowledge that is absent. The wandering of the hero is also symbolic of an unsatisfied need that the soul yearns for.

In one sense this journey is the quest for unification of the earthly side of human beings with the spiritual side of the universe. "The Ultimate adventure, when all barriers and ogres have been overcome, is commonly represented as the mystical marriage of the triumphant hero-soul with the queen goddess of the world" (Campbell 109). Beatrice as well as the Virgin represents this in the Inferno as Athena does in the Odyssey. It is often not a physical marriage but a spiritual merging of the two forces.

In gender sense it may also be perceived as the bisexuality of the spirit, allowing the anima and the animas to converge (Jung). Life's destiny and the hero's quest are often one and the same. After being gone for over twenty years, Odysseus returns home. Here he becomes the rejuvenator of Ithaca, which has been plagued by having no strong ruler. Furthermore, dozens of suitors have made a shambles of the city and the palace.

In his travels he has encountered seductive nymphs, cannibal monsters, destructive whirlpools, and Golden Age landscapes. He has gone to Hades and returned, survived the song of the Sirens, and rejected offers of immortality. He has built a raft and lost it. And after all these travels, all.