Finding the meaning in the Sirens’ song
and being Strapped to the Mast
The Odyssey contains many stories, but the myth of the Sirens is one of Homer’s greatest gifts to us, for it is his invitation for us to participate. The entire adventure is a mere 44 lines of the 13,860-line poem, and the characters involved are few- Odysseus, the Sirens, and the crewmen. The striking brevity of the words and the tiny cast allow us to consider in great detail what this story means to us right now;
Listen with care
To this, now, and a god will arm your mind.
Square in your ship’s path are Sirens, crying
Beauty to bewitch men coasting by;
Woe to the innocent who hears that sound!
He will not see his lady nor his children
In joy, crowding about him, home from sea;
The Sirens will sing his mind away
On the sweet meadow lolling. There are bones
Of dead men rotting in a pile beside them
And flayed skins shrivel around the spot.
Steer wide;
Keep well to seaward; plug your oarsmen’s ears
With beeswax kneaded soft; none of the rest
Should hear that song.
But if you wish to listen,
Let the men tie you in the lugger, hand
And foot, back to the mast, lashed to the mast,
So you may hear those harpies’ thrilling voices;
Shout as you will, begging to be untied,
Your crew must only twist some more line around you
And keep their stroke up, till the singers fade.1
Directed By The Principle Of Love: Odysseus Strapped To The Mast
All of our senses are involved in this image; we smell the salt air; we touch the coarse rope binding our arms and legs; we see the separation in the distance between us and our desires; we strain to hear what is being offered in song; we taste our anguished words as we scream to be released. All of this, of course, is experienced as suffering. Odysseus is able to withstand this suffering because he has embraced two great principles.
The first principle is grace. By this I mean the profound sense of peace that we experience as an epiphany when we are forced to drop all stories about ourselves and are left in the ineffable beauty and radiance of our natural state. Odysseus possesses grace as heart wisdom in knowing that the gods support his safe passage. This is the meaning of Circe’s line, “a God will arm your mind.”
It is, after all, the goddess Circe who warns Odysseus about the Sirens in the above passage. It is she who pledges her aid, telling Odysseus how to safely navigate past the danger. But beyond the “how-to’s” of the mechanics, I think Odysseus feels loved and protected, and is filled with a dynamic communion with the Gods. This is what I feel as I consider this story as if it were my personal dream.
The second principle is Love. Odysseus, throughout the entire Odyssey, has the abiding intention to return home to his wife and son. In this most divine and also most human potential for transformation, Odysseus can cut though all distractions from his purpose and summon the strength of heart to “weather many bitter nights and days in his deep heart at sea” in order to fulfill his destiny. He is a living demonstration of the power of Love to overcome any obstacle and return home. For me the wonderful thing about what Homer has written is that he brings in the image I was so taken by when I first read Plato; by abiding in his heart and mastering physical world reality Odysseus is able to “return to his native star.”
From the perspective of the inner journey towards wholeness and individuation, and in learning to love more deeply, the mast represents the great dilemma we each face. The tension of this dilemma takes place while Odysseus is strapped to the horizontal and vertical planes. One might say that the horizontal axis (the boat, the water) represent the goal line of one’s life- the ordinary details of living, and that the mast represents the vertical axis, the “spiritual” aspect of our being. To be bound to this crossing point, this convergence of the physical and the spiritual is the actual condition most of us find ourselves in as we begin to naturally expand our concept of Self. “The physical situation itself,” write Martha Heyneman, “and Odysseus’ agonized pleadings to his men to release him… communicate to the body and emotions what the actual experience of the spiritual effort to remember oneself- to cleave to the vertical- in the midst of life (at least in the early stages of the Way) is like, as no abstract diagram or set of instructions could.” 2
The mast is Odysseus’ way of grounding himself to life. Masts are made from massive tree trunks. Trees have roots in the ground. They function to feed themselves down in the dark through nutrients in the soil and the groundwater that soil holds. Trees also reach skyward with their leaves to soak up sunlight. So by strapping to the mast, to the life force in trees, Odysseus is binding himself to the complete nourishment of life. By being connected to what nurtures all of life, Odysseus’ life is protected.
Being bound also implies that each of us carry aspects of ourselves that must be subdued. Strapping oneself down is a tactic for putting one’s ego in its proper place. This can cause tremendous anguish as the ego fights to maintain the illusion of control. By binding himself to the mast, Odysseus is acknowledging that his ego is going to be protesting vehemently, and he takes measures proactively with Circe’s help; He knows that what he is about to hear in the Siren’s song is beyond his ego’s ability to understand it, yet what they sing is vitally important to his evolution in consciousness.
The binding, the restriction, is an important but interim step in the process of liberation from one’s over-reliance on the ego. By ego, I mean the identity we assume based on past experiences and the self-definitions we create. As Odysseus begins to hear the revelation contained in the Sirens’ song he notices even more acutely and painfully, that what he thought he was, up to this crucial moment, was actually a severely limited being.
By experiencing the pain of this limitation a new condition arises, a new way to see what he may be. I think that at some point Odysseus’ thinking function relaxes because it is bound. When there is nowhere to go and there is no help in sight, he has no alternative but to listen. This condition of surrender is necessary. “The individual,” writes Joseph Campbell, “through prolonged psychological disciplines, gives up completely all attachment to his personal limitations, idiosyncrasies, hope and fears, no longer resists the self-annihilation that is prerequisite to rebirth in the realization of truth.”3
It’s interesting to me that the myth of the Sirens also represents the individual’s struggle to find liberation from the conditioned and learned behaviors that are restricting our life energy that limit our libido, or creative life-energy as C.G. Jung characterizes it.
In Us
As we consider The Odyssey as a personal dream we can explore the possibility that the message the Sirens sing is already in us because we are they.
Homer writes that there are two Sirens. In other Greek myths there are usually three. I think that the presence of two Sirens indicates that as long as Odysseus is strapped to his identification with himself through his limited thinking function, then he is bound to perceiving the world from the standpoint of ideas and concepts about himself and the world of appearances. There is “I” and “Not I.” In the non-duality traditions, including Tibetan Buddhism, the cause of suffering is identifying with one’s ego (sems, “small mind”). By doing this we reify the ego’s thinking function and accept our ideas about things as the reality. This includes ideas about who and what we are.
The Sirens ultimate message can never be revealed because their song is personal; each of us hears something custom-tailored to our particular life’s journey. But I think it is clear by Homer’s phrase “woe to the innocent who hears that sound,” that the Sirens also sing one grand song for those prepared to hear it- of the totality of things. Psychologically this means that if our level of realization has not been sufficiently developed, then we will be thrown into psychotic states and become the location upon which the “bones of dead men rotting in a pile beside them and flayed skins shrivel around the spot.” In A Hero With A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell retells a story about Ramakrishna in which he is clearly ready to glimpse more of the totality of life.
One quiet afternoon Ramakrishna beheld a beautiful
woman ascend from the Ganges and approach the grove in
which he was meditating. He perceived that she was about
to give birth to a child. In a moment the baby was born, and she
gently nursed it. Presently, however, she assumed a horrible
aspect, took the infant in her now ugly jaws and crushed it, chewed it.
Swallowing it, she returned again to the Ganges, where she disappeared.3
Edward Edinger makes a great point about this as well;
As the myth warns, it is safe to listen to the source of divine knowledge
only when one is solidly lashed to the mast of reality. Peril lies in the
exploration of the unconscious, for the archetypal symbolism and images
can be exciting and provocative; yet they can overwhelm an ego
that is not grounded in reality. 4
The Sirens sing of the promise of something personal for Odysseus if he would steer his ship over to them. They appeal to his desire to be free from his troubling memories of the Trojan War and his desire to finally rest from the slog of his endless wanderings.
What would the sirens sing to you of your life’s journey so far?
The Crewmen And The Beeswax
In our western parlance “falling on deaf ears” usually means that our truth isn’t being understood and accepted by the listener. In this story of the Sirens deafness is a metaphor for protection from harm. By being deaf to the potentially ego-destroying message of the Siren’s song the crewmen row on undisturbed; they take over the responsibility to stay on course. Odysseus’ total surrender to the Siren’s song is only possible because he can rely on the crewmen. In viewing this part of the story as our personal dream, we can say that when the aspects of our personality are in congruence, when we feel we have some mastery over them, when they can work in harmony as a team, then and only then can we move away from our ego’s narrow definitions of self. When we achieve a high level of integration and psychic harmony we are free to explore what we may be.
Odysseus molds by hand the beeswax ear coverings and places them over each crewman’s ear himself. This shows a great caring between Odysseus and his men, and implies full integration, love, and trust.
Beeswax is created within a harmonious community. Roles in the hive are very clear and responsibilities are shared. Each bee knows by instinct what their job is and how they are helping in the success of the entire endeavor. The men accept the beeswax ear coverings and there is the recognition that each man will play his part towards successfully navigating the Siren’s challenge.
Bees also represent the cross-pollination of nature. They are the ones responsible for the joining of life by flying from flower to flower, spreading pollen. They represent a bridge between opposites- they connect pistol and stamen, or male and female. By putting beeswax on their ears, Odysseus is creating a way to unify the disparate subpersonalities present in our psyches. At the same time, by connecting to a messenger of change (the bees) we participate in the creation of something new.
Jumping Back Into Life
It is interesting to note that right after Odysseus is out of harms way from the Sirens, Homer has him immediately face the double life-threatening challenge of the Scylla and Charybdis. (Scylla is a six-headed monster that eats crew members off the port side. Charybdis is a towering churning whirlpool that destroys ships off starboard. Odysseus must make a choice, and he chooses to lose 6 crew members to save the others. He and his crew eventually pass safely.)
I think that Homer is describing the actual situation we face in balancing the “spiritual” life with the secular through the obscured lens of our world-focused ego. Odysseus has had a dynamic communion with the Eternal Oneness, a direct revelation of unlimited joy and freedom in the song of the Sirens, and is then immediately thrust back into defending his limited secular physical existence. How many of us have experienced this exact same thing? Jack Kornfield wrote a book about this called After The Ecstasy, The Laundry. He writes, “even after achieving such realization – after the ecstasy- we are faced with the day-to-day task of translating that freedom into our imperfect lives. We are faced with the laundry.”5
References
- Homer (1992). The Odyssey (R. Fitzgerald, Trans.). New York, NY: Everyman’s Library/Alfred A. Knopf.
- The Inner Journey- Myth, Psyche, and Spirit, Parabola Anthology Series, Morning Light Press, 2008. Editor- Martha Heyneman
- Campbell, J. (2008). The Hero With A Thousand Faces. Novato, CA: New World Library
- Edinger, E.F. (1994) The Eternal Drama- The Inner Meaning Of Greek Mythology (D. A. Wesley, Ed). New York, NY: Shambahla.
- Kornfield, J. (2000) After The Ecstasy, The Laundry. NewYork, NY: Bantam