I.

As soon as Ulysses, after coming back from Hades, had performed the

last rites over the corpse of Elpenor, Circe appears and makes a

striking address: "O ye audacious, who still living have gone down to

the house of Hades--ye twice-dead, while others die but once." Such is

one side of Circe, now rises the other: "But come, eat food, drink wine

the whole day;" let us have a Greek festival ere new labors begin. Then

Circe holds a private conference with Ulysses, she asked each thing

"about the journey to Hades," which, it seems, she must know ere she

can foretell the remaining part.

One cannot help feeling in this passage that the poet hints that these

prophecies of Circe have some connection with what Ulysses imparts to

her concerning Hades. Indeed she repeats what Tiresias had already

foretold in reference to the Oxen of the Sun--a matter which she

probably heard from Ulysses. Cannot the other two adventures be derived

in a general way from the experiences of the Underworld? The Past seems

here to furnish the groundwork for the predictions of the Future, and

Circe, knowing what has been in the pure forms of the supersensible,

becomes the voice of what is to be.

1. First come the Sirens, whom Ulysses will have to meet again, as he

has often met them before. Indeed Circe herself was once a Siren, a

charmer through the senses. The present Sirens are singers, and entice

to destruction through the sense of hearing, inasmuch as "heaps of

bones lie about them," evidently the skeletons of persons who have

perished through their seductive song. Pass them the man must; what is

to be done? He will have somehow to guard against his sensuous nature

and keep it from destroying itself. Yet on the other hand he must

enjoy, which is his right in this world of sensations; each good music

must be heard. So Circe tells of the scheme of putting wax into his

companions' ears, while he is bound to the mast. Already Tiresias

warned Ulysses in the Underworld to hold his appetite in check and that

of his companions, if he wished to return home. This warning Circe now

repeats, indeed she repeats in a new mythical form her own experience,

for she, the Siren, has also been met by Ulysses and mastered. Yet

these later charmers seem to have been more dangerous. When they are

passed, a new peril rises of necessity.

2. Next we behold an image, or rather two sets of images, of the grand

dualism of existence. That escape from the Sirens is really no solution

of the problem, it is external and leaves the man still unfree, still

subject to his senses. There must be somehow an inner control through

the understanding, an intellectual subordination. But just here trouble

springs up again. The mind has two sides to it, and is certain to fall

into self-opposition. Two are the ways after parting from the Sirens,

says Circe: "I shall tell thee of both."

One way is by the Plangctae (rocks which clasp together); here no bird

can fly through without getting caught, even the doves of Zeus pay the

penalty. "No ship of men, having gone thither, has ever escaped"--except

the God-directed Argo: surely a sufficient warning. Then the second way

also leads to two rocks, but of a different kind; at their bases in the

sea are found Scylla, the monstrous sea-bitch, on one side, and

Charybdis, the yawning maelstrom, on the other; between them Ulysses

must pass with his ship and companions.

It is manifest that here are two alternatives, one after the other; the

first is that of the Plangctae, the Claspers, which mean Death, unless

they be avoided, yet this avoidance does not always mean Life. We can

trace the connection with the Sirens: the absolute resignation to the

senses is license, is destruction; we may say the same thing of the

opposite, the absolute suppression of man's sensuous being is simply

his dissolution. Hence the extremes appear; the moral and the immoral

extremes land us in the same place; they are the two mighty rocks which

may smite together and crush the poor mortal who happens to get in

between the closing surfaces. If we understand the image, it holds true

of excess on either side; excessive indulgence is overwhelmed by its

opposite, so is excessive abstinence; they co-operate, like two valves,

for the destruction of the one-sided extremist. Truly Greek is the

thought, for the Greek maxim above all others was moderation, no

over-doing. Such then are the Plangctae, which Ulysses must avoid

wholly, if he wishes to escape. Still, even the danger is by no means

over.

There is the second way which introduces a new alternative; the path of

moderation has its difficulty, it too forks and produces perplexity and

peril to the voyager. Here is the point where Scylla and Charybdis

appear, a new set of extremes, between which the mean is to be sought,

then the passage can be made. Yet even thus it costs, Ulysses will lose

six of his companions; the penalty has to be paid, just the penalty of

moderation. _Es raecht sich alles auf Erden._ Two sets of extremes

always; if you shun one set and take the middle path, just this act of

shunning produces a second set; cut the magnet in twain with its two

poles, then each part will at once have two poles of its own. Such is

indeed the very dialectic of life, the dualism of existence, which the

heroic voyager is to overcome with suffering, with danger, with many

penalties.

Fault has often been found with this duplication of the alternative,

but when rightly seen into, it will show itself as the central fact of

the entire description. It casts an image of the never-ceasing

differentiation both in the mind and in the world; it hints the

recurring contradiction in all thought and in all conduct, always to be

solved, yet never quite solved. What else indeed has man to do? To

master the contradiction gives him life, movement, energy, and it must

be mastered every day. The old poet is going to the bottom of the

matter. The above mentioned repetition of the alternative has its

correspondence with the repetition which we have seen to be the

fundamental form into which the whole Book is cast.

Plainly the Double Alternative here mythically set forth, springs out

of the conflict with the Sirens, and is a deepening of the same to the

very bottom. Indulgence kills, abstinence kills, in their excess; and

the middle path bifurcates into two new extremes with their problem.

Prophetic Circe can tell all this, for does it not lie just in the

domain of her experience, which has also been twofold? Pure forms of

spirit, wholly non-natural, are these figures representing the Double

Alternative, created by the Imagination to express Thought.

3. The final warning of Circe is mainly a repetition of what Tiresias

had told Ulysses already in the Underworld; from the latter she heard

it and puts it here into its place. Beware of slaying the cattle of the

Sun, oxen and sheep in two flocks, over which two bright nymphs keep

guard. There can scarcely be a doubt concerning the physical basis of

this myth. The seven herds of oxen, fifty to the herd, suggest the

number of days in the lunar year (really 354); the seven herds of sheep

suggest the corresponding nights. Lampelia (the Moon or Lamp of Night)

is the keeper of the one; Phaethusa (the Radiant one) is the keeper of

the other--namely the Sun as the day-bringer. Seldom has the old Aryan

form of the myth been so well preserved; the whole reads like a

transcript out of the Vedas.

Still stronger than the physical side is the spiritual suggestion. The

slaughter of these cattle of the Sun points to the supreme act of

negation in the intellectual man, to the sin against light. Ulysses and

his companions now know the way to reach home, having had the grand

experience with the Sirens and then with the Double Alternative;

moreover the leader has heard the warning twice. If they now do wrong,

it will be a wrong against the Sun, against Intelligence itself.

A certain critic finds fault with Circe because she repeats the warning

of Tiresias, and he holds that some botcher or editor, not Homer,

transferred the passage from one place to the other. Yet this

repetition is not only an organic necessity of the poem, but gives an

insight into the character of Circe: she cannot foresee of herself the

great intellectual transgression, but Tiresias can; the Sirens and the

Double Alternative, however, lie within her own experience. So she

copies where she cannot originate, and in this way she is decidedly

distinguished from Tiresias, though both are prophetic.

Such is the outlook upon the Future given by Circe, in the way of

warning, whereby the warned know what is coming. In the three

adventures we feel a certain connection, in fact an unfolding of one

out of the other, beginning with the primary conflict of the Senses,

which soon rises into the Understanding, and finally ends in a revolt

against Reason itself, the source of Light. They have the character of

typical forms, derived from the Past, yet they are certain to recur

again, and hence can be foretold.