John Carroll - Greek Pilgrimage: In Search of the Foundations of the West

Scribe Publications
GREEK PILGRIMAGE

GREEK
PILGRIMAGE

IN SEARCH OF THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE WEST

JOHN CARROLL

Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
PO Box 523
Carlton North, Victoria, Australia 3054
Email: info@scribepub.com.au

First published by Scribe 2010

Copyright John Carroll 2010

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

All photographs are by the author unless credited otherwise.

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data

Carroll, John, 1944-

Greek Pilgrimage: in search of the foundations of the West

9781921753497 (e-book.)

1. GreeceDescription and travel. 2. GreeceHistory.

914.9504

www.scribepublications.com.au

For Eva

CONTENTS

The Times: Comprehensive Atlas of the World

THE PARTHENON

In this book, I travel Greece, visiting the ancient sites. My aim is to survey what remains today the ruins, the vitality, and the aura. A magic or enchantment endures, one that has something to do with the Western genesis, and the fact that our pre-eminent ancestors inhabited these places. I go on to probe the meaning in this for us, and how it is that the ruins still seem so alive, in spite of their obvious decrepitude.

This book is, therefore, a meditation on classical Greece, on its great sites, monuments, and works. It explores their pivotal role in the foundation of the modern world. We who are born into the West are all Greeks.

The ancient Greeks invite us to think about who we are, and the best ways to organise ourselves, to build institutions, and to make our cities beautiful. They inculcate a sceptical orientation to ourselves and the world we inhabit, questioning the meaning. They constantly ask what the good life is. They introduce us to democracy and to sport, to mathematics and to philosophy, and to tragic drama and to music. From Homer onwards, they live in intimate proximity to Nature, finding inspiration in its majesty and power.

In Greece, our metaphysical perspective was set. We were introduced to the mystery an abiding sense that there is a deep secret, one which somehow holds the key to the big questions about life. The travels recorded in this book will be accompanied by some of the classical stories, ones which have been retold for generation upon generation, over the last two-and-a-half thousand years. They include stories of the hero; of the life path as a journey of homecoming; of binding fate; of human acts that transcend the earthly, gaining a divine quality; of the ever-present daimonic; of the powers of the feminine; and of the quest in search of the essence of being.

With us throughout this journey will be the challenge of culture. I mean the question of what we should do, who we might be, and how we can understand ourselves, so as to rise above our base biological condition of being like animals, born to eat, grow, breed, and die. Without authoritative culture we are slaves to necessity. We today have lost a convincing language through which we can explore the possibility of higher meaning. Classical Greek culture moved across precisely this territory with a virtuosity and sureness of instinct. Here was the core of its genius.

This is also a sort of travel book, which is designed to serve as a guide for the modern traveller to Greece. I have recommended two alternate itineraries at the end, accompanied by maps and illustrations.

PART I
THE JOURNEY

THE ERECHTHEION

BORN INTO
PILGRIMAGE

The past is a mysterious land that pipes an alluring tune. By night, we dream; by day, we sleepwalk along our life-path; and, all the while, our inner ear strains to pick up a distant, faint rhythm from a long time ago, playing somewhere beyond.

It may be the song of the Sirens serenading the long-voyaging Odysseus. If he were to act on what he hears, bound to the mast of his ship as he is, his rowers ears sealed with wax; if he were free to follow what rouses him to an ecstatic swoon, his journey would be dashed to pieces on a rocky shore. By all means listen, his story instructs us, but dont sail too close to the enchantment! Or, it may be the voice of the goddess Athena that is heard, as she sings the foundation story in Western culture, the Iliad, through the voice of the poet Homer. Her story tells of the wonder and the tragedy, of what it was like, once upon a time, to live in the age of heroes. Her song implies that, ever since, things have been lesser, but that we lesser mortals may aspire to rise above our ordinariness.

Of course, it is not just any past that breathes a mystery call.

Is it that we are after some metaphysical homecoming or nostos, as it is named in Greek by Homer in his second work, the Odyssey? Nostalgia is a perpetual longing for some idyllic past, a feeling something akin to mellow grief over distant loss. And, indeed, the English word nostalgia is a Greek derivative from nostos algos meaning literally pain for home, or grief, or suffering.

It is as if our perpetual, cursed condition is to have awoken one day after a long sleep to find ourselves in an alien place, removed from our primal home: a home of which we can conjure up no conscious picture, however hard we try; a home that we know only by some sixth sense, and a deep instinctual longing. It is as if, to continue, our other home and its family, the well-known one, the haven in which we grew up, is just a substitute attempt by loving parents to console us for our loss. They, too, those parents, built their nest, a cosy security of sought-for belonging, in an attempt to console themselves for the same loss.

So it is that we are enthralled by origins. We are pitched at birth into a life-long quest to find our primordial spiritual home, the place where it truly began. So we travel, and not only on foot. We travel in our teeming imagination, pressured with fantasies of where it might be better, with whom it might be right. But arent those particular fantasies mere displacements, substitutes supplying goals that seem more achievable? Where were we in the beginning? How are we to find our way back? How are we to discover the clues that matter?

Even the ultra-rational Socrates had a dream, just before his death, of meeting a stunningly beautiful woman dressed in white robes, who told him that he was about to undertake a three-day voyage to Phthia.1 The association is with Book 9 of the Iliad, in which Achilles anticipates leaving Troy the next day, and taking the three-day voyage back to his beloved home, which is Phthia. Socrates is dreaming, as he departs from life, of joining the legendary hero on a journey to his true home. Wherever that may be, it is far from Athens, the actual place in which Socrates has always lived.