CELESTIAL JOURNEY

Homer drew the curtains of time to reveal Paris abducting the beautiful Helen of Argos, while her husband Menelaus and his brother King Agamemnon responded by persuading the princes who owed them allegiance to join forces with them in a crusade against Paris' father Priam, King of Troy. And there, in company with Achilles, Patroclus and many other heroes of the Iliad, Ulysses waged war for ten years. The epic scenes of so long ago appear to be a seamless scroll of timeless events, but in fact when Ulysses prepared for his return to Ithaca he was imprisoned in a second scroll, the unrolling of which required an additional ten years.

The journey home for Ulysses was an incessant struggle with the known and unknown forces of this world in league with unseen other-worldly powers, all of them committed to shorten his days. But Ulysses the man of many parts drew on the strength and courage of his inner self to face the oppressive dangers, the gift of wisdom from the higher beings enabled him to prevail against insuperable odds. His dramatic journey through the raging whirlpool and torrents of the Messina Straits, coupled with the threat of Scylla and Charybdis on either side, is symbolic of the pathway that every foot will tread.

Ulysses' ultimate rescue from the beguilers and singing voices which beckoned him to his doom prefigures the trials and hazards that precede the home-coming of a life-time.

When Homer eventually drew the curtains on the last scene of the Odyssey the hand proffered to Ulysses betokened a dream come true, the herald of a Celestial Journey.
- DANIEL