Click here to listen to Poseidon and the Best Laid Plans in the season 1 archives on Buzzsprout
“I sing of the great god Poseidon, mover of the earth and fruitless sea […] god of the deep, shaker of the earth […] tamer of horses and savior of ships […]” from the Homeric Hymn to Poseidon
After the Olympians defeated the old gods, Zeus and his brothers, Hades and Poseidon, divided the world into three realms. They drew lots to establish which of them would rule over each.
Poseidon was awarded the ocean.
In this podcast I talk about Poseidon and share some his myths, including his role in Homer’s Odyssey and the significance of his longstanding competition with the goddess Athena.
Transcript of “Poseidon and the Best Laid Plans”
Hello everyone and welcome to Myth Matters, a biweekly podcast of storytelling and conversation about mythology and why it’s important to our lives today. I’m your host and personal mythologist. Catherine Svehla. Thank you so much for joining me. Wherever you may be in this wide, beautiful, crazy world of ours. You are part of this story circle.
“I sing of the great God, mover of the earth and fruitless sea, God of the deep, shaker of the earth, Tamer of horses and savior of ships…” That’s from the Homeric Hymns and you may have guessed that it’s the beginning of the Homeric Hymn to the Greek God Poseidon. I want to tell you some things about Poseidon today.
This podcast originated with a request from Elise who is a member of the bandcamp community. Elise, I hope you enjoy this and that it tells you what you want to know about Poseidon. And to any of the rest of you out there who may or may not be members of the bandcamp community– in effect, hiring me to create a podcast on the topic of your choice is one of the benefits of belonging to the community. If you go to the Mythic Mojo website, you can find a link that takes you to bandcamp. For as little as $5 a month you can join the community, which gives you the satisfaction of exchanging value for value, supporting me and the mission of Myth Matters, and also requesting a podcast on the topic of your choice.
So I was thinking about Poseidon and then we had a couple of earthquakes here in southern California last week, and that was a signal to me that we definitely needed to be talking about Poseidon. Now let me start by reminding you of how the Greeks divided up the world.
There were three realms and each of them ruled by a God. Zeus was the ultimate sovereign. He presided over the earth and sky. He was essentially the God of light– of the sky, of the heavens, and so the heights. He was represented primarily by the Eagle. And then there was Hades, who is the god of the underworld. He was so feared by the Greeks that they rarely called him by that name, by his real name, lest they provoke him to action. The Greeks commonly called him “Pluto” which means “riches,” and alludes to the great treasures buried in the earth and in the invisible realms. Then there is Poseidon who was the god of the sea. The Romans called him Neptune, and he was also associated with horses, floods, droughts, and earthquakes. He was the god of earthquakes because the sea surrounds and holds the earth, so of course he would then have the power to shake the earth. His sacred animals where the bull, the horse, and the dolphin. He’s often depicted with his primary tool, which was a trident. Some say that the cyclops made the trident for him and the cyclops is going to come up again later on in this podcast.
Now, these three brothers were all sons of the Titans Kronos and Rhea, and after Zeus freed all of his siblings from the belly of Kronos, and after the Olympians defeated the Titans in the war of the Titanamachia, these three victorious brothers divided the world into these three realms: the earth and sky, the underworld, and the sea. They drew lots to determine which one of them would reighn in each of the realms.
This practice of drawing lots was fairly common for the ancient Greeks because they understood this to be the most democratic way to assign power and status and wealth. The most democratic because it was a matter of chance and that assumes equality. It assumes equality among all of the competitors. In other words, everybody could equally do the job. Everyone equally deserves what’s being given out and so just let chance decide.
Once these realms were assigned and the brothers were each in their daily power, it wasn’t equal though, because Zeus was the supreme. He was the king, he was the father, and he was untouchable. As for the rest of them, Hades, Poseidon, and all of the other Olympians, I’m not aware of any official rankings, you know, of there being any #2 God or anything like that. The gods and goddesses had more or less honor or power in a given situation depending on the setting, because each of them had their strengths and weaknesses. In the case of these three brothers, they each had their own realm, and there were continuous competitions and power struggles and alliances and grudges among the members of the Pantheon.
There was Zeus and then everybody else, and there was a tension between these three brothers that is kind of built into this system by virtue of the nature of their realms.
Zeus is secure because he’s the sovereign. He has the most visible and complete realm as far as human beings are concerned. And, Hades, that is Pluto, also has an untouchability and a certain security from threats to his power due to the other worldliness of his realm, and the dread that surrounds it, and from the human perspective, the inevitability of all of it. I mean, everyone who is human is going to spend some time in Zeus’s realm and then end up with Pluto. And how and when that happens was decided by the Fates and the Fates were independent authorities by the way. They were beyond the reach of the Gods. The gods could not change a death that the Fates had put in place. So anyway, you’ve got Zeus and Hades who are kind of fixed, fixed in the scheme of things.
In fact, there are some scholars who, in close examination of the many names and epithets that were used by the Greeks to identify Zeus and Pluto, suggest that these two brothers were polar aspects of each other. The light and the dark, visible and invisible aspects of one divinity, two halves of the whole, which leaves Poseidon kind of feeling like the odd man out.
Now, he had his realm, his palace under the sea, and he had a whole set of water and ocean-based deities with whom he lived. He spent most of his time in his own world, not up on Mount Olympus. He had plenty of work to do in the ocean. There were the Nereids for example, who were female sea deities that personified the waves of the ocean. There were lots of them. His wife, Amphitrite was a Nereid. There was Thetis who was a goddess from the older race of gods, the Titans. She was a Titaness and the mother of the hero Achilles. There were the Telchines and they were amphibious, half fish, half human shape, magician, shapeshifters who raised Poseidon. They were responsible for a great many storms experienced by sailors.
There was also Proteus, another God of the sea, and he was a shape shifter with the gift of prophecy. Although unlike other oracles, Proteus was not willing to share what he knew. You had to go undergo very arduous task of holding on to him while he changed through all of his various forms. And he could even change himself into something like fire. You had to do this in order to be able to get him to answer your questions and tell you what he knew. So there was a whole other world that Poseidon oversaw and participated in. And this world, the ocean, the sea, was very important to the Greeks.
They had miles and miles and miles of coast and many islands as part of the Greeks territory. And sailing then, was a primary mode of travel for trade, for adventure, and for nation building for the Greeks, as it was for the other peoples who lived on the Mediterranean. The Phoenicians, for example,
Poseidon was most venerated by the sailors and the coastal peoples for the gifts of the sea and they made sacrifices to him in recognition of his power to calm the waves, bring favorable winds or instigate deadly storms. Poseidon had his powers. But in this trio of brothers, he’s the restless one who’s in perpetual quest for greater recognition. The one who must defend his honor. Poseidon competes with the other Olympians and in the myths that we have that involve him, he’s often dissed.
For example, Poseidon along with Apollo helped King Laomedon and the Trojans build that great wall around the city of Troy. They built this amazing wall that was a miracle of the ancient world and then the king refused payment and Poseidon sent a sea monster to ravage the city. Heracles ultimately killed it. He showed up just in time to prevent the monstrous creature from eating King Laomedon’s daughter.
Then there was the matter of King Minos. Minos was the son of Zeus and a mortal woman named Europa and he wanted to be the king of Crete. But the people were not happy with that. They didn’t want to make him king. So Minos told them that the gods were on his side. He was so powerful that when he offered up prayers, they were answered. Minos then made a sacrifice to Poseidon, who was a very important god for the Minoans living on Crete, which is an island. He made a sacrifice to Poseidon and he prayed for a magnificent bull, one of the holy animals of Poseidon, to come up out of the depths of the sea.
And it did. Poseidon answered his prayer. The people were in awe and Minos became king. Of course, Poseidon sent that bull with the understanding that Minos would then honor him by sacrificing it to him, would give it back to him, in other words. But this bull was such an amazing creature that Minos decided to keep it for his own herds. He sacrificed a different bull to Poseidon and this made the god very angry. So he made the bull, the amazing bull that he had given Minos, a very savage creature. And he infected Pasiphae, Minos’s wife, with a lust for the bull. She had to satisfy it.
In the end, Daedalus, who was an inventor, and an indentured servant there on Crete, made a contraption. A hollow wooden cow on wheels covered in cow skin. And this was wheeled out to the meadow where the great bull was residing with Pasiphae inside it and she mated with the bull and later gave birth to Asterios, better known as yes, the Minotaur, a very famous monster in Greek mythology. He was an extraordinarily strong “man” with the head of a bull and a taste for human flesh. When he grew up, he was so powerful and deadly that Minos had him shut up in a labyrinth that was designed by Daedelus.
King Minos at the time was very powerful and he had power over the city of Athens. Every nine years he required the city to send seven young men and seven young women as tribute to Crete, and these young people were forced to enter the labyrinth to be killed and eaten by the Minotaur. This happened a couple of times and the people of Athens were very agitated and angry that their leaders were not solving the problem so Prince Theseus volunteered to go and he managed to kill the Minotaur with the aid of Ariadne, King Minos’s daughter. And I want to note that Minos, as I mentioned was the son of Zeus and Theseus was a son of Poseidon.
In myths like these, we see Poseidon answering prayers and coming to the aid of kings who like him, are seeking to gain more power and honor. There are lots of stories, other stories in Greek mythology and lots of stories around the world, about people who want to satisfy their ambitions, need something big to happen, need divine help in other words. And they ask and then they forget to honor the source, once the power is gained or the gift has been given. They try to go on to living with little concern for the gods. In our contemporary language, we would say that the person or people live a very secular life pursuing ego satisfaction until things get really desperate or something really big needs to happen, and it’s strange, but so common, this lack of gratitude. What happens, at least in these stories, is the gift becomes something monstrous and disruptive.
The most famous myth that involves Poseidon is the Odyssey. Poseidon upsets the hero Odysseus’s journey home to Ithaca several times. He is the cause of the 10 years of wandering and exile. Odysseus tells us how this comes to be in Book Nine. He explains to King Alcinous and his court how he roused the wrath of Poseidon.
Okay. When the Trojan war was over, Odysseus and his men left Troy. They set sail for Ithaca and on the way they stopped in the land of the Cicones and they plundered the city, killing the men, raping the women, taking slaves and treasure. There was a big battle and soon after they left, they ran into a series of storms and strong winds that were attributed to Zeus and this blew them to the edge of the known world. They then reached the land of the Lotus eaters and these people didn’t try to kill them, but they tried to get all of the men on Odysseus’s ships to eat the lotus fruit and the lotus flowers, which caused total forgetfulness. It just made them lose all desire for home. So Odysseus and the men who had not succumbed to their lotus treat rounded everybody up and they had to forcibly bring the men back.
Anyway, they were in a pretty low state of morale when they left the Lotus eaters, and it was in this condition that they reached the land of the Cyclops. This was a totally foreign place to them. They had never been there. They didn’t know the inhabitants but they were in search of food and water and safe harbor, and in Odysseus’s case, he wanted to satisfy his curiosity and he had a restless need for adventure and a desire for more gifts and treasure. So he took about a dozen men and they landed on this island, the land of the Cyclops, to explore. Odysseus said that he had a premonition that they might meet up with some savages so he took along a skin of irresistible red wine. It was delicious and extremely strong red wine that he had.
Odysseus goes on to say that he had a rather low opinion of the Cyclops. They herd goats and sheep. They live very simple lives. He said “they’re lazy! Here they live in this very rich land, which they’ve done very little to develop. They don’t farm and still they have everything that they need”– implication being that that was kind of unfair. He says, “you know, they don’t build any ships or sail.” So again, despicable lack of ambition. He laments their lack of civic mindedness. Each family sticks together. They don’t really have much concern for their neighbors or for community.
Odysseus and his men go around and they find a cave with very large boulders and trees at the mouth. They peer inside and there are flocks of sheep and goats in pens and they realize that it must be the home of a giant. Their host is not home but they go inside anyway to look around and they’re amazed at all of the milk and the cheeses and the animals and there’s just a lot of really delicious food. The men want to simply grab as much as they can grab and get out of there because they do not like the possibility that this might actually be the home of a giant. But Odysseus insists that he wants to stay behind and see who lives there and collect the hospitality gifts that he believes are due him as a visitor in this land.
That was the rule of the Greeks. Of course, Odysseus is not in Greece but he doesn’t care about that, so he insists that they will wait for whoever lives there to come back. They eat a bunch of the food and they sit around and eventually the Cyclops, whose name is Polyphemus, does come back. When they see him they’re terrified because he’s huge. He’s ugly to their eyes. He’s got this one giant eye in the middle of his forehead and he comes in to the cave and he covers the doorway with this huge stone slab. The men, they have all hidden in the bags and bins in the back of the cave where they watch Polyphemus milk his animals and do his chores. Then he lights a fire and he catches sight of the men hiding in the cave and calls out to them,” Hey, I see you. What, are you here to steal something from me?” And Odysseus pipes up and says, “No, we’ve been driven off course and Zeus must’ve sent us here. And so since we’re guests in your home, I presume that you will show us hospitality.”
The cyclops said, “Well, this isn’t really Zeus’s territory here. You know, stranger, we don’t have a lot of respect for him.” And he grabs up two of the men and bashes their brains out on his stone floor and eats them raw. A terrible thing. The men cower in fear and Odysseus thinks, “Oh my God, now I’ve, we’ve got to get out of here.” And he imagines them swarming over the giant Polyphemus and killing him, but if they killed him, who would remove the big stone from the door? Because it’s far too heavy for the human men to budge.
The next morning, Polyphemus eats a couple more of the men and then he leaves, rolling the stone back over the doorway. Odysseus comes up with a plan. That night when the Cyclops comes home, he offers him some of the wine, which Polyphemus drinks and he’s not very experienced with such potent wine. He drinks bowl after bowl of it and he gets quite drunk and asks Odysseus for his name. Odysseus says, “My name is nobody and you know, I’m giving you this gift and now you, by the laws of hospitality, as I told you yesterday, have to give us a gift back.” Polyphemus says, “Oh ha ha, well, you know what, I’ll give you a gift Nobody. I will eat you last and that will be my gift to you.” And then the Cyclops passed out drunk and Odysseus and his men took out a huge pointed spear that they had secretly fashioned, and they plunged it in to the monster’s eyeball. The giant was frantic and pain.
Now blinded, Polyphemus looks for them. He can’t find them. Eventually he rolls the stone away from the door and sits down there thinking that he’ll catch them as they try and sneak out of the cave. But Odysseus has each of the men cling to the belly of one of the sheep so that when the sheep go out of the door the next morning to go into the pastures, and Polyphemus feels their backs, he doesn’t feel the men. They escape. This is how they get away from poor Polyphemus. Well, what does this have to do with Poseidon? You may ask. Well, they get out to their ships and they’re pulling away and Odysseus taunts the Cyclops and yells out to him, “Hey, I told you I was Nobody, but actually my name is Odysseus and I’ve blinded you, haha. We got away.”
And Polyphemus says, “Oh my God. It was prophesized to me that I was going to be blinded by Odysseus, but I didn’t expect a little squirt like you. I thought it would actually be, you know, a real, hero, not somebody who would stun me with wine.” They yell back and forth and in his frustration and rage, Polyphemus lifts up his arms and prays to his father Poseidon to avenge him. Poseidon hears the prayers of his son the Cyclops. And from then on, he thwarts all of Odysseus’s plans to get back to Ithaca.
Zeus. Zeus has obviously played a role in this and you may ask, well, why doesn’t Zeus act? Odysseus made prayers to Zeus but Zeus doesn’t do anything because Odysseus is Athena’s champion and she is in charge. And this is a very important competition, this competition between Athena and Poseidon. The god is punishing Odysseus, but it’s really part of this larger ongoing feud with Athena.James Hillman has said that the entire Odyssey can be read as a struggle between Poseidon and Athena. So I want to go into this little bit deeper, starting with a few ideas in an essay that James Hillman wrote called “The Inside of Strategies: Athene,” which you can find in a collection titled Mythic Figures.
According to Hillman, this is a struggle between the rational and the irrational, the systematic and the emotional and impulsive, and Athena as the rational systematic planner is juxtaposed against Poseidon. Also by the way, there are several other deities that are like Poseidon in that they are more immediate and emotional. Those are Ares, Aphrodite, Dionysus, and Pan. Athena is one who takes the long view of things. She doesn’t act irrationally; she’s shrewd, she’s cool, she’s reasonable. And these are the qualities that she attempts to instill in Odysseus by the way, during the course of his long odyssey. Odysseus, her hero, he has the proper wiliness and courage but he’s a hothead.
And this goddess who is associated with the polis, with the city and civic values, wants to teach him how to be more strategic in a way that will help build the city values that later on became famous in the city of Athens. The city of Athens itself was the site of a competition between Poseidon and Athena. It was the custom that a Greek city would have a patron deity. Although the entire Pantheon would of course expect to be recognized and honored by the people, there was a patron deity and when Athens was being founded, both Athena and Poseidon showed up and they each gave a gift to the people. Athena gave them a little sprig of an olive tree and Poseidon gave them a spring of salt water. Both of these things just appeared miraculously out of the ground and the people voted on which gift they thought was the most valuable.
James Hillman says that there was only one vote difference. I didn’t find that in any other sources. In any event, the people decided that the gift that expressed the city’s deepest nature was the olive tree and therefore they gave Athena the honor and the city became the city of “Athens.”
Now some say that Poseidon’s gift to Athens was the horse, not the sea water spring, and the horse is interesting too because the horse belonged to Poseidon, but the bridle, the means of control, was given to the people by Athena. Do you see the difference between these two? Borrowing from Hillman, he says that Poseidon is “eruptive immediacy” and Athena is “distanced reflection.” The difference between these two in Hillman’s essay is this notion of “strategy.”
Now maybe you recognize these tendencies in yourself. Western culture has for millennia placed emphasis on Athena and the gifts or qualities of her father, Zeus– the whole might of light, the powers of the rational mind, consciousness, all kinds of things that are incredibly valuable and important but have also led us to a rather one-sided view of our nature.
In his essay, Hillman says that “strategy is a self-limiting idea.” Not because you have a bad strategy or because you shouldn’t have a strategy, but simply because if you think that everything that you need or want to do can be planned, and if you think that your plans can contain every eventuality, well you’re kidding yourself and you’re setting yourself up for failure, because there will always be chaos and unpredictable events.
Now I want to extend this just a little bit, going back to what I was saying at the beginning about them dividing the world up into different realms. I wonder, do we live with an awareness of these other realms and of other rules? We look at the stories that I told you. Minos keeps the bull as if he doesn’t have to play by anybody’s rules but his own. That’s a form of hubris. Then we’ve got Odysseus here who goes to the land of the Cyclops, invades the territory, robs Polyphemus and insists that Polyphemus is going to treat him according to the rules of Greek hospitality that Odysseus might follow on his home island of Ithaca. And so what ends up happening? Well, he has this gruesome experience with a man- eater, definitely a monster, right? And yet Polyphemus is also the peaceful shepherd, son of Poseidon living a quiet life on a pastoral island.
Where are we? The realm that we’re in is going to dictate who we’re going to meet and the rules that will apply. Now, do we have the wisdom to acknowledge this or do we deny it and naively put ourselves in danger? I mean, by acknowledging the existence of, of what is a monster or a danger to us, I’m not suggesting that we then de-potentate it. I mean, that is not actually acceptance if you think about it. So do we act naively and put ourselves or others in danger? Or do we repress? Do we repress the reality of others and other realms and make monsters then, of what we don’t understand? And not only make monsters of what we don’t understand, but we risk becoming a monster ourselves. That single vision of self, what Jung called the one-sided consciousness, feeds hubris, which we’ve been talking in the last couple of podcasts. It leads to an ego inflation. Too much certainty, which often leads to evil in the best people, the ones with the best intentions, the ones who know what is right, what is normal, what deserves a place and what should happen.
The ocean is a vast, dynamic, restless place. The metaphor and also lived reality of depth. It can be peaceful and calm one moment and angry the next, and so to Poseidon, the God who brings movement and creative tension to this trio of brothers, who animates and enlivens our predictable path to Hades and the underworld. Who unsettles the rational sameness of our routine and helps us remember the limits of our best laid plans.
And that’s it for me, Catherine Svehla and Myth Matters for this week. I’m very grateful to all of you who support this program by sharing it with others. Thank you for spreading the word about what we’re doing here at Myth Matters. I mentioned the community on Bandcamp earlier in this podcast. I am very grateful to those of you who are able to provide some financial support to the podcast and join the community. I want to give special thanks to Kayleigh Frater, who recently joined. And if you’re finding something of value here on Myth Matters and would like to see the podcast grow, then I hope that you will go to the Mythic Mojo website, click on that link, and join the community as well.
Thank you so much for listening. Please tune in next time and until then, happy mythmaking and keep the mystery in your life.
