Pharaoh resolves to kill the rebel chiefs on his ancestor’s great feast day as sacrifice, and when he allows them a last orgy, the friends confront death with varied emotions. But Pharaoh is in the grip of a nightmare he had seen the previous night, of a savage and monstrous head that rose above the horizon, a dangling corpse. No pleasure can console him, no dream interpreter ease him. Meanwhile, in his dungeon, Odysseus recalls a visit he had made with Rala to the embalmers, and rejoices to remember that on the walls of the tombs they had painted a devouring flame that flashed beyond all comforts of life and nature, even beyond the gods. Recalling how a conjurer once tried to blow spirit into the mouth of a hawk-faced god, Odysseus knows that it is man who gives life to gods. Pharaoh’s chief steward visits the prisoners and offers reprieve to anyone who can exorcise the king’s evil dream. Odysseus offers to interpret the king’s dream in dance. With the mask of his newly carved god dangling down his back, he dances of beggary, of war, of the maimed and wounded, then suddenly clamps the mask on his face. Pharaoh shrieks with terror, recognizing the terrifying face of his nightmare, then commands his guards to escort Odysseus and his troop out of the land. Odysseus returns to the dungeon, tells his troop of the glad news, eager now to leave Egypt, to lead his people to a new land and there build a city and civilization based on his new vision of God. Nile offers to follow them to the frontier, but declares that he will remain in his native land to foment rebellion.
BOOK XII
The flight out of Egypt. Odysseus’ troops are composed of the despairing, the criminal, the riffraff of life, that disruptive element which most often breaks down old values and treks toward new frontiers. When they reach the frontier, he holds up the mask of his god and asks all to choose between the poor comforts of their slavish existence and this new god who offers only thirst, hunger, and freedom. He wants only the unregenerated, the restless, the unappeased to come with him. In a dance of delirium, Odysseus declares that God has revealed to him the new road and the new city they must build, then divides the group into three troops. Orpheus precedes with his flute, Granite leads the youths and the amazon-like maidens, Kentaur the old and the children, and Odysseus men in the prime of life.
For three days they follow the Nile amid crocodiles, snakes, and mud villages till they reach the desert sands. As they penetrate further and further into the desert’s throat, they pass a human skull filled with bees, a last blade of green grass, huge carved rocks of a past sand-smothered civilization until, weak with hunger and thirst, they clamor to return, even though to slavery and poverty. Granite is ruthless, but Odysseus understands man’s frailties and urges his people to plod further to where he tells them he envisages food. Their despair is increased when an oasis to which they hasten proves to be a mirage, but Odysseus reminds them that he had promised only a pitiless god of thirst, hunger and war. Obscurely moved by the ruthless laws of survival and necessity, he determines to abandon all who do not have the strength to follow him, but tender-hearted Kentaur, enraged at his master’s seeming inhumanity, refuses to leave the old and the children to their death, and stays behind to lead them.
Odysseus and his remaining troops plod on; he tells them fables to cheat their hunger, refuses to let them water even a flower for fear their hearts, also, might cast roots, and keeps them pitilessly on the march. (In Ithaca, meanwhile, Telemachus and Nausicaä play with their small son tenderly but are dismayed to note in him many characteristics of his fierce grandfather.) At length one day the troops sight a Negro village, but before they can decide how to proceed, they are attacked by a fierce Negro band which almost annihilates them. Kentaur and his group, who had captured a Negro hunter and forced him to lead them to where food might be found, appear suddenly and turn the tide to victory. They make peace with the Negroes and are welcomed by the village chieftain, a monster of fat, who mistakes Kentaur for their leader because of his own monstrous bulk, and proposes to marry him to his daughter, “a hippopotamus of fat.” A great feast is prepared in a courtyard under an oak tree hung with the skulls of enemies. Odysseus, suspecting that the Negro chief will try to surfeit them with food, drink, and women, warns his men to be on the alert. In an orgiastic dance and ritual, Kentaur and his fat bride are wed, and all disappear to couple in the shadows, but as Odysseus keeps vigil and notices the Negroes stealthily gathering the weapons, he blows on his conch in warning, and with difficulty disentangles his friends from black erotic embraces. They plunder the village of food, leave behind those who refuse to continue, and plod on.
Kentaur broods on the ruthless god of Odysseus who sieves out his followers so cruelly, according to survival, and plays no favorites. Odysseus tells his troops that all adventures and all experience lead to further revelations of God, that God grows as man grows, changes with man’s environment and culture, for it is man who feeds him: “God is the monstrous shadow of death-grappling man.” God needs us, not out of love, but because we are the flesh through which he lives and grows. Granite declares he now knows for what two causes he’d give his life: for that which scorns man’s comfortable virtues and restlessly seeks to find further horizons, and for that which declares that hunger and thirst are what impel men to explore and to seek. Odysseus agrees, and carries this thought still further: that salvation and destruction are one, for only by the dissolution of what has been accomplished can man enlarge his spirit and reach his only salvation. He tells Granite of his vision of a city based on this new vision of God, and tells Kentaur that cities must be created out of vision before they can be turned into deeds.
BOOK XIII
Through dark Africa to the source of the Nile. In his travels, meanwhile, Rocky stumbles on a seemingly deserted village at a time when the old king is being assassinated, according to traditional ritual, by three witch doctors to make way for a young fertile chief. The people hail Rocky as one sent them by their white-haired gods, and make him chief. Odysseus and his troops, meanwhile, have been pushing through a jungle of damp mold, of monstrous trees, entangling vines, and savage animals; here God has taken the mask of a frightening and fetid forest, of rapine and lust. Rocky is taught his duties as a chieftain of the Negroes, and plans wars and conquests. One day Granite captures a female leopard cub and presents her to Odysseus; they become inseparable companions. Finally the troops cut through the jungle and soon spy some Negroes tilling their fields, but these run away in fright at the approach of white men. Granite sights their village and wants to press on immediately, but Odysseus counsels waiting until the following day. At dawn three Negro envoys greet the white men as though they were gods, tell them of a plague which is devastating their village, and ask for help, but Odysseus speaks to them so fiercely in a demand for food as recompense, that the Negroes scatter in fright. The friends help Orpheus hew out a savage headless god from a block of wood, then Odysseus tells him to take this to the village, fall into a seeming trance, proclaim that this god will heal all ills, and then trade it for food; but he warns Orpheus that he must not be deceived by a few miracles that might indeed happen. Orpheus, however, is swept away by his own self-induced ecstasy and when, indeed, the crippled walk and the blind see, believes in the artifact of his own hands, falls down and worships the god he had created, and though he sends food to his friends, refuses to return, not even when Odysseus comes to take him.
After a storm one day, Odysseus scornfully tells his friends what had befallen Orpheus. They spy a town in a deep gulch, and in a forest find some Negro boys undergoing a ritualist sexual spring rite before descending into the village to possess their brides. Leaving Kentaur with the troops, Granite and Odysseus descend to the village and there with great joy are reunited with Rocky. Kentaur joins them for a great feast, and a sorcerer conjures up a vision of Orpheus dressed as a witch doctor, prostrate before his new god. After three days and nights of feasting, Odysseus bids Rocky cast off his new crown and join them once more, but when Rocky reminds him that, in line with his own teaching, a pupil must cast off his teacher a
nd become a leader of men in turn, to shoot beyond the twelve axes Odysseus once strung with his arrow, Odysseus rejoices, blesses Rocky, and asks for the blessing of the youth in return.
The friends leave Rocky, and after nine days of marching through stony wilderness, they sight some mountains and begin to climb them. One day Granite yells out, “The Sea!” and all, through a cleft, glimpse an endless blue-green shore. When they reach the waters, plunge into them with joy and find them sweet, they realize that they have come to the end of their journey, the lake source of the Nile where they plan to build their ideal city. Odysseus directs his troops to erect temporary shelters on the shore while he climbs the adjacent mountain to commune for seven days and nights with God in order that he may thus formulate the new laws and plans for the ideal city. Accompanied by his leopard cub at dawn, he begins his ascent.
BOOK XIV
Odysseus communes with God. It is in this book that Kazantzakis develops the core of his ascetic philosophy, further amplified and more clearly systematized in his small book Spiritual Exercises: Salvatores Dei.
First Day (1-84). Odysseus climbs the mountain all day until at night he finds a cave in which to sleep where neither ghosts nor demons dare attack him.
Second Day (85-161). In the light of dawn, Odysseus sees that the walls of his cave are painted with primitive drawings of a hunt, and hails his blood brother, the first archer. He dedicates this day to song and joyful embracement of life, then daydreams of his most secret wish, the possibility of deathlessness, but a small worm climbs up his chest to remind him of his mortality. At night he sleeps once more in the cave.
Third Day (162-443). Odysseus sits on a huge rock, calls the bird of god to descend, then sinks into silent contemplation. He recalls his first experience with the three elements, woman, sea, and God: how as an infant he had almost fainted when he first smelled a woman’s breasts, and how at the age of two he had pelted the sea with stones and yelled: “O God, make me a God!” He ate and became the things he ate, grew to adolescence, wedded, had a son, then went off to war. Choked with memories, he acknowledges that mysterious primitive forces within him have stifled much in his heart that cried out for liberation. He looks in the yellow eyes of his leopard cub and sees himself as mankind’s prototype, a caveman. Atavistic memories seethe within him, cruel hates and shameless longings in which his soul lies smothered; he becomes aware of man’s fathomless line of evolutionary development from inanimate nature to all forms of animate nature, to man, to spirit. At sunset he sleeps on the rock and dreams that his heart and mind quarrel like an old married couple. The female heart is dissatisfied with the boundaries of law and order which the timid mind is constantly erecting; she wishes to break through routine, cast off the yoke, smash down the middle wall of phenomena and plunge through into the other world, down into the abyss, into God; but the male mind scolds and tells her to be content with what is visible and at hand.
When the eternal Outcry in man shouts for help, the mind scurries away, but the heart pours out her blood in order that the phantom forefathers may drink and revive. An individual, however, must choose whom of his forefathers he wishes to revive, what of heritage and history he wants to retain. Odysseus thrusts away those who wish to live for material values only; he denies his father, Laertes, because a father must always give way to his son; he denies his family ancestors, for earth has now produced sons better then they; he denies even his dear friend Captain Clam because the world must be ruled not by love alone but by more ruthless principles of what is most needed. Only when his three great Fates approach does Odysseus give them of his blood to drink. Tantalus drinks, and then accuses Odysseus of planning to build a city and to settle down, of betraying the unappeasable heart, the restless search. Heracles drinks, and Odysseus hails him as that hero who in twelve labors pummeled man’s flesh into a refinement of spirit, and weeps to see him now emaciated by death. Heracles urges Odysseus to complete the task he himself had left unfinished, to push on to the thirteenth and final labor (immortality), though he cannot discern what it may be.
Fourth Day (444-736). When he awakens, Odysseus becomes aware of all the phantoms he carries in his bloodstream. He knows now that he is the product of all these phantoms have done and what they still long to do. He, like all men, is a bridge between past and future, holding within himself the dead, the living, the unborn. The realization that he carries infinite depths within himself frees Odysseus from a concern with his own Ego so that he knows now that he must go beyond the I to his own racial ancestors. But now he sees his third Fate, Prometheus, nailed to a rock, and addresses him as father of flame and brain, as the “brave mind of god-battling man,” as one who stabilized man on earth and yet impelled man’s mind toward the sun. Prometheus laments that he has failed, forsaken and betrayed by man whom he had created, and that he could not finish “life’s most glorious task,” that he neither made his peace with God nor killed him, that “Beyond all flame and light, beyond even Death, my son,/the final labor, the last ax, still gleams with blood.” He vanishes, and the Outcry is heard shouting for help once more.
Odysseus now plunges beyond his particular race and into a feeling of brotherhood for all races, realizing that he and all men are units in the evolutionary stream of all mankind. But now the voice of Mother Earth within him bids him push on beyond the boundaries of the human race itself to make his peace with all of nature, with beasts and trees, to direct her now and tell her what to do (as if, in the scale of evolution, man can now go beyond necessity and himself direct the life-process). In dreams that night, he feels himself a part of all animate and inanimate nature, of birds, beasts, insects, rocks and sea, until he touches the most atavistic and primordial sources of the universe, the inscrutable and uncompassionate rhythms where life and death cannot be differentiated one from the other.
Fifth Day (737-950). At dawn next day it seems to Odysseus that the men and beasts on the cave walls have come to life and swirl in dance about him. Soon he feels himself close-pressed by the phantoms of primordial life until they all make way for Leviathan, the most primeval ancestor of all, the great mass of somnolent life in which the soul had just begun to flutter its wings. After Leviathan passes, Odysseus opens his arms to welcome man’s immediate ancestor, the Ape, and addresses him with homage and affection. He turns then to all other creatures from which man is descended, even the humble dung-beetle and the ox. In his brain all become friends, the lion and the fawn. He welcomes the birds and the insects until his identification with living creatures is complete, so that in the spring rains that night all creatures seek shelter in his body and his brain.
Sixth Day (951-1246). Amid the rain-drenched earth at dawn, Odysseus listens to a male and female voice within his breast. The female heart, with love and tenderness, calls to the Spirit (to God), that is still submerged in mud roots and animal flesh, and longs to make it more human, to further it in its evolutionary ascent. The Spirit warns that it is savage and bloody, but when the heart still calls with love, it springs up as the heart would wish it, in form of a gallant youth. Odysseus now hears the Spirit (or God) groaning within himself, ever climbing a bloodstained road through inanimate and animate nature, and finally even through man. Trees and beasts smother God, even man’s soul cannot contain his ever-upward reach, and he begs Odysseus to help him fight free. God is filled with fear, for he sees no end to the dark climb as he stumbles and struggles upward. Odysseus vows to dedicate himself to the liberation of this Spirit which in him cries out for help, and he now sees this vital impulse in all things, in the fruit he eats, in the seed he plants. All is one cyclical nourishment: “Birds, fruit, and water have all become Odysseus now!” He comes to the realization that it is God who is eternally crying out in man to be liberated.
The poet now addresses Odysseus to tell him that he has gone beyond the restrictions of his ego, his race, all mankind, and even all animate and inanimate things, until he has heard and understood the Outcry that stifles not only i
n all bodies but even in all souls, and struggles to mount further still. This insistent struggle toward purer and purer refinement some call Love, some God, some Death, and some an Outcry. The soul now seems to Odysseus but a wick which the flaming Spirit consumes as it yearns for other kindling, that it might burn with a more rarefied light. He vows to build an ideal city that will embody his vision forever. Singing with joy, Odysseus suddenly sees a vision of God undergoing many forms: as Tantalus, as Heracles, as Prometheus, as charging armies that symbolize the military campaign of the spirit, and finally as an old vagabond, an outcast constantly scorned and persecuted, in whom may be seen “the savage bitterness, the spite, the unfathomed eyes,/the flickering flames that glittered in his eyes like snakes,/the bloodstained endless upward road he climbed with grief.” Odysseus is wrung with compassion, and then filled with serenity as the setting sun and the full moon glow simultaneously on opposite sides of the horizon.
Seventh Day (1247-1410). An inner voice mocks Odysseus that his air-castles are of no worth unless realized in actual practice and works, in acts and deeds. With pebbles, clay and mud, he builds a model of his proposed new city, then plunges down the mountain slope. He knows that the world was made when two antithetical forces clashed, one male and the other female, in the arenas of phenomena and the mind. The Act hews forests, builds ships, and with its precious cargo, God, who is wounded and bleeding, crosses the fearful abyss in a constant strife, age on hopeless age, “to raise the nonexistent shores from endless waves.” A voice in Odysseus urges him to use all the powers of his mind and imagination in order to shape nature and life in their image, for then man not only frees a god, but even makes a god. Odysseus embraces Lady Act as a bridegroom his fecund bride, then hurries to his fulfillment, to the building of his ideal city.