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Evans Lansing Smith, Ph.D. – writer, professor, world traveler, poet, and mythologist – joins us this week in Conversations of a Higher Order to discuss “The Song of the Sirens,” his current contribution to JCF’s MythBlast essay series (click on link in title to read).
With a curriculum vitae too extensive to detail here, I’ll just touch on a few highlights of our guest’s career that are bound to be of interest to Campbell aficionados. Dr. Smith is Chair and Core Faculty of the Mythological Studies M.A./Ph.D. Program at the Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, California (home to Joseph Campbell’s personal library of some 3,000 books). He is the author of 13 books (including two volumes of poetry), along with numerous articles on comparative literature, mythology, and even the Grateful Dead. Dr. Smith devoted a decade to editing Joseph Campbell’s Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth, and then, with Dennis Patrick Slattery, Ph.D., served as co-editor of Correspondence: 1927-1987, the collection of Campbell’s letters.
But, before all that, way back in the 1970s, at the very beginning of what was to become a distinguished career, young Lans Smith traveled on tours of Northern France, Kenya, and Egypt with one Joseph Campbell.
I imagine most of us know the drill by now. I will get the discussion started with a few comments and a question, but it will be your thoughts, reactions, observations and insights that expand this beyond just another interview into a communal exchange of ideas – a true “conversation of a higher order.” Please feel free to join the discussion and engage Dr. Smith directly with your questions and observations.
So let’s begin:
Dr. Smith, thank you for taking time out from your busy schedule to come play with us in Conversations of a Higher Order. My head is still spinning from the explosion of the common misperception of the Sirens as seductive mermaids enticing sailors to their doom with an ethereal, erotic song. No matter what translation I’ve read, I realize now that when I’d come to Book 12, I would automatically project that culturally-engrained image onto the passage. As you return us to the actual text, what has been interpreted by some as a morality tale about resisting temptation deepens into something far more profound. I thank you for that.
I do have one observation, followed by question.
I can’t help but note that the Sirens are only heard by those who undertake a voyage. If one does not embark on the journey, then there is no risk – and, of course, no adventure, no tale to tell.
And, as you dispel the default interpretation, I can see why that Siren song is so compelling: encountering that song, astronaut Rusty Schweickart has a metaphysical experience; an indigenous shaman learns not to fear the universe; and Campbell himself suggests therein lies an encounter with the wisdom that surpasses all understanding.
Where, then, lies the danger? What is the risk to hearing that song?
I return to Circe’s warning, that those who hear the Sirens’ song will never find home. Brave Ulysses must be lashed to the mast, his sailors’ ears plugged with beeswax, his men warned to ignore his entreaties to free him to follow that song. It would seem the danger isn’t so much hearing the song as pursuing it once it’s heard.
Is this an experience only for the rare soul – the shaman, the epic hero, the astronaut floating in space? Must we plug our ears with beeswax and bend our backs to the oars – or is this an opportunity within our reach? If so, to what mast must we be bound to be saved? Who are our oarsmen, to see us past this compelling peril?
Asking for a friend . . .
Stephen Gerringer
tie-dyed teller of tales
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In Campbell’s view, the lure of the Sirens is the lure of transcendence, the lure of immortality, which he associates with the Oriental paths to enlightenment and release from the wheel of death and rebirth. Odysseus is heroic—in a very Occidental, humanistic way—in his decision to remain bound to the wheel of life, in all of its joys and sorrows, by returning home to his wife Penelope on Ithaka. Even though he knows all the suffering that decision entails, he has previously rejected Calypso’s offer of release through immortality, by saying (as we all must): “Let the trial come!”
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Dear Dr. Smith and All,
Dr. Smith, thank you for this most hauntingly lovely topic of the sirens. I love this thread. On the note about the siren song being about the transcendent point of mortality and immortality I have long been haunted by this siren song I post below, and its title is “The Mortal Coil: Song to the Siren.” I chose this particular video on You Tube rather than the official one since this video has the lyrics in it as the song goes along. I hope you all enjoy it. Cocteau Twins have done many songs with mythic themes.
~ Marianne
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Thanks Marianne for this link. Do you know Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren” (also available on Youtube): it’s a beauty!
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Hi Dr Smith,
Like Stephen I’m also curious about who can encounter the Siren and what qualifies as a voyage. Is the water to be interpreted as an archetypical symbol for the unconscious? If so, does this imply the sirens are only encountered on inward spiritual journeys or could this be triggered through other life events?
Thanks,
Phillip
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Hello Phillip: in Campbell’s Occidental Mythology and elsewhere during his many public lectures on Homer’s Odyssey, he suggested that the whole poem should be seen as a kind of dream, following the Jungian model of the “night-sea journey,” a descent into the domain of the deep unconscious (often symbolized by crossing bodies of water) which activates the archetypal fields that manifest in such images as the Sirens. So yes, an inward journey. But since those same archetypal energies that manifest in the images of dream and myth are the same energies that manifest in the forms of the physical world, i.e., in nature, any deep encounter catalyzed by any kind of journey (internal or external) will put us in contact those profound energies. I am thinking of an experience I had while sailing around Cape Breton, and suddenly hearing high-pitched shrill cries all around us, which turned out to be coming from a bunch of pilot whales circling around the bow and leading us into the harbor. It is just a matter, as Campbell often said, of opening our eyes and ears to the song of the universe all round us.
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Dr Smith,
Thank you for your MythBlast. It does resonate well.
All hail “The Still Small Voice” , that lullabies, cradles, “The Sound And The Fury” with the veiled haunting gossamer Song of the Sirens.
“And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.
“And it was so, when Elijah heard it, that he wrapped his face in his mantle, and went out, and stood in the entering in of the cave. And, behold, there came a voice unto him, and said, What doest thou here, Elijah?” – 1 Kings 19:11-13
“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.” – Shakespeare
May the Lion Ulysses pold to the mast , Bloom , echo back with joyous strains.
Gloria in excelsis.
“Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing.
Imperthnthn thnthnthn.”- James Joyce
May the brass trumpet sound !!! The King, the King, the King is dead … Long live the King !!!
R³
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Nice quotations R3: Shakespeare, the King James Bible, and Faulkner make for good company. The song of the sirens is in the rhythms of ecstatic prose and sublime, inspired poetry.
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Dr Smith ,
Do you think the sirens sing us towards Maslow’s peak experiences and Joyce’s epiphanies ?
Robert
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Hello Again R3: I am not familiar enough with Maslow to connect his system with the experience of the Sirens. I do know Joyce well. His concept of the Epiphanies informed his collection of short stories, Dubliners. He called them “sudden spiritual manifestations” that occur during the ordinary course of any particular day, in the context of domestic life. Homer’s Sirens are clearly outside the boundaries of an ordinary day in the life, so the parallel is tenuous. But if you want to explore the role of Homer’s Sirens, read the Chapter in Ulysses normally simply called Sirens. It is set in a bar in Dublin at lunch time, when someone gets up to sing, and Leopold watches the barmaids flirting behind the counter.
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Dr. Smith,
Yes I enjoy Joyce also. He was alluded to above with a pun and the opening lines of his Siren chapter. Being pold to a mast was just an ordinary day in the life of Ulysses. Leopold Bloom’s ordinary day was fashioned after the Ulysses’ journey. It’s lots of fun to follow literary allusions ! And riff on them …
R³
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Thanks for posting this! You might also check out the Sirens in “Oh Brother Where Art Thou.” It is one of the great scenes in the movie.
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Hello,
Great movie. I enjoy the Sullivan’s Travels association. Love them Soggy Bottom Boys !!! 🎶 “I’ll meet you on God’s Golden Shore” 🎶
The Sirens sing us to our Death …
May we die daily …
I do enjoy their echo through Tons of temples shot through the canons of history …
Greek gods Hypnos (sleep) and Thanatos (death) who, in the Greek mythology, were brothers.
Death Instincts (Thanatos) The concept of the death instincts was initially described in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which Freud proposed that “the goal of all life is death.” Freud believed that people typically channel their death instincts outwards. Aggression, for example, arises from the death instincts.
“To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;”
Robert
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Dear Dr. Smith,
Thank you for this precious piece that I read many times.
1. “Plugging our ears with beeswax and bending our backs to the oars” Could this not also be us “following our bliss”. That is the time, that we are led by the strength of passion rather than the logical mind. It’s the time that we care not what others think of us, where our next meal will be from, whom do we owe— At this point, nothing else matters.
2. R³ – your observation that ” sirens sing us towards Maslow’s peak experiences and Joyce’s epiphanies ?” resonates with me. I have always considered Maslow’s peak experience, and the song of the sirens, and our ears plugged with beeswax as one and the same. As Joe says, a mythically inspired person thinks nothing of his safety, security, personal growth and progeny, cares not for the lower levels of the pyramid, but goes right to the top.
3. Dr. Lansing Smith, you wrote, “the lure of the Sirens is the lure of transcendence, the lure of immortality, which he associates with the Oriental paths to enlightenment and release from the wheel of death and rebirth” Does not the Lure of the transcendence automatically shuts us off to all other distractions, bound to our own center?
Shaahayda
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Shaheda,
We as a species have abstracted and miniaturized the pyramid so. Our hierarchy of needs the pinnacle of self actualization. Yet the pinnacle is where each of us reside. It is a mundane reality of evolution. We perch on mountains of isolation of self creation. Singing our own songs. Longing to draw others to listen to the beauty of our suffering. We look out across the universe to see others at a spooky distance on their peak singing their song. I hear the grand harmony. It is all a myth … of mountains singing o’er the plains. The Siren song is a conversation of the highest order that we listen to in silent splendor … it reverberates as a whale song from the deep abyss … humanities longing and desire shall lead us forward as a light in the darkness of the soul … of the collective … we shall find our home once more at journeys end … spewed regurgitated reanimated reincarnated from the belly of the beast … on to God’s golden shore …
I think many project themselves as the hero Ulysses. We don’t often see ourself as a siren luring others off their journey to edify our ego.
The whale the great fish the beast leviathan behemoth are wonderful mythic metaphors of civilization institution comprised of self actualized individuated individuals that rise and fall from the depths singing the song of the sirens …
R³
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Thanks for these great links and posts. Since you included the Whale Song, you might take a look at Chapter 126 of Moby Dick, “The Life-Buoy,” which somewhat obliquely refers to the Sirens:
•“in the deep darkness that goes before dawn […] sailing by a cluster of rocky islets” the sailors are startled by a “plaintively wild and unearthly cry,” like the “wailings of the ghosts of all Herod’s murdered innocents” (526)
•”The Christian or civilized part of the crew said it was mermaids,” but the Manxman “declared that the wild thrilling sounds” were the “voices of newly drowned men” (526-27)—like Homer’s Sirens
This may also evoke one of the legends associating the Sirens with Persephone and the Underworld alluded to in an art work called “Persephone’s Companions Turned Into Sirens,” Johann Ulrich Krauss (1690): In some versions of the myth, the sirens were once nymphs and companions of the goddess Persephone. When Persephone was abducted by Hades the nymphs prayed for wings so that they could search for their lost friend. Their wish was granted and they became half bird and half woman. Another version (Ovid V, 551)) states that as punishment for not intervening when Persephone was abducted, Demeter changed their form.
One of the nymphs was named Parthenope and comes to shore by the marina in Naples.
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Evans,
How oft are beings drowned by the tempting song of the sirens?
Thank you for the allusion they are threads that weave well into the fabric of Penelope.
Persephone and her organic agrarian annual and perennial vegetation myths grow well with the sounds of the Sirens serenading them back from the dead as the metempsychosis of myths that never die only translate to a new state of being as romantic as Longfellow …One more interesting thread to weave in Starbuck . Funny how something as mundane and daily as a cup of Joe can lead to a mythic contemplation of the Sirens. All hail the convenience of modern civilization!!! The contemporary leviathan in which we live move and have our being. May our’s and it’s siren song be heard long after we are dead and gone !!!
Robert R Reister
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Evans and Robert, and All,
Thank you for sharing the whale song. In some shamanic traditions, the whale’s sound carries ancient records of knowledge of life (back to prehistoric) on earth. The frequencies of their sounds can tap into the mind of the Great Spirit to tell the secrets of the ages or else what you might want to know about yourself, since the whale medicine can teach us to also find our own sound and frequencies. What sounds do we humans share in common?: laughter, crying, yelling out…but we do not have our own whale song per say or we do not all have a howl, and while we do have a collection of music from music history, we do not have just one song that we all sing in uni-verse. If we did, I wonder what it would be? Would it be a piece by Beethoven or something by the Beatles or perhaps a blending of the two or of the entire reservoir?!
And thank you Evans and Robert and all who mention the belly of the whale where a challenge and rebirth takes place within what I see now as a sort of concert hall and echo chamber!
I once saw a whale in the Pacific ocean while fishing with my dad in the Hawaiian seas. It was so beautiful to see it surface and dive. It is so wonderful to see the “depths” surface in this way. That entire trip (vacation) was my initiation into my teenage years, my rite of passage. There were many spectacles, and so it was spectacular! Writers, artists, musicians, historians, shamans, any kind of record keepers such as dream keepers/journalists, etc. all love Whale. In a sense I can see where every totem animal carries its sound strongly or uniquely enough to lend us our ears to hear our own voices and our own calls and responses/answers, like the howl of the wolf or the hoot of the owl, yet Whale is specifically known to carry various frequencies to life as we know (or do not know) it.
~ Marianne
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Hi Everyone,
I am responding here to my own post about the shamanic/mystical attributions given to Whale, which was # 5118 and to Robert’s (R3’s) response post # 5040.
I mentioned that Whale is said to hold the records of life on this earth. Meanwhile, the ocean it lives in is often called the Ancient Mother of us all. So I responded again here just to post another “whale song” (or dolphin song?–dolphin is the breath, and the breath produces voice/song) I enjoy so much called “Ancient Mother” by Robert Gass. At the end of the song, there are also some whale (dolphin) song sounds. I have posted it before on the Facebook site I used to go to (I do prefer this forum!) and I might have posted it in this forum before too yet I do not recall whether I did so or not.
Enjoy, en/joy, in joy,
Marianne
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Hi Stephen,
Now it is letting my type be seen! The first few times I tried to respond to your beautifully compelling questions, this site would not let the type be seen. Now it is working again–
Stephen, the questions you write at the end of your post are lovely:
Where, then, lies the danger? What is the risk to hearing that song?
I return to Circe’s warning, that those who hear the Sirens’ song will never find home. Brave Ulysses must be lashed to the mast, his sailors’ ears plugged with beeswax, his men warned to ignore his entreaties to free him to follow that song. It would seem the danger isn’t so much hearing the song as pursuing it once it’s heard.
Is this an experience only for the rare soul – the shaman, the epic hero, the astronaut floating in space? Must we plug our ears with beeswax and bend our backs to the oars – or is this an opportunity within our reach? If so, to what mast must we be bound to be saved? Who are our oarsmen, to see us past this compelling peril?
It sounds like a good intro to a very good book. I love this poetic thread.
Thank you, All, so nice to hear people’s voices!
~Marianne
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Thank you, Marianne,
I like the way Lans answers my questions, which circles back to Joseph Campbell’s own rejection of the way of renunciation (leaving life behind and withdrawing from the mundane world in favor of navel-gazing –where the Siren’s song takes us when we hear it and pursue it exclusively).
. . . as opposed to Joe’s approach – drawing on Krishna’s revelation to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, Nietzsche’s amor fati, and the “bodhisattva formula” within Mahayana Buddhism – of “saying yea to life!” – and joyfully participating in this world of sorrows.
Seems the myth advises us one way to successfully navigate that passage is to lash oneself to the mast – the World Axis, or Still Point round which all revolves … which strikes me as a subtle thread tying together all these wonderful MythBlast essays from so many different authors.
Stephen Gerringer
tie-dyed teller of tales-
Thank you Stephen for this further information on this topic. I am going to come back and revisit this asap. For now, head is swimming! –in Eastern philosophies and aesthetics–so much to say in this topic on aesthetics, and about the contemplated naval! Thank you! Also aesthetics in regards to Shaahayda’s quote of Campbell’s passage in her post above which I will also revisit. I would love to dig into it right now, but I have to get back to work for now today!
~ Marianne
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Interesting that for the early Christian commentators the mast was analogous to the Cross, and Odysseus to Jesus in his resistance to and rejection of the song of the sirens, which for them, as for the Gnostics, represented the lure of the flesh, from which the soul must liberate itself, in order to return to the homeland of the spirit, symbolized by Ithaca. For the Pythagoreans, of course, it was just the opposite: the sirens offered the hope of spiritual transcendence.
What a wonderful round of posts! Thank everyone so much for participating!
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We would like to extend our thanks to Evans Lansing Smith, Ph.D. for spending time with us in Conversations of Higher Order.
Dr. Smith, thank you for giving so generously of your time – far more than the single week we expected! Though, of course you may feel free to stick around and participate as much or as little as you would like, we do understand you have other commitments you must attend to; however, don’t be surprised if the conversation continues on without you as participants continue to explore these subjects.
We look forward to doing more of the same with your next MythBlast essay.
Stephen Gerringer
tie-dyed teller of tales
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