The Ilion Mystery – Part 2
We saw in the previous article – The Ilion Mystery, Part 1 – that the Trojan War was a pictorial description of a great inner conflict concerning the evolutionary direction beyond liberation of Spirit. On the one hand, the Trojan coalition expresses the view of the most advanced realisations of a yoga in the heights of the mind. Homer calls them Trojans, Lycians and Dardanians, i.e. those who work for liberation in spirit and enlightenment in a yoga that separates spirit from matter, and thus the spiritual quest from ordinary life. This coalition is led by the ‘divine’ Hector, a symbol of an upward expansion of consciousness. The most advanced of these achievements is represented by the queen of the Amazons, Penthesilea, who represents the ability to abstract oneself from suffering through perfect mastery from above.
On the other hand, the Achaean coalition expresses the view of the other parts of the adventurer’s consciousness. Homer calls them Danaans, Achaeans and Argives, i.e. respectively those who work in a spirit of unity, those who concentrate or aim at an annihilation of the ego, and those who work for further purification. This coalition is led by Agamemnon, the symbol of the strongest aspiration for ‘something else’. His brother Menelaus, ‘the one who cares about freedom’, is the king of Sparta, ‘that which arises, the new’. He is married to the most beautiful of Greek women, Helen, the symbol of the right evolutionary direction towards more freedom, ‘for beauty is truth’. She is a daughter of Zeus, and thus a new impulse of the overmind in human evolution.
To this Achaean coalition belongs Achilles. He is the son of Thetis, daughter of the ‘old man of the sea’. She symbolises the roots of life in its emergence from matter. When we consider the meaning of her name, she represents ‘the root of life’, the physical or cellular consciousness. Through his father, Achilles belongs to the lineage of the Titan Oceanos, thus to the process of purification/liberation. He is the king of the Myrmidons, a term meaning ‘ants’. He is therefore the symbol of a yoga of purification which works in the minute movements of consciousness down to the most archaic body consciousness, which cleanses down to the bone, as ants do. He is therefore a symbol of a very advanced purification. Although Helen was born among the Achaeans, the Trojans, through the intermediary of Paris, took her, considering that the evolutionary truth was on their side.
When the poem Ilion begins, the conflict has already been going on for ten symbolic years, the time of a long maturation, and the events described there take place on the last day of this tenth year of the conflict. At the beginning of this advanced phase of Yoga, the adventurer does not clearly perceive whether the divine evolutionary direction is towards an improvement of the present mental man and a continuation of the quest in spirit, or whether it is a radical reorientation. But the highest of the overmind knows this, even if the seeker is not aware of it in all parts of his being. This is why Zeus decided the outcome of the war in advance, having promised Achilles the greatest glory, and promised Agamemnon that he would only return to Argos once the city of Ilion known as Troy had been destroyed:
My friends, Danaan warriors, squires of Ares, great Zeus, son of Cronos, hath ensnared me in grievous blindness of heart, cruel god! seeing that of old he promised me, and bowed his head thereto, that not until I had sacked well-walled Ilion should I get me home; [i]
From the very beginning of Ilion, through the voice of the goddess of the dawn, Eos, who in Greek mythology belongs to the supermind, Sri Aurobindo reminds us of this inescapable outcome decreed by the highest of the overmind:
Looking on men who must die and women destined to sorrow,
Looking on beauty fire must lay low and the sickle of slaughter,
Fateful she lifted the doom-scroll red with the script of the Immortals,[ii]
The unfolding of the Ilion epic is then no more than a detailed description of a number of purifications on all levels, of the ultimate hopes of the ancient spiritual forms to perpetuate themselves, and of their final annihilation. By “ancient spiritual forms”, we must understand those that have survived to the present day and are based on many centuries, even millennia, of practices, experiences and realisations.
What can we understand about the symbolic meaning of a city and its inhabitants? A city is the symbol of a coherent, well-established and organised structure, in this case, for Troy or Ilion, that of a yoga consolidated since time immemorial, that of liberation in the spirit. The name ‘Ilion’ means ‘the liberation of consciousness’. And its inhabitants represent what works within this structure, namely the practices (the heroes), the achievements towards which these practices tend (the heroines), and the new emergences (the children). The city of Troy is thus a symbol of a yoga that has brought about liberation in the spirit, union with the divine in the spirit, the ‘wisdom’ of the enlightened mind, for the Trojan royal lineage belongs to the offspring of the Pleiades Electra, the symbol of this plane, as well as the ‘holiness’ symbolised by the union of the Trojan Anchises with Aphrodite, the goddess of love.
Mythology states that the fundamental cause of the war was the choice of the Trojan shepherd, Paris-Alexander, who designated Aphrodite as the most beautiful of the goddesses, ahead of Hera and Athena: at a certain point in human evolution, primacy in yoga was given to the search for Love before that of Truth. This is why Aphrodite, the force that helps the growth of love, support the Trojan camp. Apollo, the force that helps the development of the Mind of Light is also supporting the Trojans. The goddesses Athena and Hera, respectively the symbol of the forces that support inner growth – the master of yoga – and the force that controls the proper execution of the divine plan, were displeased by the judgment of Paris and swore the loss of Troy and sided with the Achaeans.
If Troy is to be razed to the ground, this does not mean that the quest for Love will cease forever. When humanity has integrated the Truth, then the quest for Love can flourish again. That is why the Trojan Aeneas will survive the slaughter. And that is why Sri Aurobindo refers to Troy as “perishable immortality”: it is only a temporary destruction.
So over Ilion doomed leaned the yearning immense of the sunrise.
She like a wordless marble memory dreaming for ever
Lifted the gaze of her perishable immortality sunwards.[iii]
The Roman poet Virgil imagined that it was up to Rome and its emperors to revive Troy, but this was premature. This was also the basis of Christianity “Love thy neighbour as thyself.”
The situation on the last day of the war
While the battle was no longer being fought on the outskirts of the city but on the ships of the Achaeans, Achilles had finally agreed to enter it after the death of his friend Patroclus, reversing an almost hopeless situation. When the poem Ilion begins, on the last day of the war, many heroes have died on both sides. The adventurer of consciousness has thus already challenged many of the formulations and practices of the spiritual quest in all areas.
In the Trojan camp, Hector is dead, killed by Achilles. This is a sign that the adventurer has accepted once and for all that the new yoga must take place in life itself and on all planes, and is no longer just about an expansion of consciousness into the spirit worlds. Since Achilles finally agreed to return Hector’s body to his father to be buried according to the rites, the myth indicates that the phase that is coming to an end could not take place otherwise. However, the Trojans have not yet agreed to return Helen, i.e. the adventurer has not yet fully accepted that the separation of spirit and matter is over, and is still convinced that the quest for Love comes before the quest for Truth. Also in the Trojan camp, Polydamas, meaning ‘many masteries’, is no more: it is accepted that the path of mastery exercised from above must give way to transformation.
In the Achaean camp, let us mention the death of Patroclus, whose name means “the glory of the ancients”, and who was a friend of Achilles. His death is an acknowledgement that the old processes of purification must be ended while recognising their usefulness in their time. But the adventurer is still not clearly aware of the evolutionary path, for he is aware of the overmind forces working within him in opposite directions. Indeed, the gods have manifested themselves on the battlefield on both sides.
On the other hand, the most advanced achievements and practices of each side, which had previously refrained from participating in the battle, were finally mobilised for the final outcome. In the Achaean camp, it was Achilles and his Myrmidons who turned around an almost hopeless situation for the Achaeans, as the Trojans had broken through the moat and wall protecting the ships. This seems to be a recurring phenomenon in yoga: it is when one thinks that all is lost that there is a reversal. Indeed, each movement must go to its exhaustion.
Achilles, by the letters which constitute his name and given his ancestry, is the symbol of the completion of the double purification/liberation on the mental and vital planes, of a total equanimity and surrender on these planes. It is the completion of this purification that will enable the great reversal.
In the Trojan camp, it is Penthesilea, the queen of the Amazons, who has come with her troops to support the Trojans. Her city is located near the mouth of the river Thermodon, and thus at the peak of the inner fire of union with the Divine in the spirit. It symbolises a grandiose achievement, the ability to abstract oneself from suffering through perfect mastery, through the power of the spirit exercised from above. It demonstrates in some way the validity of spirituality that tends towards conquests in the spirit. Achilles expresses himself as follows about it:
A woman had come in to aid you,
Regal and insolent, fair as the morning and fell as the northwind,
Freed from the distaff who grasps at the sword and she spurns at subjection
Breaking the rule of the gods. She is turbulent, swift in the battle.[iv]
This Amazon queen and her troops of warrior women represent realisations on planes where the fruits of yoga lead to divine intoxication or ecstasy. Achilles addresses her as follows:
Girl, to thy rivers go back and thy hills where the grapes are aspirant.[v]
These planes are very close to the overmind. Indeed, in Book 4, Penthesilea invites the young Eurus, symbol of an ‘enlargement of consciousness’, to join her after the war in her country where the hills besiege Cronion, i.e. the son of Cronos, Zeus, symbol of the highest of the overmind:
Eurus, there in my land thou shalt look on such hills as thy vision
Gazed not on yet, with their craggy tops besieging Cronion,
Sheeted in virgin white and chilling his feet with their vastness.[vi]
Penthesilea embodies a completion of the yoga represented by the three children of Tros, the founder of Troy: liberation in spirit (Ilos), equality (Assarakos) and joy (Ganymede), which can be likened to the realisations that Sri Aurobindo makes explicit in The Synthesis of Yoga, Part 4, Chapter 13, “The Action of Equality”, when he speaks of the progression of equality which can be assessed in oneself through four criteria:
- equality in the most concrete practical sense of the word: freedom from mental, vital and physical preferences, an even acceptance of all God’s workings within and around him;
- a firm peace and absence of all disturbance and trouble,
- a positive inner spiritual happiness and spiritual ease of the natural being which nothing can lessen,
- a clear joy and laughter of the soul embracing life and existence.
Through the mobilisations of the disciplines represented by Achilles and Penthesilea, the adventurer of consciousness is thus aware that the outcome is near.
The final peace offering
In the last peace offering made by Achilles to the Trojans, Sri Aurobindo clearly poses the problem that will be discussed in the rest of the poem, namely the possibility of preserving the forms of the old yoga in the new era that is beginning, the one in which matter will no longer be separated from spirit.
From the point of view of the deep purification of the vital, the achievements in spirit are great, but they have led to the rejection of the lower planes of nature, life and body. They concern only a few and leave out the rest of humanity. Sri Aurobindo tells us that these few realised masters have suppressed fear but are blinded by the powers of the highest mind:
Awe they have chid from their hearts, nor our common humanity binds them,
Stay have they none in the gods who approve, giving calmness to mortals:
But like the Titans of old they have hugged to them grandeur and ruin.
Seek then the race self-doomed, the leaders blinded by heaven.[vii]
However, the adventurer who follows the inner call for greater purification is still attracted to some of the achievements of the quest in spirit, to ‘strange’ powers, miraculous to ordinary humanity. This is illustrated by Achilles’ love for Polyxena, ‘numerous strange realisations’, daughter of the Trojan king Priam. This is why Achilles does not want the ruin of Troy, this city of love.
Then let none seat deaf flame on the glory of Phrygia’s marbles
Or with his barbarous rapine shatter the chambers of sweetness
Slaying the work of the gods and the beauty the ages have lived for.[viii]
At this final stage of the inner struggle, the adventurer is still ready to find a compromise in a spirituality which, while recognising the need for purification towards greater liberation, would retain the practices and achievements of the past by integrating all forms of spirituality.
Achilles therefore asks the Trojan leaders to unite Asia with Greece, returning Helen and giving up much wealth.
Asia join with Greece, one world from the frozen rivers
Trod by the hooves of the Scythian to farthest undulant Ganges.[ix]
To return Helen is to accept that the evolving truth is moving towards even greater freedom, not only that in the spirit: Helen is indeed the wife of Menelaus, the one ‘who cares for freedom’ in the line of Tantalus, the symbol of ‘aspiration’. This offer of peace can remind us of the moment when Mother had prepared in the subtle planes a new creation for the earth in the overmind. She undid it in a few days when Sri Aurobindo told her that they had not come for that, but for a greater conquest.
The Trojan deliberations, the refusal of the offer and the reactions of the Achaeans.
Sri Aurobindo then develops the different points of view that oppose each other in the consciousness of the liberated in spirit. In The Book of the Statesman, it is the viewpoint of the higher mind with clear discernment that is addressed. But this mind is no longer recognised as valid by the liberated in spirit, either because the adventurer has silenced it or put it under tutelage. With lucidity, from this point of view, the adventurer recognises that the forces of the overmind, the gods, are asking him to evolve mastery towards transformation and to stabilise the overmind within himself.
Vainly the sands of Time have been strewn with the ruins of empires,
Signs that the gods had left, but in vain. For they look for a nation,
One that can conquer itself having conquered the world, but they find none.
None has been able to hold all the gods in his bosom unstaggered,[x]
This point of view calls for a humble work on oneself instead of dreaming of unattainable conquests in the mind:
Who but the fool and improvident, who but the dreamer and madman
Leaves for the far and ungrasped earth’s close and provident labour? [xi]
It proposes that the ancient yoga should temporarily step back and accept a union of spiritualities, saying that it will win the day later.
Then in “The Book of the Assembly”, first addressed is the point of view of intuition at the level of the enlightened mind, but Sri Aurobindo warns us at the outset that this pure intuition coming from the Mind of Light has been distorted by fate. This distorted intuition calls the adventurer to maintain the present state, and thus to continue the inner struggle.
Priam’s son Laocoon, fate-darkened seer of Apollo.[xii]
Next to be addressed is the point of view of equality represented by Paris, considered as the greatest of the Trojans, and then that of Aeneas, symbol of the further evolution of consciousness, which leads to the final decision, the rejection of Achilles’ offer.
On learning of the rejection of his offer, Achilles is prepared to go into battle alone if necessary and asks the other Achaean leaders not to destroy the city.
Touch not the city Apollo built, where Poseidon has laboured,
Slay not the work of the gods and the glory the ages have lived for.[xiii]
Despite their rather divergent opinions, the Achaean leaders pretend to accept Achilles’ request, reserving the right to destroy Troy when the time comes. Twice, once in each camp, it is the ruse that is proposed. Sri Aurobindo thus suggests that perfect sincerity and surrender is still not achieved, as some parts of the being seek to retain their achievements or ways of being.
The opening to the present times
From Book 7 onwards, entitled “The Book of the Woman”, Sri Aurobindo extends the problem more and more clearly to the present times and gives the reason for this:
So when the Eye supreme perceives that we rise up too swiftly,
Drawn towards height but fullness contemning, called by the azure,
Life when we fail in, poor in our base and forgetting our mother,
Back we are hurled to our roots; we recover our sap from the savage.[xiv]
He even evokes periods well after Homer and even the contemporary period.
Now to our earth we are bent and we study the skies for its image.
That was Greece and its shining, that now is France and its keenness,
That still is Europe though by the Christ-touch troubled and tortured,
Seized by the East but clasping her chains and resisting our freedom.[xv]
“The Book of the Gods” is the last one to be completely finished. In it, Sri Aurobindo gives his vision from the overmind of the evolution of the world to the present time and the great reversal that must take place. He reminds us that the overmind is the world of the gods who move men without their knowledge:
by the cloud and the sunbeam veiled, and men know not their movers[xvi]
This is the case at least since the forces of the overmind are no longer perceptible to man, since humanity left the golden age:
Nor as in our centuries radiant
Mortal-seeming bodies they wore when they mixed with our nations.[xvii]
Sight we have darkened with sense and power we have stifled with labour,[xviii]
In this book, Zeus summons all the gods and announces that the time has finally come for the fulfilment of what has long been decreed. The highest of the overmind thus orders the annihilation of the old forms of spirituality, their structures, practices and achievements:
Troy shall fall at last and the ancient ages shall perish.[xix]
If the overmind had enabled the victory of Troy, it would have meant that the movement of spirit/matter union was postponed to another evolutionary cycle, and probably that the time had not come for the intervention of the supramental consciousness and forces.
This necessary shift of spirituality from the heights of the spirit to the yoga of the body entails a necessary descent into the shadows for the purpose of purification and liberation.
Twilight thickens over man and he moves to his winter of darkness.[xx]
From the beginning of Book 2, Sri Aurobindo, through certain allusions, invited us to consider that this epic also concerned the present times and made numerous digressions that we recognise as always relevant.
Then as now men walked in the round which the gods have decreed them
Eagerly turning their eyes to the lure and the tool and the labour.[xxi]
He has also put forward some ideas on political organisation such as:
Gathered alert to the call the democracy hated of heaven.[xxii]
In “The Book of the Gods”, Sri Aurobindo adds new considerations on the evolution of civilisations, evoking their greatness and their fall under the pressure of the barbarians. He introduces the idea of cycles and the fact that nothing can be left behind in this evolution, that each descent into night allows for a greater dawn.
So shall the darker and ruder always prevail o’er the brilliant
Till in its turn to a ruder and darker it falls and is shattered. (…)
So shall it last till the fallen ages return to their greatness.
For if the twilight be helped not, night o’er the world cannot darken;
Night forbidden how shall a greater dawn be effected?[xxiii]
At the end of “The Book of the Gods”, Sri Aurobindo gives us a vision of the present humanity marching towards its dark winter and the position of the overmind forces during this period. With the god Ares, he evokes the weakening of the right use of force, the memory of which will be preserved by weak peoples:
Leaving a Roman memory stamped on the ages of weakness[xxiv]
Aphrodite, the goddess of Love, knows that her greatness will disappear, but she will fight to maintain herself, which Zeus grants her for a symbolic time of a cycle and a half.
Thou for a day and a night and another day and a nightfall,
White Aphrodite, prevail; o’er thee too the night is extended.
She has gone forth who made men like gods in their glory and gladness.
Now in the darkness coming all beauty must wane or be tarnished;
Joy shall fade and mighty Love grow fickle and fretful;[xxv]
The god helping the development of the Mind of Light, Apollo, is shrouded in night. Only Poseidon, the master of the subconscious, happily supports Zeus’ decision. The book ends with the relentless manifestation of the forces of fate of which no one is aware until they act: Hades, the god of the corporeal unconscious, Themis, the divine law, and Ananke, the implacable executor of that law.
Book 9, unfinished, begins with the account of some Penthesilea’s deeds in the final battle that is about to begin.
What is to be understood from this poem?
We started out with the idea that, like Homer’s Iliad, Ilion was only for the very advanced seekers, the adventurers of consciousness who had already reached the stage of the enlightened mind, and who had to carry out a thorough purification of the vital without separating spirituality from life. In this perspective, Sri Aurobindo invites us to consider that, apart from a misdirection that separates spirit from matter, it is the adventurer’s attachment to his most advanced achievements that prevents the New, the most extreme symbol of which is Penthesilea and her Amazons. For attachment to these achievements creates a mental, vital or occult fortress.
Only the overmind could see, long before the conflict broke out, that in each of its parts, the more evolved in spirit and outer nature, there remained somewhere a desire to retain the old achievements, a lack of complete surrender, which is expressed in the myth by ‘deceptions‘. On the Trojan side, it is the proposals by certain chiefs such as Anténor to accept Achilles‘ offer while being certain that Troy would very quickly become the most powerful again. On the Achaean side, it is Achilles who is in love with the Trojan Polyxena and refuses the destruction of the city. It takes a ‘lie’ from the other chiefs to get him to join the fight. It is this ‘attachment to the old’ that makes the destruction of the old forms of spirituality inevitable for the adventurers of consciousness. This attachment goes hand in hand with a lack of humility, as Achilles says to Penthesilea.
Distaff and girdle,
Work of the jar at the well and the hush of our innermost chambers,
These were appointed thee, but thou hast scorned them, O Titaness[xxvi]
But this attachment to the ancient forms also concerns us all. For Sri Aurobindo has gradually led us to see this poem as being about humanity as a whole, inasmuch as the adventurers cannot totally dissociate themselves from the rest of humanity. For civilisations and spiritualities in the broadest sense, including religions, are built around the impulses given by realised beings.
He also tells us that the civilisations that have developed on the basis of these impulses follow certain cosmic cycles, without however specifying their duration and nature. He suggests that the present time is both the end of a civilisation and the end of a cycle that should lead us to a new golden age after the passage of a great shadow. We can deduce that this would be a great reversal, accompanied by the energies of the cycles, by the action of the supramental since 1956, and by the influence of a “new consciousness” manifested since January 1969.
If the old forms are to be destroyed, we must discover the new forms of progression. Sri Aurobindo invites us in other writings to each discover our own form of yoga. We are invited to work more on the vital and on the body. And sensitive to the shift in energies, we may accompany the movement that restores the place of women in evolution.
We can compare the destruction of Ilion to one of those moments that Sri Aurobindo calls ‘The Hour of God’ and make this aphorism our own:
Break the moulds of the past,
but keep safe its gains and its spirit,
or else thou hast no future.[xxvii]
Ilion invites each of us to an inner examination: what are ‘the moulds of the past’ to which we cling? And among the gains to be retained, might there not be the discernment for which the ages have toiled? Is not its ‘spirit’ a discovery of the divine within and a gradual surrender in the most perfect humility?
***
[i] Homer, Iliad, Canto 2 Lines 112-113
[ii] Ilion 1-33 ff
[iii] Ilion 2-10
[iv] Ilion 1-502 ff
[v] Ilion 1-659
[vi] Ilion 4-696
[vii] Ilion 1-448 ff
[viii] Ilion 5-231
[ix] Ilion 1-546 ff
[x] Ilion 2-287
[xi] Ilion 2-371
[xii] Ilion 3-6
[xiii] Ilion 5-316
[xiv] Ilion 7-34
[xv] Ilion 7-64
[xvi] Ilion 8-7
[xvii] Ilion 8-124
[xviii] Ilion 8-147
[xix] Ilion 8-211
[xx] Ilion 8-215
[xxi] Ilion 2-23
[xxii] Ilion 2-78
[xxiii] Ilion 8-221
[xxiv] Ilion 8-275
[xxv] Ilion 8-427
[xxvi] Ilion 1-634
[xxvii] Thoughts and Glimpses 237, CWSA 12: 456.