Psychedelic Apes

by Alex Boese

  For this reason, Homer’s masculinity was taken for granted. No one questioned it. It would have seemed absurd to do so. It went unchallenged until the very end of the nineteenth century, when the British novelist Samuel Butler first put forward the heretical idea that perhaps, for all those centuries, everyone had been wrong. Perhaps Homer actually was a woman.

  Surely such an idea can be dismissed easily. There must be some direct evidence of Homer’s gender. After all, doesn’t he identify himself as a man somewhere in his poems? Don’t contemporaneous writings refer to him as such?

  As it turns out, no. There’s no direct evidence that Homer was a man. Homer never mentioned his/her gender. In fact, the two poems attributed to Homer offer no details at all about their authorship. Their creator remains completely anonymous throughout both, never stepping forward to take credit. The name Homer doesn’t even appear anywhere in them. Nor is it mentioned in any contemporaneous source.

  The origin of the poems themselves is similarly shrouded in mystery. These are the few facts, such as they are:

  Around 1200 BC, a war took place around Troy, which was a city located on the north-west corner of what is now Turkey. Or perhaps it was a series of battles. Archaeologists aren’t sure, though they’re fairly confident that some kind of conflict took place there, and that it was fought between the residents of Troy and forces from the mainland of Greece. Four hundred years then passed, and in around 800 BC the Greek alphabet was invented. And sometime relatively soon after this, two epic poems about the conflict were set down in writing. They were among the earliest works written in the new alphabet. The first poem was the Iliad, set during the battle of Troy itself. The second poem was the Odyssey, which followed the adventures of the hero Odysseus as he tried to return home after the war, but, on his journey, was waylaid by monsters and sorceresses.

  Once the poems had been written down, however, even more time passed before the Greeks started to wonder about who had written them. The identity of the author was lost in the mists of history. It was now after 500 BC, and, in the absence of any firm information, a legend sprang up attributing the poems to an ancient bard named Homer. The Greeks, though, were well aware that they didn’t actually know anything about who Homer was, and even more legends sprang up to fill the biographical void about him. The most popular of these was that he had been a blind poet who had lived on the coast of Asia Minor.

  This meagre suite of details about the Homeric poems has left many questions unresolved. Scholars are sure that the poems must have existed to some degree in oral form before they were written down, recited by bards during public festivals. But were they composed in their entirety as oral poetry, perhaps soon after the Trojan War, and then passed down for many generations before finally being transcribed? Or did the person who wrote them down essentially invent them, perhaps weaving together fragments of older oral poems? Scholars simply don’t know.

  Also, precisely how soon after the invention of the Greek alphabet (circa 800 BC) were the poems written down? The classicist Barry Powell has argued that the alphabet itself may have been invented in order to write them down. Others, however, put their composition as late as 600 BC.

  Scholars aren’t even sure Homer was just one person. Many believe the works we attribute to Homer were composed by lots of different authors and then stitched together at some later date. Another theory suggests that the name Homer referred to a guild of poets.

  Homer’s biography, in other words, is a blank slate. It’s only tradition that ascribes masculinity to the poet.

  However, pointing out the lack of biographical information about Homer merely establishes uncertainty. Is there any reason to truly suspect Homer was a woman?

  Samuel Butler thought so. He detailed his case for this in a 270-page book titled The Authoress of the Odyssey, published in 1897. His argument focused entirely on the Odyssey, which he felt had a distinctly feminine sensibility to it. So much so that he concluded it could only have been written by a woman.

  Butler noted that the Odyssey was full of female characters: Penelope, Minerva, Eurycleia, Helen, Calypso, Circe, Arete and Nausicaa. In fact, it contained more women than any other ancient epic, and these women were not only central to the plot, but they were also fully fleshed out and sympathetic. The male characters seemed to Butler to be rather wooden and unintelligent.

  There were other details that, to his discerning eye, betrayed a woman’s hand, such as the expert way in which domestic life was portrayed in the epic. He also listed various errors in the Odyssey that, he believed, only a woman would have made. He called them a ‘woman’s natural mistakes’. These included: ‘believing a ship to have a rudder at both ends’ and ‘thinking that dry and well-seasoned timber can be cut from a growing tree’. Surely no man would have made such obvious blunders! So, of course, the author of the Odyssey must have been a woman.

  Butler even managed to narrow down who this female author was. He identified her as a young unmarried girl who lived in the town of Trapani, in north-west Sicily, around 1050 BC – a conclusion he arrived at by identifying landmarks around Sicily that resembled locations described in the Odyssey. Just about the only thing he didn’t provide was a street address.

  Butler’s argument may seem distinctly odd to us. After all, a ‘woman’s natural mistakes’? Really? Plus, his reasoning only applied to the Odyssey. He thought the Iliad, with its violent battle scenes, was probably the work of a man. He believed there were two separate Homers, one of whom was a woman, and that, by some historical accident, both poems had been credited to one man.

  Nevertheless, his book landed like a cultural H-bomb, sending shockwaves of controversy far and wide. It didn’t really matter that his argument wasn’t very good. The mere fact that he had dared to make it was scandalous. Scholars were outraged. This was the Victorian era, when the British educational system was still centred around learning the classics. Homer was like the training manual for the male upper-class elite. To question his gender was to challenge the entire patriarchal order upon which British society was built.

  But Butler found ardent supporters among modernist artists, who, in the early twentieth century, were busy trying to challenge all kinds of taken-for-granted notions, such as what art is supposed to look like. Why couldn’t a toilet or a blank canvas count as art? some of them were asking. So, the Homer-was-a-woman theory was right up their alley and became a cause célèbre among them. Its most famous legacy was that it inspired James Joyce to write his masterpiece Ulysses. Joyce reportedly kept a copy of Butler’s book beside him on his desk as he wrote.

  To give Butler his due, the Odyssey is curiously female-centred. If an ancient woman had sat down to write an epic, it’s easy to imagine she would have produced something like the Odyssey. But, if that were the entirety of the evidence for the female-Homer theory, it wouldn’t be very interesting, except as a historical curiosity. But there’s more to it, thanks to the efforts of historian Andrew Dalby, who, in his 2007 book Rediscovering Homer, updated Butler’s argument, offering a more sophisticated case for why Homer might have been a woman.

  Dalby lay the groundwork for his argument by establishing some historical context. He noted that ancient Greece had plenty of talented female poets who could have produced the works of Homer. Poetry was an art form that Greek women not only participated in, but excelled at. Sappho, who lived in the sixth century BC on the island of Lesbos, was widely regarded as being one of the greatest Greek poets.

  Dalby also dismissed the widely held belief that epic poetry was performed only by men, with women restricted to singing lamentations or love poetry. Studies of surviving traditions of oral poetry have shown, he said, that both men and women composed and performed epic poetry. The difference was that only men performed it in public settings, such as banquets, while women performed it in private, family settings.

  Finally, Dalby rejected the idea that the epic poems could have been composed in oral form before the invention of t
he Greek alphabet and written down later. This, he maintained, simply wasn’t the way oral poetry worked. Poems were never transmitted verbatim from one generation to the next. The idea of such perfect transmission is a concept that belongs to the print mindset. In oral culture, only a very loose framework of ideas and repeating phrases was ever passed down. Each performance was essentially a new version of the story. In which case, whoever first wrote down the Homeric poems must essentially have created them anew.

  With this context in mind, Dalby then asked the question, why would a male bard have written down these epic poems? It seems like a very strange thing for a man to have done. After all, today we take it for granted that writing is a way to gain cultural status, but in Ancient Greece, circa 800 BC, hardly anyone could read. Writing was a brand-new technology. Writing down epic poems would have been a dubious venture, at best. Who would have been the intended audience?

  Here was the crux of Dalby’s argument. He believed that a successful male poet (and the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey must have been the best poet in Greece) might have resisted participating in such a novel undertaking because there was no obvious status to be gained from it. Honour and glory for male bards came from public performance. A written text was an unknown quantity. Plus, participating in such a project – presumably reciting the poetry in a private setting while a scribe wrote it down – would have taken him away from his career, possibly for months.

  A female poet, on the other hand, would have had no qualms about performing in a private setting. If she was a talented poet, barred from performing at public gatherings, she might even have sensed the possibility of reaching an entirely new kind of audience through writing.

  Dalby also noted that the anonymity of the poems might support their female authorship. Male poets traditionally identified themselves in their works and bragged about their accomplishments; it was an important part of the process of crafting a public persona. The lack of any identification in the Homeric poems hints, therefore, that their author was someone in the habit of maintaining a more private persona: someone such as a woman.

  In trying to reconstruct the process by which the poems came into existence, Dalby theorized that the Iliad must have been written first by this unnamed female poet. He surmised that she would have had a male patron who bankrolled the entire venture. The goatskin parchment on which the poems were written would, after all, have been very expensive. At his request, she initially created a traditional epic, weaving together old stories and legends.

  Twenty years later, Dalby imagined, the same patron must have asked her to write a second epic, but she was now older and had been able to think more deeply about the craft of writing and its possibilities. So, this time, she produced a more experimental, complex work that was also more outwardly feminine. In this way, we gained the Odyssey.

  Dalby knew that his theory was highly speculative, but he insisted that it was entirely plausible.

  Actually, classical scholars haven’t rejected Dalby’s hypothesis out of hand. Reviewers praised his argument as interesting and imaginative, but they still weren’t quite ready to accept the idea that Homer might have been a woman. They pointed out that, even if it’s possible that women sang epic poems in private, there’s still a very long tradition that identifies epic poetry as a male genre. And, while the author of the Homeric epics may not identify him/herself, there are several bards who are alluded to in the epics, and they’re all men. A female Homer, one would think, might have included a female bard in the poems, just for the sake of gender solidarity.

  There was also the expense of the Homeric project. Writing down the epics would have required a significant investment. It wasn’t as if goatskin parchment was being mass produced at the time. Would a wealthy male patron really have entrusted such a costly venture to a woman?

  Finally, there’s that vast weight of tradition identifying Homer as a man. Surely this has to count for something.

  Classicists readily acknowledge that none of these are slam-dunk arguments against the female-Homer theory. One gets the idea that, unlike their Victorian-era counterparts, they’d actually really like to believe that Homer was a woman. They just can’t bring themselves to.

  Though, one has to acknowledge that Dalby does have a point. The Homeric poems came into existence at the exact historical moment of transition from an oral to a written culture. Writing would prove to be the ultimate disruptive technology, eventually completely eclipsing oral culture. Would an accomplished male bard, proud of his success, really have helped usher in the change that was going to spell the end of his profession? That would be a bit like imagining the print and music industries had immediately embraced the Internet. In reality, they long resisted it. It tends to be those on the margins, the outsiders who aren’t benefiting from the status quo, who first spy the full potential of disruptive technologies, and, in ancient Greece, who would have been more of an outsider than a woman who possessed all the talent of her male peers, yet could share none of their public glory?

  What if Jesus was a mushroom?

  Mind-altering substances have probably been used in religious worship for as long as it has occurred. This claim isn’t particularly controversial. Ancient Hindu texts refer to the use of an intoxicating drink called soma, and Native American tribes have been using the psychoactive peyote plant in rituals for thousands of years. Archaeologists have found that temples throughout the Mediterranean, such as the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, were often located at sites where trance-inducing hydrocarbon gases generated by bituminous limestone rose out of geological fissures.

  Such practices may seem rather exotic to modern-day Christians for whom Sunday worship typically doesn’t get any headier than having a sip of sacramental wine. But, according to John Marco Allegro’s sacred-mushroom theory, detailed in his 1970 book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, Christianity wasn’t always so tame. In its original form, he claimed, it was very much associated with the use of mind-altering substances. In fact, he claimed that it started out as an ancient sex and drug cult. Even more controversially, he made the case that Jesus was never imagined by the first Christians to be an actual person. Jesus, he said, was a hallucinogenic mushroom.

  If Allegro had been a long-haired, wild-eyed radical standing on a street corner, his theory could have been easily dismissed. The problem was, he wasn’t anything like that. His academic credentials were impeccable. He was a specialist in philology, the study of ancient languages. He had studied at Oxford University under Sir Godfrey Driver, the foremost figure in the field, and he held a lectureship at Manchester University. The real feather in his cap, however, was his position as a member of the international research team tasked with investigating and translating the Dead Sea scrolls.

  The Dead Sea scrolls have been described as the greatest archaeological discovery of the twentieth century. Found in the late 1940s, they are a set of writings that had been hidden in a cave near Qumran in Israel by an ancient Jewish sect, about a century before the time of Jesus. These scrolls contained what were by far the earliest known copies of the Old Testament. To be part of the team researching them was, for all involved, a sign of great academic status. Allegro had been appointed to the team at the urging of Sir Godfrey, who believed him to be a rising star in the field of philology.

  By 1970, Allegro had become a well-known public intellectual through his work on the scrolls. He had written several bestselling books, and he appeared frequently on radio and TV. This meant that, when he started declaring that Jesus was a mushroom, his fellow academics couldn’t just ignore him. He clearly was in a position to speak authoritatively about early Christianity.

  The cornerstone of Allegro’s theory was linguistic analysis. He claimed that having a knowledge of ancient languages other than Greek and Hebrew opened up all kinds of novel insights into the New Testament. Particularly important was Aramaic, the language spoken in the ancient world by many Semitic people from the Near East, and Sumerian, the languag
e of ancient Mesopotamia. Scholars had only recently deciphered the latter.

  Armed with his expanded linguistic knowledge, Allegro had reread the New Testament and he believed that, in doing so, he had discovered two distinct levels of meaning within it. There was the surface meaning told by the Greek text, which detailed the story of a kindly preacher named Jesus who spread a gospel of love. Beneath this, however, he claimed to have found a level of meaning that only became apparent if one knew Aramaic and Sumerian. This consisted of a complex web of wordplays, puns and allusions that repeatedly referenced mushrooms.

  There was, for example, the story of Boanerges. In the Gospel of Mark, two brothers named James and John are introduced, whom, we are told, Jesus had nicknamed Boanerges. Mark tells the reader that Boanerges means ‘sons of thunder’. Except, Allegro pointed out, it doesn’t – not in any known dialect of Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek. ‘Sons of thunder’ was, however, an Aramaic term for mushrooms, because they appeared in the ground after thunderstorms.

  Another cryptic fungi reference involved the name of Peter, the leading apostle of Jesus. Petros means ‘rock’ in Greek, which serves as the occasion for a famous instance of wordplay in the New Testament when Jesus says, ‘Now I say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.’ Allegro noted there was an even deeper pun because Pitra was the Aramaic word for a mushroom.

  Then there was the scene when Jesus, as he hung on the cross, cried out before his death, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani.’ This is usually translated as, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ Allegro informed his readers, ‘lama sabachthani is a clever approximation to the important Sumerian name of the sacred mushroom “LI-MASh-BA(LA)G-ANTA”.’ Eloi, Eloi, he further revealed, recalled the invocatory chant of Bacchic revellers, ‘eleleu eleleu’, which they repeated as they pulled the sacred fungus from the ground.