Ulysses and the three sirens

AN ANCIENT CURSE UPON ALL LEADERS WHO LIE

In memory of Eustace Mullins and Ezra Pound

16th February 2010

"We claim to be just and upright. No wrath from us will come stealthily to the one who holds out clean hands, and he will go through life unharmed; but whoever sins and hides his bloodstained hands, as avengers of bloodshed we appear against him to the end, presenting ourselves as upright witnesses for the dead."
— Aeschylus, Eumenides (“the kindly ones”), 470 BC

The Furies (their Roman name) or Dirae ("the terrible") typically had the effect of driving their victims insane, hence their Latin name “furor”.
— Virgil VII, 324, 341, 415, 476.

[Hello you irascible old Loomis geezer. I been listening to your radio interviews during World War II lately. I like the way you talk, old man. Truck stop parlance, that’s what I call it. Got to dumb it down for the folks at the truck stop. It’s much worse now, 70 years later, although you knew back then what we still don’t know now. No, they haven’t planted Eustace yet. Too bad you never got to say goodbye to him. I did. He had that light, like yours.]

And now, for the real story of this human gong show.

As atheists are the most religious people in the world because of the sheer amount of time they spend thinking up their refutations of divine guidance, so wanderers and adventurers are really our foremost homesteaders, because they try so hard to find it and seldom can because it is always right in front of their eyes, and they just don’t ever see it.

We have run aground on the shoals of our own fear. We cling to the island called god, but the inexorable tide of time always wins the battle and drags us out to sea, flailing, terrified.

Man in an open boat shouting “who can murder me!?” Is it our destiny? If you close your eyes and focus on Jesus, it will take you where you want to go. But where was that, exactly?

Where precisely is that boat of yours headed?

Seascript, by John Kaminski, 1979

sweet salt.

freighter on the far horizon.

sundiamonds glitter on the bay.

palms soothe.

sundown in the far compartment.

self-incrimination titters in the hallway.

the sea evokes it.

Be disturbed how we hide our eyes from the awful truth of the bloody reality that runs this so-called world, where the maw of profit chomps down with its giant jaws on every life giving emanation from this planet, and destroys it. We think we’re safe as we hunch in our dark apartments, muttering, “We have enough to get by . . . it’ll be OK, for awhile.”

Can’t look too closely at tomorrow anymore, can you?

Shades of a long-gestating darkness are closing in on us.

Be disturbed that the greatest literature, the most in depth, complete and compassionate literature ever produced by humans, was achieved in the earliest phase of human development, and that ever since, the productions of the human mind have, while developing myriad quantitative tangents of thought, failed to improve upon the penetrating depth of perception that was depicted in the very first works of the Western canon, The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer.

These were collections of oral traditions from 1200-800 BC that were finally written down around 500 BC and have remained essential classics for 2500 years. Like Moses and the Buddha, the actual historical character named Homer was quite likely a collection of scribes and bards who passed knowledge through generations with songs and stories.

The Iliad is a psychological guidebook to the relationship between men and their own interior echoes when humanity was first emerging from semicoherent bicamerality, while The Odyssey chronicles the 10-year voyage of Odysseus, or Ulysses, through the demonological catacombs of the sparkling Grecian mind.

Ezra, you’ll be happy to know that the Jews have destroyed literature just like they did to art, physics and you name it, the moneygod has wrecked everything.

As I like to say it, the middleman disease got so bad it killed both the producer and the consumer. And all we had left was a bunch of salesmen running around not knowing what to do.

The folks who run the show are operating on the principles of herd management, so that makes the earth just another plantation for those dark lords . . . who are those bastards, anyway?

You guys both tracked ’em pretty good. But I got a story that I’m pretty sure you both were lookin’ for but may have missed.


Ulysses and the three sirens

(But first, the obligatory Greek chorus, to be repeated as needed: “No matter how far we may roam, we’re all just trying to get home”)

It always seems like a song. We always pray it keeps playing.

Beleaguered upon the sea with no destination in sight: this is the voyage all men make.

All men are kings, Ulysses was all men; adventure was his, but the price of his pride gnawed at the belly of his rainbow.

This shrewd hairy guy invented the Trojan Horse. But the prophecy was wrong, the weather went bad. The storm catapulted him across time to our dreams.

Centuries later, the sleek Greek fleet, technological marvel of the Age of Pericles, disappeared without a trace in warm water off Sicily.

In each case and at all times, they were watching. Call ’em what you will: Eumenides, Erinyes, Dirae! Sirens! the three Furies . . .

Who is it that sings to sailors in a storm upon the ocean?

As the crest of the wave rises far above our heads, who are they who are closest to our hearts?

And in the last wash of time, who are they we have left behind waving from a lush receding shore as we abandon paradise to return to our path, the ultimate lesson in life.

The sirens lured men to their deaths, the legends say. Orpheus had saved the Argonauts by singing so that the sirens’ message could not be heard. But what was it the sirens wanted to say?

Ulysses lashed himself to the mast to keep from being lured by those sexy sirens — the harpies of their time, leprechauns — with the very worst questions of all, ones that are right, and you know they’re right.

Erinyes, Sirens, Furies.

A fearful trinity. The three sisters.

Their heads seethed with serpents, their eyes dripped blood, some had big bat wings that could flap you to death. Surely you have seen a woman in this condition. Possibly you loved her, unfathomably.

Dante, in fact, met them on the way to the Inferno, where they remain eternally posted to interrogate all poets at the gates of the city of Dis, where all poets visit if not eventually reside.

These three appealing Fury chicks are:

Tisiphone (tis-if-oh-nee), "blood avenger," punisher of murder and crimes against family.

Alecto, maker of grief, who revels in wars and quarrels. She could set brothers of one mind at one another's throats, or torment a home with hatred.

Megaera (mah-ger-ah), the "jealous one," lethally retributive about adultery.

The most terrifying spectre of the ancient world, the only purpose of three sisters is vengeance.

"The Erinyes were the punishers of sinners, called ’those who walk in darkness.' Weeping tears of blood and hissing with hair of vipers, they would descend like a storm. As long as there was sin in the world, they could not be banished."

The Kindly Ones are not to be taken lightly. Once they have been summoned they can not be put back down. Fortunately, they will only avenge specific crimes. And even more fortunately, they only answer requests for vengeance which are performed according to the old traditions and which have validity.

Of course the risk you take is this: if you call on them falsely, you might find them torturing you. The more honest you are in the act of summoning them, the more kindly they treat you. It is important to remember they will not stop just because the summoner changes their mind. They only stop when THEY are satisfied that justice has been done.

Once they have been summoned they will persecute their victim until they either commit suicide or go insane. They do not let up, and they do not go home. They are the ultimate court, and the ultimate punishers. People persecuted by the Furies often lost everything, and would be so tormented in their dreams that they would dread to go to sleep for fear of the pain and suffering that awaited them. They could bring sickness, madness, and even physical torture to their victims.

A victim seeking justice could call down the curse of the Erinyes upon the criminal. It was believed in early epochs that human beings might not have the right to punish such crimes, instead leaving the matter to the dead man's Erinyes to exact retribution.

Many scholars believe that they were originally referred to as the Eumenides not to reference their good sides but as a euphemism to avoid their wrath by calling them by their true name. This is similar to the taboo on speaking the names of certain spirits in many cultures.

Because the three Sirens, as the Greeks told us, are “those who beneath the earth punish whosoever has sworn a false oath.”


Are you listening, you Kol Nidre advocates? Because you have a problem that will never go away, the Erinyes. Observe how they are about to disintegrate your peace of mind.

As the Greek playwright Aeschylus told it, the Erinyes are particularly known for the persecution of Orestes for the murder of his mother, Clytemnestra. Since Apollo had told Orestes to kill the murderer of his father, Agamemnon, and that person turned out to be his mother, Orestes prayed to him. Athena intervened and the Erinyes turned into the Eumenides ("goodly ones"), as they always did in their beneficial aspects.

Orestes, after years of being tormented day in and day out, losing his family, his kingdom, his wealth, begged the goddess Athena to stop the Furies from persecuting him further. Athena convinced them that Orestes had suffered enough for his crime, and that he had repented of it. The Dirae then went to him not as the terrifying Erinyes, but as the beautiful Eumenides, the Kindly Ones, and they replaced his misfortune with blessing and his nightmares with sweet dreams.

The lesson being that if you understand what the Furies are saying, your life will take a sudden turn toward the peaceful.

It took virtually all the gods — Apollo plus Athena plus Hermes, to get the Erinyes to calm down. See how Orestes was deceived by the gods.

Eustace Mullins and Ezra Pound voyaged like Ulysses, and departed pretty much unappreciated and forgotten, despite the huge quantities of truth they put down on paper. On men like these, civilizations can be built; without them, civilizations can only be destroyed.

Eustace Mullins wrote nearly a hundred books, all about the concealed history of the world that keeps most of the world strapped in a slavery that it does not even begin to perceive, and for his troubles, endured every form of libel and vituperation from people who didn’t bother to understand what he was actually saying.

Ezra Pound captivated the literary world by his coaching of three Nobel Prize winners — Eliot, Joyce and Fitzgerald — but ran afoul of the world management team when he began broadcasting from Italy that the world bankers were behind all the wars. As a result, he spent 13 years imprisoned in a mental hospital (ironically, the same one recently chosen as the new headquarters of America’s new KGB, the Homeland Security department), his public reputation tarnished forever.

Pound uttered the immortal paragraph explaining that the United States has not been an independent country since the era of Abraham Lincoln, because it had been taken over at that time by the Jewish international bankers. But Mullins ultimately topped him with his own immortal line: “Because of the presence of the Jew, you will not achieve your dreams.”


For almost three millennia, Odysseus has been the template for strong male leadership: strength, courage, nobility, a thirst for glory, and confidence in his authority. His most distinguishing trait, however, is his sharp intellect. Odysseus’s quick thinking helps him out of some very tough situations, as when he escapes from the cave of the Cyclops in Book 9, or when he hides his slaughter of the suitors by having his minstrel strike up a wedding tune in Book 23.

Like other Homeric heroes, Odysseus longs to win kleos (“glory” won through great deeds), but he also wishes to complete his nostos (“homecoming”).

He enjoys his luxurious life with Calypso in an exotic land, but only to a point. Eventually, he wants to return home, even though he admits that his wife cannot compare with Calypso. He thinks of home throughout the time he spends with the Phaeacians and also while on Circe’s island. Sometimes his glory-seeking gets in the way of his home-seeking, however. He sacks the land of the Cicones but loses men and time in the process. He waits too long in the cave of Polyphemus, enjoying the free milk and cheese he finds, and is trapped there when the Cyclops returns.

Early in his adventures, Odysseus’s love of glory prompts him to reveal his identity to the Cyclops and bring Poseidon’s wrath down on him. By the end of the epic, he seems much more willing to temper pride with patience. Disguised as a beggar, he does not immediately react to the abuse he receives from the suitors.

Instead, he endures it until the traps he has set and the loyalties he has secured put him in a position from which he can strike back effectively. Like Ulysses, we prepare for the right moment to strike.

I HEREBY call down an ancient druidic curse on these bastards who treat us like cattle. May the experience a painful erosion of their own minds due to their demonstrated lack of humanity.

May their hair be invested with snakes and demons, so they can watch their heart’s desire turn into repulsive sewage, which is exactly the effect they have had on the world.

Let them be shunned and ridiculed into silence, for the simple crime of not being able to love.

And like Ulysses, let us all begin working to go home, to understand what home is, and how among all the things in the universe that deserve defending, home is the one essential that we should fight for more than anything else.



John William Waterhouse (1849-1917), ''Ulysses and the Sirens'' (1891).
Public Domain. By John William Waterhouse (1891). Courtesy of Wikipedia

Click here to see a larger version of this image.

Sirens are seductive female creatures in Greek mythology. The Sirens are probably best known for their part in the Odyssey where their song lured sailors to their death. Odysseus ordered his crew to plug their ears with wax (on the advice of Circe) so as not to be lured by the Sirens' song. In the story of the Argonauts, Orpheus sang sweetly enough to keep the men from succumbing to the Sirens. There were two or three Sirens. They were the daughters of the sea god Phorcys or the river god Achelous. In art, the Sirens are depicted as part human and part bird, as are also the harpies.

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