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The History, Psychology, and Philosophy of Magic

Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus, by John William Waterhouse (1891).
Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus, by John William Waterhouse (1891).

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Many years ago, I went through a phase at cocktail parties. Whenever someone asked me, ‘So, what do you do?’, I would reply, ‘I’m a magician.’ I kept a straight face, but was laughing inside.

The word ‘magic’ derives from the Latin, the Greek, the Old Persian, and, ultimately, the Proto-Indo-European magh, ‘to help, to be able, to be powerful’, from which also derive the words ‘almighty’, ‘maharaja’, ‘main’, ‘may’, and… ‘machine’. We come full circle with Clarke’s Third Law, which states: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’

Magic, like religion, is deeply embedded in the human psyche. Though it has, effectively, been banished from the land, still it surfaces in thought and language, in phrases such as ‘I must be cursed’ and ‘He’s under your spell’; in children’s stories and other fiction; and in psychological processes such as undoing, which involves thinking a thought or carrying out an act in an attempt to negate a previous uncomfortable thought or act.

Examples of undoing include the absent father who periodically returns to spoil and smother his children, and the angry wife who throws a plate at her husband and then tries to ‘make it up’ by smothering him in kisses. The absent father and angry wife are not merely trying to make amends for their behaviour, but also, as if by magic, to ‘erase it from the record’.

Another example of undoing is the man who damages a friend’s prospects and then, a few days later, turns up at his door bearing a small gift. Rituals such as confession and penitence are, at least on some level, socially condoned and codified forms of undoing.

Even if the world doesn’t work by magic, our mind often does—and projects its thinking back onto the world.

What Magic Is

‘Magic’ is difficult to define, and its definition remains a matter of debate and controversy. One way of understanding it is by comparing and contrasting it to religion on the one hand and to science on the other.

On the assumption that certain entities can exert a hidden influence on one another, magic is a method of acting in the world through sheer power of will. The notion that the universe is pregnant with subtle connexions is supported by, of all things, the study of mathematics, and it can sometimes seem, when a hidden number or relationship suddenly becomes apparent, that maths is at only one remove from magic.

Magic is often considered a gift, such that some people have it to a high degree and others, the muggles, barely at all, perhaps because their will is weak, unsettled, or untrained, or because magic does not run in their family—for like madness, or kingship, magic is often hereditary. Whatever the case, people without magic are usually portrayed as lacking in cognitive faculties such as insight, intuition, and imagination, and would not see possibility or irony or poetry even if it slapped them in the face.

Kinds of Magic: White and Black, High and Low

Magic is sometimes divided into white and black, and high and low. Black magic is selfish and does not consider other people, whereas white magic is altruistic or selfless, and seeks in general to maintain or restore the equilibrium of the universe. The magician’s psychological makeup determines what kind of magic, white or black, he or she is able or likely to wield.

Speaking of equilibrium, deflecting objects and especially people from their natural or pre-ordained course is likely to have significant repercussions, which is why, aside from the mental effort and exhaustion, the use of magic is often said to come at a price, either to the magician, his or her client (for want of a better term), or a third party. The equilibrium must, ultimately, be maintained. Drinking wine, I often say, is like using magic: there’s always a price to pay—if only the price of the bottle.

The magician is, in effect, a mediator of energies. Low magic involves drawing up energies from the earth, from plants and minerals and so on, and is more the province of common folk. High magic involves drawing down raw, unprocessed energies from the sun and sky, which requires complex ritual and is more the province of an educated or trained elite. Both high magic and low magic can be either white or black.

In the popular imagination, low magic has often been associated with women—the witch, wise woman, or herbalist—while high magic has more often been associated with men: the mage, wizard, sorcerer, or alchemist. This distinction may owe less to magic than to history: learned magic required literacy, education, and access to books and institutions, privileges that were overwhelmingly reserved for men. Notable exceptions include Circe and her niece Medea, two of the most powerful sorceresses in Greek mythology—but Circe was a goddess, and Medea a granddaughter of the sun god Helios.

The magician cultivates his or her will through concentration—acquiring charisma in the process—and focuses it through ritual such as ceremony, chant, or spell. Ritual also helps to create the right atmosphere and attitude for magic to take hold. Words, in particular, can exert a power all of their own. In the language of Ancient Egypt, the sound of a word had a magical power which complemented its meaning, a view of language which we still retain when we talk of ‘spelling’ a word, or visit a psychotherapist. And while words can change the world, getting them wrong, that is, misspelling, can have disastrous consequences. If they had told us at school that we were learning magic, we would have paid a lot more attention.

When Magicians Were Priests, Doctors, and Philosophers

Historically, the priest, the physician, the magician, and the scholar might have been one and the same person: the shaman, the sorcerer.

In the West, pre-Socratics such as Pythagoras and Empedocles moonlighted as mystics and miracle workers—or perhaps, since the term ‘philosophy’ is held to have been invented by Pythagoras, moonlighted as philosophers. Pythagoras claimed to have lived four lives and to remember them all in great detail, and once recognised the cry of his dead friend in the yelping of a puppy. After his death, the Pythagoreans deified him, and attributed him with a golden thigh and the gift of bilocation.

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates argues that there are, in fact, two kinds of madness: one resulting from human illness, but the other arising from a divinely inspired release from normally accepted behaviour. This divine form of madness, says Socrates, has four parts: love, poetry, inspiration, and mysticism, which is the particular gift of Dionysus.

While Socrates, in some sense the father of logic, seldom claimed to have any real knowledge, he did claim to have a daimonion or ‘divine something’, an inner voice or intuition that prevented him from making grave mistakes such as getting involved in politics, or fleeing Athens after being sentenced to death: ‘This is the voice which I seem to hear murmuring in my ears, like the sound of the flute in the ears of the mystic…’

Far from being a thing of the distant past, this trope of the philosopher-sorcerer outlived the sack of Athens and the fall of Rome, and perdured well into the Enlightenment. The economist John Maynard Keynes, upon buying a trove of Isaac Newton’s papers, observed that Newton and the physicists of his time were ‘not the first of the scientists, but the last of the sorcerers’. Other notable later occultists include Giordano Bruno, Nostradamus, Paracelsus, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and Arthur Conan Doyle, father of the hyper-rational Sherlock Holmes.

Magic vs Religion

Yet since antiquity, the West has had an uncomfortable relationship with magic, usually regarding it as something foreign and ‘Eastern’. In Plato’s Meno, Meno compares Socrates to the flat torpedo fish, which torpifies or numbs all those who come near it: ‘And I think that you are very wise in not [leaving Athens], for if you did in other places as you do in Athens, you would be cast into prison as a magician.’

For the Greeks as for the Romans, magic represented an improper and potentially subversive expression of religion. After centuries of contra-legislation, in 357 CE, the Christian Roman emperor Constantius II finally banned it outright:

No one shall consult a haruspex, a diviner, or a soothsayer, and wicked confessions made to augurs and prophets must cease. Chaldeans, magicians, and others who are commonly called malefactors on account of the enormity of their crimes shall no longer practice their infamous arts.

The Bible, too, inveighs against magic, in more than a hundred places, for example, picked almost at random:

  • Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. —Exodus 22:18 (KJV)
  • Regard not them that have familiar spirits, neither seek after wizards, to be defiled by them: I am the Lord your God. —Leviticus 19:31
  • But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death. —Revelation 21:8

Early Christians associated magic with mythopoeic thought, in which all of nature is full of gods and spirits, and therefore with paganism and, by extension, with demons. During the Reformation, Protestants accused the Church of Rome, with its superstitions, relics, and exorcisms, of being ‘more magic than religion’—a charge that transferred all the more to non-Christian peoples, and that, notoriously, served as a justification for large-scale persecution, colonisation, and Christianisation.

So, what exactly is the difference between magic and religion? It is often held that magic is older than religion, or that religion was born out of magic, but it may be that they co-existed, and were not distinguished.

Both magic and religion pertain to the sacred sphere, to things removed from everyday life. But, compared to religion, magic does not split so sharply between the natural and the supernatural, the earthly and the divine, the fallen and the blessed. And whereas magic involves harnessing the world to the will, religion involves subjugating the will to the world. In the words of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘religion consists in a humanisation of natural laws, and magic in a naturalisation of human actions’.

Hence, magic tends to be about specific problems, and to involve private rites and rituals. Religion, in contrast, tends towards the bigger picture, and to involve communal worship and belonging. ‘Magic’, said the sociologist Émile Durkheim, ‘does not result in binding together those who adhere to it, nor in uniting them into a group leading a common life. There is no Church of magic.’

So, one hypothesis is that, as man gained increasing control over nature, magic, as it came to be called, lost ground to religion, which, being communal and centralised, evolved a hierarchy that sought to suppress those practices that threatened its dogma and dominance.

Magic vs Science

But now religion is, in its turn, on the decline—in favour of science. What is science? Within academia, there are, in fact, no clear or reliable criteria for distinguishing a science from a non-science. For example, is ‘political science’ really a science? What might be said is that all sciences share certain assumptions which underpin the scientific method—in particular, that there is an objective reality governed by uniform laws, and that this reality can be discovered by systematic observation.

But, as I argue in my book, Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking, every scientific paradigm that has come and gone is now deemed to have been false, inaccurate, or incomplete, and it would be ignorant or arrogant to assume that our current ones might amount to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

The philosopher Paul Feyerabend went so far as to claim that there is no such thing as ‘a’ or ‘the’ scientific method: behind the façade, ‘anything goes’, and, as a form of knowledge, science is no more privileged than magic or religion.

More than that, science has come to occupy the same place in the human psyche as religion once did. Although science began as a liberating movement, it grew dogmatic and repressive, more of an ideology than a rational method that leads to ineluctable progress.

To quote Feyerabend:

Knowledge is not a series of self-consistent theories that converges toward an ideal view; it is rather an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible (and perhaps even incommensurable) alternatives, each single theory, each fairy tale, each myth that is part of the collection forcing the others into greater articulation and all of them contributing, via this process of competition, to the development of our consciousness.

Whatever one makes of Feyerabend’s provocation, science differs from magic in its method. Magic begins with hidden sympathies; science with verifiable hypotheses. Yet, once the human mind gets involved, the boundary between the two becomes less clear, and Newton spent more of himself on his secret alchemy than on his public science. 

So, Does Magic Work?

So far, I’ve been talking as if magic works. But does it work, and, if so, how?

Unless one broadens the definition of magic to include cognitive faculties such as insight, intuition, and imagination, or simply peak performance, magic does not work, or, at least, not in an immediate, instrumental sense. But magic might work indirectly, by focussing the mind and energies on a particular problem, or through a mechanism akin to the placebo effect or psychoneuroimmunology.

The term ‘placebo effect’ derives from the Latin placere (‘to please’) and refers to the tendency for a remedy to ‘work’ simply because it is expected to do so. In essence, people who associate taking a remedy with improvement may come to expect improvement if they take a remedy, even if the ‘remedy’ in question is no more than an inert substance, or a substance that has no therapeutic effect but only adverse effects that can be interpreted as indicative of a therapeutic effect. It may be that the expectation alone suffices to mimic the effect of the remedy, and brain imaging studies indicate that, in some cases, remedies and their placebos activate the very same mechanisms in the nervous system.

Remedies that are perceived to be more potent have a stronger placebo effect. Perceptions of potency are influenced by factors such as the remedy’s size, shape, colour, route of administration, and general availability. A brightly coloured injection administered by a silver-haired professor of medicine can be expected to have a much stronger placebo effect, and therefore a much stronger overall effect, than the unremarkable over-the-counter tablet recommended by the teenager next door. When doctors in England lost their white coat, they lost much more than a coat.

This highlights the importance of the psychological, social, and cultural context in which a treatment or intervention is administered, and, more particularly, the significance of the therapeutic act or ritual. If the practitioner, the patient, and their society believe in the magic, then the magic is real by the very force of that shared belief.

No wonder the magician, the priest, and the healer used to be one and the same person—and, in many societies, still is. Like religion, magic may represent a response to anxiety, distress, and a feeling of inadequacy or impotence, especially in the face of natural disaster. And like religion, it may represent a spiritual path, akin, perhaps, to a martial art, which also involves concentrating the mind, channelling instinctual drives, and leveraging forces.

So, does magic work? Yes and no.

Magic as a Mirror of the Mind

Whether it works or not, magic is an external projection of the human psyche, an external projection of our internal or psychological truth, which is why it features so prominently in fiction. Fairy tales often begin with a formulation such as, ‘Once upon a time in dreamland’, and magic is that dreamland. Like dreams, magic makes use of condensed symbols, and like dreams, it is a kind of wish fulfilment.

In the same vein, magic might be compared with mental states such as psychosis and neurosis, which, like dreams, can also involve condensed symbols and wish fulfilment. Sigmund Freud linked magical rituals and spells with neurotic and obsessional thought processes, and there are some parallels with compulsive acts, which are a response to obsessional thoughts or rules that must be rigidly applied.

Magic is, arguably, on a spectrum with madness, and magical thinking is especially prominent in schizotypy, or schizotypal personality disorder, which predisposes to schizophrenia—and, indeed, to shamanism. As I’ve said, Plato distinguished between madness resulting from human illness and madness arising from a divinely inspired release from normally accepted behaviour. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates says that this divinely inspired madness has four forms: mysticism, inspiration, poetry, and love. Love, according to Socrates, is not a god, as most people think, but a great spirit (daimon) that intermediates between gods and men.

Similarly, in The Sorcerer and His Magic (1963), the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss argues that magic is a mediator between normal thought processes (common sense, reason, science…), which suffer from a marked deficit of meaning, and pathological thought processes, which abound with meaning:

From any non-scientific perspective (and here we can exclude no society), pathological and normal thought processes are complementary rather than opposed. In a universe which it strives to understand but whose dynamics it cannot fully control, normal thought continually seeks the meaning of things which refuse to reveal their significance. So-called pathological thought, on the other hand, overflows with emotional interpretations and overtones, in order to supplement an otherwise deficient reality… We might borrow from linguistics and say that so-called normal thought always suffers from a deficit of meaning, whereas so-called pathological thought (in at least some of its manifestations) disposes of a plethora of meaning. Through collective participation in shamanistic curing, a balance is established between these two complementary situations.

The function of magic may not be to explain the world or act upon it so much as to imbue it with meaning. Science can tell us why an eclipse occurs; magic can tell us what the eclipse might mean. The first is a question of cause, the second of significance—and man, uniquely, is an animal in search of meaning. Which is why animals may have pointed ears, but never pointed hats.

Why We Miss Magic

Today, magic, like mythopoeic thought, is seen as ‘primitive’, and has largely been relegated to fiction and illusionism. But as a result, people have come to associate magic with delight and wonder; and with the retreat of Christianity, at least from Europe, a growing number are returning to some form of paganism as a path to personal and spiritual development.

A common trope in fantasy fiction is the ‘thinning’ of magic: magic is fading or has been banished from the land, which is caught in a perpetual winter or otherwise in deathly or depressive decline, and the hero is called upon to rescue and restore the life-giving forces of old.

It is easy to draw the parallel with our own world, in which magic has been progressively driven out, first by religion, which over the centuries became increasingly repressive of magic, and latterly by science with its zero-tolerance.

The sociologist Max Weber referred to it as the ‘disenchantment of the world’. The more completely the world can be calculated, predicted, and explained, the less room it leaves for mystery, correspondence, and intrinsic meaning. Although we have gained enormously in knowledge and control, something may have been lost in the exchange—and by gaining control, we have, ironically, lost control of the planet.

Some of my regular readers may have wondered why I turned my pen to so apparently frivolous a subject as magic. But we now know that magic is much more profound than it may at first seem. Aside from its links with madness and with healing, it is a mirror of the mind, and even, like love or beauty, and science and religion, a mode of belonging to the world.

Perhaps this is why magic has survived every attempt to banish it. Though we may no longer believe in sorcerers and spells, we continue to fall under charms, break curses, tempt fate, thank our lucky stars, and search for signs. We still speak the language of magic because that is the oldest and truest part of us.

That is why, when we read fantasy fiction, it is always for the side of the old magic that we root, for a time when everything shone brightly and we didn’t have to go around begging for meaning.

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What the Odyssey Can Teach Us About Wine—and Drinking

Odysseus pours wine for the Cyclops Polyphemus
Odysseus offers Polyphemus the wine of Maron. After a design by John Flaxman.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Wine flows through the Odyssey. Homer mentions it well over a hundred times, and even supplies the first recorded tasting note in history. He loves wine so much he sees it on the face of the sea: the famous ‘wine-dark sea’.

But wine in the Odyssey is far more than a drink, or even a poetic image. It is a measure of civilisation. How people drink, and whether they drink at all, tells us what kind of people they are.

What Odysseus Most Loves

Many people imagine that the Odyssey unfolds in straightforward chronological order, from Troy to Ithaca. In fact, most of the adventures for which it is famous—the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis—are narrated retrospectively, as Odysseus recounts them to the Phaeacians.

But before beginning his story, Odysseus tells King Alcinous and the Phaeacian court what, to him, constitutes the happiest scene imaginable:

For I say that there is no fulfilment more delightful than when joy possesses a whole people, and the banqueters in the halls sit in rows listening to a singer, while beside them the tables are laden with bread and meat, and the wine-bearer draws wine from the mixing bowl and carries it round and pours it into their cups. This seems to my mind the fairest thing there is.

This is the very scene before him. It is a revealing picture of the good life, three thousand years ago. Wine is not drunk alone, or merely for intoxication. It is shared, with food, music, conversation, and storytelling. And the adventures that Odysseus is about to relate will show what happens when those customs break down.

The Wine That Bested a Giant

Odysseus begins with the Cicones at Ismarus. After sacking their city, he orders his men to leave immediately. But they refuse. Instead, they remain on the shore slaughtering livestock and drinking wine. ‘There,’ Homer tells us, ‘much wine was drunk.’ While they are feasting, the surviving Cicones summon reinforcements. They counterattack, and Odysseus loses six men from every ship. Already, wine-drinking has become a test of self-command.

One assumes they were drinking the local wine—from what is now PGI Ismaros, in Thrace. At the heart of this wine region is the ancient town of Maroneia, named for Maron, the legendary priest of Apollo—and in later tradition, grandson of Dionysus. During the raid, Odysseus had spared Maron, together with his wife and child. In gratitude, Maron gave him gold, a silver mixing bowl, and twelve jars of an extraordinary wine.

It is here that Homer gives us the first tasting note:

He gave me twelve jars of wine, sweet and unmixed, a divine drink. No servant or maid in the house knew of it, but only [Maron] himself, his dear wife, and one housekeeper. And whenever they drank this honey-sweet red wine, he would fill one cup and pour it into twenty measures of water, and from the mixing bowl there rose a marvellous sweet fragrance: then indeed it would have been no pleasure to hold back.

Admittedly, Homer is not using the WSET tasting template. But I think the examiners would be satisfied that this is no rustic plonk.

Odysseus takes a skin of the wine when he goes to investigate the Cyclopes. The Cyclops Polyphemus, though a shepherd, is not a social or civilised creature. He has generous grapes—later tradition would place him on the volcanic slopes of Mount Etna—and milk and cheese, but no wine. So when Odysseus pours him some of Maron’s wine, he drinks it neat and is overwhelmed by it. When he asks for more, Odysseus obliges him three times, until he slumbers. That’s when the red-hot olive stake is driven into his single eye. It was not merely by his cunning that Odysseus defeated the vastly stronger Cyclops, but by wine, and by turning the monster’s own savagery against him.

The Sorceress’s Wine

Several adventures later, Odysseus and his remaining men reach the island of Circe. The sorceress welcomes a group of them into her house and feeds them a mixture of cheese, barley meal, honey, and Pramnian wine, a strong, celebrated wine of uncertain origin—interlaced with amnesic drugs. As they gulp it down, she strikes them with her wand, and they are transformed into pigs. (Circe is the original sorceress, and why Western witches and sorcerers carry a wand.)

Men surrender to their appetites, forget their homes, and become animals. Yet Homer is not preaching abstinence, but self-control. After Odysseus overcomes Circe and she restores the men, wine and feasting help lift their spirits.

Two Kinds of Feast

Much later, when back in Ithaca, Odysseus offers one of the shrewdest descriptions of drunkenness in ancient literature. In Alexander Pope’s verse translation:

And wine can of their wits the wise beguile,
Make the sage frolic, and the serious smile,
The grave in merry measures frisk about,
And many a long-repented word bring out.

For Homer, then, the question is not whether to drink, but how. For a positive model, we need only return to the Phaeacians. They mix their wine with water, pour libations to the gods, exchange gifts, eat together, listen to music, and tell stories. They welcome the shipwrecked Odysseus and create the conditions in which a stranger might tell his story. Here, wine does not obliterate memory, but facilitates its recovery. And the scene is, of course, ‘the fairest thing there is.’ Grapes have been turned into wine, ingredients into cuisine, sounds into music, strangers into guests, and experiences into stories. Only once he has recovered his story is Odysseus fit to return to Ithaca.

Ithaca, where the suitors have been occupying Odysseus’ palace, slaughtering his livestock, draining his wine stores, and feasting at his expense while competing for Penelope. Outwardly, theirs is a civilised feast. There is meat and wine, music and conversation, servants and guests. But the suitors abuse that hospitality and gorge themselves day after day. Like Polyphemus, they know how to consume but not how to live.

Homer lived almost three thousand years ago, in a world in which wine was not treated simply as another form of ‘alcohol’. It was agriculture and craftsmanship transformed into hospitality, fellowship, ritual, pleasure, and even enlightenment. But Homer was not uncritical. Wine could indeed loosen the tongue, overwhelm judgement, invite forgetfulness, lose men, and return them to animals. The same drink could accompany Odysseus’ fairest vision, while also bringing down a giant, turning his men into swine, and foreboding the demise of the suitors. Civilisation requires not the abstinence of Cyclopes, but the moderation of men.

For Homer, the opposite of drunkenness was not sobriety, but civilisation.

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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into The Meaning of Myth, on the psychology and philosophy of mythology, and The Concise Guide to Wine and Blind Tasting, on the appreciation, psychology, and philosophy of wine.

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Odysseus, Calypso, and the Philosophy of Immortality

Odysseus and Calypso
Calypso offered eternity. Odysseus chose Ithaca.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Would you want to live forever? Then why did Odysseus refuse Calypso’s offer of immortality?

Suppose an attractive goddess offered you eternal youth and immortality. Would you accept? Most of us wouldn’t have waited for the end of my last sentence. Homer, however, tells the story of a man who turned her down.

Calypso is one of the most elusive characters in Greek mythology. Like ‘apocalypse’ and ‘eucalyptus’, her name derives from the Greek kalyptō, ‘to conceal’ or ‘to hide’. She lives on the remote island of Ogygia, hidden from both gods and men. She is beautiful and deeply in love with Odysseus. More than that, she offers him the greatest prize of all: eternal life with eternal youth.

Yet every day Odysseus sits alone upon the shore, gazing out to sea and weeping. He longs not for paradise, but for Ithaca.

The Odyssey is full of monsters and marvels. The Cyclops tests Odysseus’ ingenuity. Circe his self-control. The Sirens his judgement. Yet Homer saves his greatest temptation until the monsters are gone. Calypso cannot be defeated. She can only be refused. Her island may be the most philosophical place in all literature. It asks neither how we survive nor how we succeed, but what makes a human worth living—or even, what makes a human life human.

At first sight, Odysseus’ decision seems irrational. Calypso is more beautiful than Penelope, her island more idyllic than rocky Ithaca. She offers not merely pleasure, or happiness, but eternity. Why exchange eternity for a finite, imperfect, and uncertain human life?

Nor is Calypso a villain. Homer invites us to sympathise with her. When Hermes arrives bearing Zeus’ command that she release Odysseus, she bitterly complains that the male gods freely take mortal lovers while condemning goddesses for doing the same. Before letting him go, she desperately pleads with Odysseus. Penelope can never rival her beauty or save him from ageing and death.

The obvious answer is that Odysseus misses his wife and son. But Homer suggests something deeper. To embrace Calypso would be to abandon not merely his home, but himself. When we fall in love, we fall in love with someone who would change us, but not change us beyond all recognition. Calypso does not ask Odysseus to become a better Odysseus. She asks him to become someone, or something, else.

For thousands of years writers and philosophers and sorcerers have returned to the same question.

Some five centuries before Homer, another hero came to the opposite conclusion. After the death of his friend Enkidu, whom he mourned ‘like a woman mourning’, Gilgamesh set out in search of eternal life. At the end of his long journey and descent into the underworld, he discovered the plant of immortality—only for a serpent to steal it while he bathed. He returned home empty-handed, having learnt that the proper task of human beings is not to escape death, but to make the most of life.

Greek mythology itself offers an even darker warning. Eos, the goddess of the dawn, fell in love with the Trojan prince Tithonus and, fearing his loss, begged Zeus to grant him immortality. As the centuries pass, the once alluring youth shrivels into a babbling old man, too frail to live yet unable to die. In some versions of the myth, he shrinks into a cicada, condemned forever to thirst and chirp.

Jonathan Swift issues a similar warning in Gulliver’s Travels. The Struldbrugs, though born immortal, continue to age indefinitely. As they lose their memories and outlive everyone they have ever loved, they sink into loneliness, despondency, and envy of mortals.

In his essay The Makropulos Case (1973), the philosopher Bernard Williams sought to explain why immortality might ultimately become undesirable. The ambitions and desires that give our lives meaning, he argued, cannot sustain one and the same person forever. Once they are exhausted, we could escape the resulting tedium only by becoming different people, with different ambitions and desires. But then who exactly would be living forever?

Immortality threatens not only meaning but identity. Tolkien reached a similar conclusion, this time by asking the opposite question. In The Silmarillion, his mythology of Middle-earth, death is ‘the Gift of Men’. It is not men who envy the immortal elves. It is the elves who envy men, because only mortal lives possess the shape, urgency, and completion that immortality denies. Far from a punishment, mortality becomes one of humanity’s greatest blessings.

Today, our oldest ambition has become a technological one. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs spend vast fortunes on longevity research. Some hope to slow ageing indefinitely. Others dream of uploading consciousness into machines. Cryonics companies promise to preserve bodies until such a time as science might revive them. The quest of Gilgamesh is now drawing venture capital.

Before asking whether any of this will succeed, we should ask, with Homer, whether it should.

Odysseus’ refusal is one of the most astonishing decisions in all literature. Offered eternal youth and immortality, he prefers an ageing wife, a rocky, run-down island, and a fragile, mortal life. Rightly or wrongly, it is not life that Odysseus wants, but his life—not an immortal life, but a meaningful one. Instead of trying to live forever, it is today that we should seek to live.

That, anyway, is what Homer seems to be saying. 

What about me? Would I accept Calypso’s offer?

I think I’d compromise and ask for three hundred years. That way, I’d have the best of everything.

There are two things that man can do that God cannot: make wine, and end his own life.

Deus non sibi potest mortem consciscere si velit, quod homini dedit optimum in tantis vitae poenis. —Pliny

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What Homer’s Odyssey Teaches Us About Nostos

Odysseus and Calypso
Calypso offered him eternal youth and immortality. He chose home.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

What’s Homer got to do with the sitcom Friends?

Over the past ten or fifteen years, journalists have contacted me time and again with questions about nostalgia. More often than not, they want to know the same thing: Why do we keep rewatching Friends? Why do we return to the same books, films, songs, and places, even when we know them by heart?

The obvious answer is that familiar things comfort us in uncertain times. That is true. But I have come to think there is a deeper answer—one that, almost three thousand years ago, Homer already understood.

If Homer’s Iliad is the epic of kleos (glory), his Odyssey is the epic of nostos (homecoming). As a psychiatrist and the author of a book on the emotions, I have been writing about nostalgia for many years. But only recently did I begin to see the Odyssey through that same lens.

The word nostalgia was coined in 1688 by the Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer. A portmanteau of nostos and another Greek word, algos (‘pain’ or ‘ache’), it originally referred to the homesickness of Swiss mercenaries fighting in flat and foreign lands. Military physicians blamed the condition, among others, on ear and brain damage from the constant clanging of cowbells. Today, of course, we no longer think of nostalgia as a mental illness but as a natural, common, and often beneficial emotion.

Although the word is relatively recent, the feeling is ancient. No writer understood it more profoundly than Homer.

When we first meet Odysseus, he is not blinding the Cyclops or resisting the Sirens. He is sitting alone on the shore of Calypso’s island, gazing out to sea and weeping. Calypso has offered him everything that human beings are supposed to desire. She is beautiful and deeply in love with him. More significantly, she promises him eternal life with eternal youth. Despite all this, he daily returns to the same lonely place by the water and pines for Ithaca.

At first sight, his yearning seems irrational. Ithaca is a small, rocky island. His wife Penelope has grown older. His palace has been overrun by arrogant suitors. Why exchange paradise for hardship, mortality, and uncertainty?

Because what Odysseus longs for is not a better life, but his own life.

This is what makes the scene so moving. Odysseus does not simply long for a place in his past. He longs for the life that belongs to him: his wife, his son, his kingdom, his mortality—in short, his identity. Ithaca is not merely a destination but the place in which he can return to being himself.

Later in the story, the Phaeacian bard Demodocus sings of the Trojan War. Odysseus, who is in disguise, covers his face and weeps. Homer compares his grief to that of a woman throwing herself upon the body of her fallen husband, before she is dragged away into slavery. Only then does Odysseus reveal his identity and begin to tell the tale of his wanderings. As he reclaims his story, his voice blends with that of Homer. Memory becomes narrative, and narrative begins to heal memory.

Virgil echoed the famous scene at the beginning of the Aeneid, the foundational epic of Rome. Arriving in Carthage, Aeneas sees murals depicting the fall of Troy. He too breaks down into tears, before telling his story. Mourning the loss of his Trojan kin, he cries out, Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt: ‘These are the tears of things, and mortal things touch the mind.’

Neither was nostalgia limited to Mycenaean princes. In 586 BCE, Babylonian forces destroyed Jerusalem and the First Temple, forcing many Jews into exile in Babylon. In the Bible, these Babylonian captives lament the loss of their homeland, in verses later put to music by Boney M: ‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, Yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.’ 

Different peoples, different ages, different homes—but always the same tears. Nostalgia may be a seventeenth-century coinage, but the feeling is as old as humanity itself.

Today, psychologists understand nostalgia not as a mental disorder or disturbance but as an emotional resource. Nostalgia strengthens our sense of self and identity by anchoring our present in a larger narrative and reconnecting us with the people and places that have shaped us. In fact, nostalgia can be thought of as the counterpart of anticipation, and seems to serve the same purpose. The hauntings of times gone by, and the imaginings of times to come, strengthen us in lesser times.

This is one reason so many of us return to Friends. Those of us who are old enough often say that we miss a world before mobile phones and social media, when friends met spontaneously, conversations stretched late into the evening, and no one thought of ghosting you. The Berlin Wall had fallen, the Cold War was over, and many of us were riding high on the Wind of Change. There is a lot of truth in that. But I suspect we are also longing for something more personal. We are remembering a time in our lives when connection seemed fuller, the future seemed more open, and we ourselves were younger. Friends becomes a doorway not only onto that lost world, but also onto the person who inhabited it.

We think of nostalgia as longing for the past. Homer suggests something deeper. We long not simply for what has been, but for the life that feels most truly our own.

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What Homer’s Odyssey Teaches Us About Great Literature

Odysseus and Calypso
The longest journey is the one home to ourselves.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Why do some books remain alive for thousands of years while others, equally entertaining in their day, quietly disappear? The books that survive are those in which each generation discovers a different book. Even within a single lifetime, we never read the same book twice. Great books are mirrors. Every time we return to them, we see something different—not because the book has changed, but because we have grown. 

Homer’s Odyssey is perhaps the greatest example. No one simply receives Homer. Every translator, filmmaker, and reader enters into a conversation with him. Emily Wilson’s celebrated translation, the first complete English translation by a woman, has drawn renewed attention to aspects of the epic that many earlier translators scarcely noticed, particularly the experiences and voices of women. Wilson has argued that previous translators sometimes allowed their own assumptions to colour the text—for example, referring to enslaved palace women as ‘whores’ and ‘sluts’ where the Greek uses neutral terms or simple feminine pronouns. Christopher Nolan, meanwhile, has made a screen adaptation that many reviewers have read through the lens of contemporary concerns such as trauma, displacement, and identity. Every generation inherits the same three-thousand-year-old poem, yet somehow discovers a different Odyssey.

Part of the explanation lies in the hero himself. At first sight, Odysseus seems an unlikely everyman. He is a king, a war hero, the favourite of Athena, the architect of the Trojan Horse, and cleverer than almost everyone else. Yet Homer never reduces him to any one quality. Wilson famously translates his opening epithet, polytropos, as ‘complicated’: ‘Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost…’ Elsewhere Homer describes him as ‘much-enduring’ (polytlas) and ‘great-hearted’ (megalētōr). From the very beginning, Odysseus emerges not as a one-dimensional hero but as a many-sided human being, shaped as much by suffering as by triumph. In the twentieth century, Lord Raglan identified twenty-two recurring features of the mythical hero—miraculous birth, an attempt on the infant’s life, a royal destiny, and so on. Figures such as Theseus, Oedipus, and Moses satisfy twenty or more. Odysseus satisfies only eight. He stands halfway between mythical hero and ordinary man. Brave yet frightened, wise yet often foolish, loyal yet tempted, he struggles, learns, and changes. We do not admire Odysseus because he is perfect. We recognise ourselves in him because he isn’t.

Great books are psychologically spacious. Into them, we project not only ourselves, but our deepest concerns—and the concerns of our age. Looking into the Odyssey, Freud found a map of the unconscious. Simone Weil discovered a moral philosopher of attention. James Joyce found the voice of modern consciousness. Given my background as a psychiatrist and philosopher, I tend to read the Odyssey as a psychological and moral tale. On the surface, it is a geographical tale about a man trying to get home. But underneath, it is a psychological tale about finding our way home to ourselves and becoming the people we were meant to be. Every island offers Odysseus a different way of abandoning his journey—and abandoning himself. Each asks him the same question in a different form. The Lotus-Eaters ask, ‘Will you forget who you are?’ Circe asks, ‘Will you surrender your humanity to animality and pleasure?’ Calypso asks, ‘Will you give up your mortal life?’ The Cyclops Polyphemus asks, ‘Will you let your pride destroy you?’ The Cattle of Helios ask, ‘Can you resist immediate gratification?’ You, reading the same poem, may yet discover an entirely different Odyssey. That is not a weakness of the work. It is what enables it to endure.

Not all of us get to sail around the Mediterranean navigating Sirens and sea monsters. But all of us are on a journey home to ourselves. Like Odysseus, we too must grow and change before we can truly arrive. His wanderings are not simple delay but essential schooling. Every trial teaches him something—or, more importantly, strips something away. He must learn patience and perseverance, love and remembrance, humility and restraint… Only by losing and recovering himself does he become fit to return to Ithaca. Ithaca, or home, is not simply a place, but a life that feels genuinely our own.

The Odyssey does more than invite interpretation. It embraces it, making it part of the story itself. Many people imagine that the epic unfolds in straightforward chronological order, from Troy to Ithaca. In fact, most of the adventures for which it is famous—the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis—are narrated retrospectively, as Odysseus recounts them to the Phaeacians. But before he begins speaking, Homer has him weep. Hearing the bard Demodocus sing of Troy, Odysseus breaks down. Only then does he recover his own story. As he weaves his years of wandering into a coherent narrative, his voice blends with that of Homer. In telling his story, he transforms himself. His next journey will take him home.

For nearly three thousand years, we have become the Phaeacians, listening to a weary traveller trying to make sense of his life, as we try to make sense of our own. All along, we thought we were interpreting the Odyssey. All along, the Odyssey was interpreting us.

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If this essay has left you wondering why certain stories continue to speak across centuries, you may enjoy The Meaning of Myth—an exploration of why myths endure, and how they continue to shape our imagination, our values, and the civilisations we inherit.

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