Odysseus: The Wanderer, the Phaeacians and the Atlantic

Odysseus keeps sailing into my research on Atlantis. Several of the authors I read see his voyages as a memory of the Atlantic world, and his family tree reaches back to Hermes. These are the pages where I wrote about him.

The wanderings and the Atlantic

Ignatius Donnelly opens his case in The Kings of Atlantis become the Gods of the Greeks:

On the same page Donnelly says the island of Calypso also seems to lie in the Atlantic, twenty days’ sail from the Phaeacian isles, and he calls the wanderings of Ulysses a prolonged struggle with Poseidon, the founder and god of Atlantis. In The History of Atlantis (1926) Lewis Spence takes the same line from a paper in The Occult Review of September 1923: on Ogygia, Calypso, daughter of Atlas, holds Odysseus while Athene protects him.

Scheria and the Phaeacians

Jürgen Spanuth sets out 32 parallels between Atlantis and the island of the Phaeacians, as I summarise on Jürgen Spanuth’s Atlantis: The Mystery Unravelled (1956), Chapter by Chapter. His conclusion:

The island itself has its own page, Scheria is the island home of the Phaeacians in Homer’s Odyssey, where Nausicaa helps the shipwrecked Odysseus and Alcinous gives him a ship and crew for Ithaca. The Phaeacians and Phoenicians have different origins and roles in history and mythology keeps the two peoples apart.

Family, ships and arrows

Autolycus, son of Hermes is his maternal grandfather, who gave him his name, and some versions make Sisyphus his father through Anticlea. The Catalogue of Ships has him leading twelve ships of Cephallenians to Troy. The forbidden fruit recalls Calypso offering him ambrosia to make him immortal. In The Indentity of the Civilizations of the Old World and the New Donnelly, citing Tylor’s Anthropology, pairs the poisoned arrows of America with Odysseus going to Ephyra for an arrow poison.

Related pages

• The Kings of Atlantis become the Gods of the Greeks
• The History of Atlantis (1926)
• Jürgen Spanuth’s Atlantis: The Mystery Unravelled (1956), Chapter by Chapter
• Scheria is the island home of the Phaeacians in Homer’s Odyssey
• The Phaeacians and Phoenicians have different origins and roles in history and mythology
• Autolycus, son of Hermes
• The Catalogue of Ships
• The forbidden fruit
• The Indentity of the Civilizations of the Old World and the New

For every page I tagged with odysseus, see the odysseus tag archive.