Paul Wallis on the layers of Greek myth

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Paul Wallis tells Portal to Ascension why Greek myth matters, speaking as a learner rather than the specialist in the room. School gave him one layer only: morals, adventures, and tragedies that lasted because they describe us. A famous line, that deity is humanity drawn large, made the gods a screen for character, serious as a good novel is serious. He keeps that layer and wants others. The dig that found Troy showed him a feeling-filled poem can still carry coasts, kingdoms, and war. Church years spent teaching how to read old books convinced him one story can hold an origin, an inner journey, and name-magic together. Joseph in Egypt is his scriptural sample. Seekers of esoteric Greece might also try myth as deep memory, and seekers of psychology might set Heracles beside Gilgamesh or Jacob and Esau. He asks whether those labors remember our species pulling ahead of older humans. Early Greek cosmology, which science later had to learn again, gets the same patience. The talk is his case for reading myth as a stack.

Key points

• Wallis says classrooms reduced Greek myth to moral adventure and to a mirror of human character.
• The discovery of Troy is his proof that a psychological poem can also hold places and politics.
• Training in biblical interpretation taught him that one story can carry several narrative layers.
• He sets Heracles beside Gilgamesh and Jacob as a way to ask historical questions of the labors.
• Presocratic ideas about the cosmos are, for him, another case of old knowledge learned again.

Short quotes

I am absolutely here today as a student

Paul Wallis, Paul Wallis on the layers of Greek myth

He refuses the expert’s chair and listens before he adds his own angle. Watch at 3:51

Homer Iliad had real world history real geography and real geopolitics embedded in it

Paul Wallis, Paul Wallis on the layers of Greek myth

Troy, once dug up, becomes his example of fact sitting inside a mythic poem. Watch at 9:26

Pythagoras prefigured today's modern gravitational theories

Paul Wallis, Paul Wallis on the layers of Greek myth

Early Greek cosmology, in his telling, reached ideas science had to recover much later. Watch at 14:23

Video by PortalToAscension. Watch on YouTube.