The Odyssey Is Not What You Think: Reality Is a Soul Trap | Ike Baker

Summary

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Podcast Summary: THIRD EYE DROPS

Episode: The Odyssey Is Not What You Think: Reality Is a Soul Trap | Ike Baker

Date: July 30, 2026
Host: Chris Ryan (SpectreVision Radio, likely under Michael Phillip’s Third Eye Drops)
Guest: Ike Baker (author, podcaster, esoteric scholar)

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Overview

This episode dives deep into the hidden, esoteric meanings behind the classic epic, The Odyssey. Rather than viewing it as simple myth or ancient literature, host Chris Ryan and esoteric scholar Ike Baker explore the idea that the Odyssey (and by extension the Iliad) is a symbolic, metaphysical map of the soul’s journey—a soul trap, ensnaring us in material reality, as explained through Platonic, Orphic, Pythagorean, and Hermetic philosophical traditions.

The discussion weaves history, mythology, and philosophy to reveal how ancient thinkers and later Neoplatonists understood the Odyssey as an allegory for cosmic structure, the descent (and eventual return) of the soul, and the ways in which reality may, in fact, be disguised as an underworld or a form of Hades.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Odyssey’s Esoteric Nature

[01:22, 04:46, 08:56]

• Ike Baker and Chris Ryan discuss how scholars like Proclus and Porphyry see the Odyssey (and Iliad) as more than mere poetry—“the quintessential story of the structure of the cosmos and the story of the soul.”
• These texts are layered, with literal, moral, and metaphysical meanings.
• Ancient philosophers did not treat them as historical but as symbolic containers of hidden truths.
• Quote:
  “It is an epic tale that is supposed to communicate several things on different levels.” – Ike Baker [01:31]

2. Platonic and Pre-Platonic Perspectives

[11:20, 12:11, 14:51, 16:45]

• Plato mythologized relentlessly, using allegory and myth (like the myth of Er, allegory of the cave) to convey ideas about the immaterial world.
• The difference between Plato’s mystical metaphysics and Aristotle’s logical empiricism is emphasized; Aristotle’s influence (and later Aquinas) filtered Plato’s message into a more “useful” but less mystical tool for science.
• Plato’s true intellectual lineage is from Pythagoras, Parmenides, and especially Orphic mystery cults:
  “Plato’s a great example of how mythology is not monolithic. He’s using these things as symbols, and he’s using as many of them as serves his purpose to show us them at different angles.” – Ike Baker [13:17]

3. The Orphic-Pythagorean Tradition & The Soul in the Body

[17:34, 18:33]

• The Orphics interpreted myth “esoterically, metaphysically, theologically.”
• The soul’s journey into the body (seen as the “tomb of the soul”) is a punishment—a central theme in Orphism and re-emphasized by Plato and in the Homeric epics.
• “They have referred to the body as the tomb of the soul. He says that the Orphics believed that the soul was sent into Hades, which is where we are, as a punishment.” – Ike Baker [01:00, repeated at 27:50]

4. Multi-layered Reading of the Epics

[33:19, 35:00]

• The Odyssey (like the Mahabharata) operated without the modern distinction between the secular and the sacred.
• Three levels of the epic:
  • Letter (literal/body): The story/structure/history
  • Soul (moral/emotional)
  • Spirit (theological/metaphysical): Deep truths about soul and cosmos.
• “The Odyssey is the quintessential epic... used literature in a way that was not completely secular because their worldview couldn't understand secularism.” – Ike Baker [33:19]

5. Allegory of the Cave in Odyssey: Book 13 (The Cave of the Nymphs)

[50:00–58:49]

• Porphyry interprets the famous cave in Ithaca, described in Book 13, as an allegory for the cosmos and the soul’s entry into material incarnation.
• Bees, honey, urns: Symbols of pleasure and sexual generation, which attract souls to incarnation.
• Purple garments: Bodies woven by naiads (souls associated with water, i.e., incarnation and materiality).
• The cave’s gates: Analogous to the zodiacal gateways (Cancer and Capricorn), entry and exit points for souls, echoing ancient astral ascent cosmology.
• Quote:
  “The honey signifies the material pleasure, specifically the desire for physical sex that lures souls into the generative cosmos.” – Ike Baker [58:49]

6. Cosmological Structure: The Spindle & The Moirai – Myth of Er

[41:00–44:50]

• Plato’s myth of Er informs reincarnation and cosmic cycles; souls drink from the river Lethe (forgetfulness) before incarnation.
• “The soul... enters into embodiment upon reincarnation as a somewhat of a blank slate. Some drink more deeply of that river of forgetfulness, and others do not.” – Ike Baker [43:17]

7. The Garment, the Soul-Twin, and Ascent

[62:31, 73:01, 95:05, 101:41]

• The “astral garment” or body is crafted by the planets as the soul descends.
• The journey home (Odysseus’s return to Penelope) is the return to the higher, undescended self (daimonic self).
• Penelope is the soul’s double; her undiminished chastity is the undiminished nature of the higher self.
• Odysseus slaying the suitors: The soul must conquer base appetites (12 “tormentors” or passions, echoed in Hermetic and Platonic texts).
• Quote:
  “Penelope… is the higher self of Odysseus.” – Ike Baker [89:49]

8. Ritual, Theurgy, and Actual Practice

[82:03, 101:56, 112:06]

• The Neoplatonic theurgists used the Odyssey (and Iliad) to inform ritual practices meant to effect the ascent or purifying of the soul.
• Ritual ascent is more of a philosophical life-path (“Every day is a recapitulation of the funeral pyre”) than a single ritual event.
• “The power of the sacrifice is in the cost to the person who offers it. And that is a theurgic truth.” – Ike Baker [113:02]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Allegory:
  “Caves, when you read about them… are kind of suggesting… as representative of the cosmos.” – Ike Baker [51:15]

• On Forgetfulness & Reincarnation:
  “Leffee is not only the drink of forgetfulness, it is the rushing of material… inclinations… creating a state of stupor in the soul where it’s completely intoxicated and rushes down.” – Ike Baker [71:59]

• On Knowing Oneself:
  “If you take these ideas and you only apply them theoretically and intellectually… you will self-deify and you’ll be much worse off than if you had not thought about any of this stuff at all.” – Ike Baker [88:26]

• On Odysseus’s Journey and the Soul:
  “The whole idea… of the astral garments… as the soul descends through the spheres and takes on these astral garments, that gives us our earthly inclination, our character… this is the philosophy behind that.” – Ike Baker [73:01]

• On Ritual Ascent:
  “The sacrificing of the 12 Trojans is the divestiture of your investment in these 12 tormentors… guilt, guile, greed, envy, lust, appetite… pour out libations, you have to humble yourself, offer yourself to the gods.” – Ike Baker [113:02]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 01:00 – 04:46: Initial thesis; the Odyssey as esoteric allegory
• 11:20 – 14:51: Plato and mythic interpretation; difference from Aristotle
• 16:45 – 20:33: Orphic tradition and myth interpretation
• 27:50 – 30:16: The body as the soul’s tomb and Hades-as-reality motif
• 33:19 – 36:26: Three layers of interpretation in ancient epics
• 51:00 – 62:31: Porphyry’s interpretation of Book 13 cave scene as esoteric cosmology
• 73:01 – 76:28: Astral garments, planetary accretions, and the soul’s descent
• 82:03 – 88:26: Theurgy, Chaldean Oracles, and practical applications
• 89:49 – 95:05: Penelope as the higher self; the soul’s twin motif
• 101:41 – 101:56: 12 suitors/slaying as spiritual purification and zodiacal relevance
• 112:06 – 117:57: Ritual, humility, and living the ascent every day

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Additional Resources & References

• Chaldean Oracles
• Porphyry’s ‘On the Cave of the Nymphs’
• Proclus’s commentaries on Homer and Plato
• Macrobius on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio
• Plato’s Republic, Phaedo, Timaeus, Meno
• Hermetic Corpus (esp. Corpus Hermeticum 13)
• Ike Baker’s upcoming book Esoteric Mythology (Inner Traditions, Nov 2026)
• Charles Stang’s The Divine Double

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Conclusion

This episode profoundly recasts the Odyssey as a spiritual map: every mythic trial, every fantastical detail, is an encoded pointer to the metaphysics of the soul’s descent, its intoxication by materiality, and its possibility for ascent and homecoming. Ancient philosophers, especially the Neoplatonists, took this esoteric reading seriously, seeing the myth not as old-timey fiction but a philosophical instruction manual for remembering our true, undescended nature.

Memorable Closing Quote:
“Things divine are not attainable by mortals who understand the body alone, but only by those who, stripped of their garments, arrive at the summit.” – Proclus, quoting the Chaldean Oracles [101:41]

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For further exploration, listeners are encouraged to revisit the Homeric epics with these interpretive keys, check out Ike Baker’s work, and follow the trails of ancient metaphysics into the very heart of myth and reality.

Transcript

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[Ike Baker]

They have referred to the body as the tomb of the soul. He says that the Orphics believed that the soul was sent into Hades, which is where we are as a punishment.

[Chris Ryan]

So this idea that we are in the underworld right now, do you believe this?

[Ike Baker]

Yeah, 100%.

[Chris Ryan]

Wow. With the Odyssey in particular, there's a very good chance that this thing is not at all what people think it is. What is the Odyssey really?

[Ike Baker]

The Iliad and the Odyssey are really trying to tell the quintessential story of the structure of the cosmos and the story of the soul. And those two things are integral to each other. It is an epic tale that is supposed to communicate several things on different

[Chris Ryan]

levels, and perhaps even literal esoteric practices like ritual that can communicate, connect us to higher planes, higher intelligences.

[Ike Baker]

That's what. That's what Proclus believed for sure.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah. Welcome back, my friends. This idea that there are hidden esoteric layers to some of history's most famous epics, like the Iliad and the Odyssey, it is such a compelling, intoxicating idea for me. But it is not just me. In fact, this is not even just a modern kind of intellectual wankery, because there are some truly brilliant philosophers and mystics who have been investigating this very mystery for thousands of years at this point. As such, we're going to get pretty nerdy with this. We're going beyond the surface level. We're digging into specific thinkers, specific parts of these epics profound, hidden esoteric secrets that are surprisingly easy to understand from a high level about what reality really is, what we're doing here, what we are, and what it really means to come home. And with that, if you do not know my friend Ike Baker, he is a longtime student and initiate of the esoteric. He is one of the most well read people I know on these topics. Check out his books and his podcast, Tickle the Algorithm for Me. And let us begin. This. This was born out of just sort of micro epiphany that I had while I was driving the other day. You know, obviously the Odyssey is out and maybe a good bit of context. I haven't even seen it yet. I'm about to see it in a couple of days. Maybe by the time this comes out, I'll have seen it. But this is for people who both have seen it. But also, even if you haven't, that's totally fine because we're going to go to a dimension of this that probably a lot of people have not even considered, which is that it may not be at all what it looks like from the outside looking in. And, you know, if you, if you go into a lot, you know, not just from the ancient Greek world, but throughout the ancient world, there's this dimension of trying to explore spiritual texts and epics, you know, works of literature from a more esoteric angle, you know, meaning are there concealed layers to these texts that are sort of wrapped up in, in an exoteric narrative. And it turns out there is a long history of this with the Odyssey and the Iliad probably, but I haven't even barely gone down that rabbit hole. But with the Odyssey in particular, there's a very good chance that this thing is not at all what people think it is. And. Yeah, why don't you take over from there before I just continue rambling?

[Ike Baker]

Sure, I mean, yeah, I guess. Well, first of all, I want to say I saw the Odyssey and I liked it. And I have, you know, the Odyssey has been very important to me as somebody with Greek heritage, but also as a student of history and of mythology and mythography and this kind of stuff. But the character of Odysseus was somehow important to me before I even had read the Odyssey, oddly enough, it just was some character that I latched onto, seemed, I guess I had a vague awareness just from hearing parts of the, you know, various extracts and tales taken out of or either elaborated from. There was a lot of elaboration. Right. The, the, the, this overarching story of these Homeric cycles These, these, you know, legendary histories stemming from the, the war in Troy, they're added on, they become these folk traditions that are just continually serving as backdrops throughout the ancient, you know, the history of the ancient Mediterranean, literary, philosophical, so on and so forth, even socio, political and historical. But, but they play this backdrop that keeps getting toyed with and added to and expanded. You know, I guess like we might call it like the Expanded Universe of Marvel or dc. Well, they were doing that back, back then, but from what I was aware of as a young kid, I just viewed Odysseus as this very paternal and very noble character. And you read the Odyssey and, and you do see that it's kind of a guy who is caught between a rock and a hard place. And you know, the rock is Troy and the hard place is Agamemnon, who forces him to go. So, you know, that said, I did enjoy the movie, but for anybody that has seen the movie or maybe hasn't seen the movie, but is familiar with the, the epic, they're, they're not very similar. I mean there are basic touch tones and the bones of it is, it's certainly recognizable. And I'm not just talking about historical accuracy or realism. That's not why I go to the movies. Personally, I don't really, I, I am totally comfortable with creative license. I don't need it to like, what would a historically accurate Cyclops look like? You know, Give me a break. It's because, you know, there's always been an element of fantasy in the. It's not, it's never served as a strictly historical document. How could it, how could it with, with, with Cyclops and sirens and all this kind of stuff. So right there, that can show you that, okay, this isn't meant to be interpreted entirely literally. Right? So the story is retelling this tale of a very famous war that the Achaeans had against the Trojans, okay. And they recruited everybody through the, through the, the greater islands and mainlands of what we call Greece today. These are the Mycenaean civilization and they go to war with Troy. And we believe, according to the findings of, I think the, at the end of the 19th century by the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, he claims to have found the vestiges of Troy somewhere in Anatolia. I believe so like modern day Turkey. I think I have that correct. But so they go to war and this is where we get the telling of the Iliad and the Odyssey, right? Because Iliad actually comes from the Greek Ilios, the sun. Okay. And that was the ancient name of Troy, the city of the sun.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah, right there. That's a potentially big allegorical move right there. Yeah, exactly.

[Ike Baker]

And this becomes very famous. I mean, Virgil, the Roman poet, tells the story of Ennius, who was a Trojan fleeing Troy after the war. And he talks about how he, he made his way to what we know now nowadays as the con, or the, the country of Sicily or Italy, sorry, mainland Italy. And he founds the Roman civilization. So they're using it as a historical backdrop centuries later, maybe a thousand years later. We don't know precisely when the Odyssey took place. We think the, you know, the late Bronze Age, which, which is effectively in terms of like the historical timeline right before the, the Bronze Age collapse. So there's a lot of different ways that you can look at the Odyssey, but certainly what I try and defer to is not so much my own, you know, what we would call the upg, unverified personal gnosis, but a more informed understanding of the text through the lens, the interpretational lens of ancient philosophers. So the philosophers weren't looking at the Iliad and the Odyssey as, you know, something historical. They didn't even talk about them like they were historical. They actually, if you, if you read Plato, he criticizes Homer and Hesiod for writing so. And what he considers distastefully and in a spirit of blasphemy against the gods, like just saying, how could a God behave like a human? How could they have these fickle natures and things of this kind? And he's not trying to, I don't think he's actually making an argument for their ignorance so much as he's trying to point to the fact that these contain higher truths. Because we know that Plato, if you even read like one of his dialogues, you, you kind of get this sense that he doesn't have the same way of interpreting what a quote, unquote, you know, ancient deity from a polytheistic pantheon.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah.

[Ike Baker]

What we would in the modern day associate that with that. He doesn't, that's not the way he thinks of those gods. And he's living in the quote, unquote, golden age of Greece. Right, right. So.

[Chris Ryan]

And he's giving praise to, you know, like Athena, and he's giving praise to, you know, various deities here and there throughout his works all the time. But, yeah, to your point, he seems to think about them very differently. And, and, and to an extent, that even comes up in Socrates's trial. Right. Because they can, like, they call him a blasphemer. They call him, an atheist or whatever, or accuse him of that. But then the irony is, in some ways, they're actually showing you the deeper mysteries of what a deity actually is because they're not considering them as these anthropomorphic, you know, sky people or whatever. So it's ironic.

[Ike Baker]

Almost exactly. Exactly. And effectively they're communicating. They're in a stream of transit transmission ideas that predate them by at least 100 years. Right. So they are. Plato's ultimately working in a mythopoetic sort of tradition of philosophy. And you can see that just reading Plato. I mean, throughout the course of the dialogues, he's constantly mythologizing. I mean, constantly. He's always speaking. He always makes. Making sure he has recourse to speak to the reader in terms of myths like the myth of Ur from the book of the Republic, the book 10, the afterlife life myth of the. Of. Of the Phaedo. Right. The allegory of the cave from the Republic. The allegory of the divided line from the Republic. Okay.

[Chris Ryan]

The. The ring. Ring of Gyges, stuff like that.

[Ike Baker]

Yes, It's. It's. So. He's so, you know, saturated in this. This recourse to mythology. Why? Because he's talking about things that are ultimately transcendent. And Plato's a great example of how mythology is not monolithic. He's using these things as symbols, and he's using as many of them as serves his purpose to show us them at different angles. Right. He calls, you know, the creative deity. He calls it the good. He calls it the sun beyond the sun. Right. He's. He's constantly giving us different ways, different symbols through which we can approach something that we ultimately can't know with our. With our discursive minds, with our minds that know what our addresses are and, and how much, you know, five times eight is. We can't understand deity in its fullness. And so he's. He's using mythology to. To lead us along. And this is. Here's the problem. I'm going to explain this for people. When you're gonna. Just when you discuss Plato, you got to be careful of which end of Plato you're on. Okay? So in the modern day, we look at Plato as. Through a telescope, okay? And at the end of that telescope is a little colored filter, little colored glass. And that colored glass that colors the entire picture we're looking at is Aristotle.

[Chris Ryan]

Okay?

[Ike Baker]

Now about midway through that telescope, there's another colored glass, and that's St. Thomas Aquinas, who gives us Thomasian, Scholasticism, so we have these filters, right? He was a cleric in the church who took really much more of an Aristotelian lens. What does that mean? What do I mean by these lenses? Well, Plato talked extremely mystically. His dialogues are mystical, they're theological, they're metaphysical. They're not meant to communicate simply this, you know, proto logic of how to learn things. If anything, it's more about this sliding scale of where your consciousness is, how far down it can go, how far up it can go, and how to do that, how to know when you are where. All right, but Aristotle, who lived and studied with Plato while he was alive, Aristotle was a young man. Plato was a very old man. But because they're so close to each other, they're basically the same pin on that, on that timeline, that they're like two trees that, that grow really close and wind around each other so that if you're looking at the canopy, you, you can't tell which tree is which at the root level. So what you need to do in order to get clarity, because the Aristotelian, and therefore the, the scholastic view, which has informed centuries of educational approaches like modern institutions of education, higher learning, they have been informed by that approach specifically. But to understand Plato, you have to get on the other side of Plato and not look back at him from where we are, but look forward to him from the mythographers and philosophers who came before him.

[Chris Ryan]

Oh, wow.

[Ike Baker]

Specifically Pythagoras Parmenides. We don't know much about the philosophy of Pythagoras's supposed teacher, according to a historian, an ancient historian called Diogenes Laertius. He tells us that Pythagoras was the student of Pharisites. But we do know enough about what was going on in the 6th century BCE to know that the Orphics were thriving, the cult of Orpheus was thriving at the same time Pythagoreans were. As a matter of fact, some scholars have gone so far as to describe this as an Orphico Pythagorean tradition. And what the Orphics are doing, right, and the, the oldest actual physical historical document in Europe is a, is a papyrus known as the Durvani Papyrus. And it.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah, I wanted to bring this up.

[Ike Baker]

It purports to interpret mythology the way Orpheus did, which is esoterically, yes, metaphysically, theologically, you know, it's. I, I can't quote it directly right now, but it'll say things like, similar to when Orpheus says Zeus, what he means is the Fire of intelligible mind. You know, that kind of stuff. It's an interpretation. When we say this, what we really mean is this. And it's. It's constantly framing that entire tradition of interpreting myths and in an Orphic milieu. And we know that the Pythagoreans were concerned with essentially the same thing on a deeper. Or at least they kept it very secret on a deeper level, what the Pythagoreans understood the gods to be is number. And we anthropomorphize number so that we can talk about how it permutates in a way that we can understand.

[Chris Ryan]

Right.

[Ike Baker]

Because if I told you, go out and get me five, you would very rightly ask me five of what? Well, five is an actual thing, and we can find five everywhere, but simultaneously nowhere at its root essence. Okay? So these essences that somehow inform the entire cosmos, but are nowhere to be found as they are in it, but only in specific and special examples, which are multivarious, though, that is, those are what Plato will eventually refer to as the forms, okay, the universals, the Orphics. And the Orphico Pythagorean tradition views these as the, what we would call the root essences, the intelligible essences of the gods that we give these stories, these faces, these likenesses to. To be able to say things about them that we can't talk about otherwise. So that kind of. That kind of pause. Sure.

[Chris Ryan]

I just want to pause to. To review this point that you just made because it's so germane to this entire conversation, which is that we have a document, because a lot of the things that we're going to talk about today with specific reference to the Odyssey having these esoteric dimensions are actually going to come hundreds of years after, I'm guessing, once we get into porphyry, proclus, whatever. Yeah, These are like. These people are way down the line from what we're talking about here and way, way down the line from the Odyssey itself. But what the diverny is that, I never know. Papyrus shows is that there was a pre Plato. So like, you know, wasn't it like 5, 600 BC or something?

[Ike Baker]

Didn't go back that far. But it's. It was, it was. What it was is it was an exemplification of the Orphic tradition, which did. Which was older than Plato.

[Chris Ryan]

Okay, so. So I think they believe that it is from like this. This is not an original. It's passing the sentiment of something down that has long existed before. Exactly. Which is. So the the very germane point to this is this kind of concealing esoteric truths that the masses would not understand is far, far older because there, there is an often made argument by academics that this is just later Neoplatonist, you know, finding patterns that aren't really there, fitting it into their current, you know, quote unquote theurgic phrase craze of like thinking that, you know, the ancients concealed all this knowledge in places they, they really probably didn't or it's not what they think.

[Ike Baker]

Right.

[Chris Ryan]

But we have super early evidence showing that they did do this and even that one, you know, to get extra nerdy right here. I mean even that one example you just pulled out there of Zeus actually being this like intelligible divine fire, like that is what the Chaldean oracles kind of paints it as. Way, way, way later. And again, not to introduce too many things for people that aren't familiar with all this, but Chaldean oracles is this thing way down the line in late antiquity that all of these more openly esoteric ritual practitioners are using as their sort of almost like biblical level text to make to, to explain the metaphysics.

[Ike Baker]

Yeah.

[Chris Ryan]

And, and altered states, whatever's going along with all of this stuff. So it does seem like that there could be this esoteric thread reaching way back into antiquity as far as the Odyssey that is being preserved throughout these, these cultures. So yeah, so hopefully we've, we've framed that well enough.

[Ike Baker]

Yeah, I think so. Yeah. I mean the Drvini Pyrus dates to about the time of Alexander. So you know, I would say slightly after, but more so contemporaneous with Plato. But as you mentioned, it's actually talking about things that go back much further and Plato. Absolutely. When you read these dialogues and like I say, and you taking it, you're looking at Plato from the traditions before him, free of the Aristotelian sort of framework that has been compounded by centuries of kind of like, I don't know, it's just this, the thing is this,

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[Ike Baker]

The way that Aristotle molded and selected very carefully and then expressed specific aspects of Plato's philosophy was not necessarily true to the heart and soul of what Plato was attempting to do, so much as it was taking the most useful elements for mundane knowledge. And those become useful because they lead us towards what we call, you know, scientific empiricism. So what started out as actually a metaphysic and a theology, which later commentators like Proclus acknowledge this. He calls him a, a, a mystagogue. Plato, not a, not a, not a philosopher. He says this, this, this man led us to the, the heights of the mysteries. But there's how much is really to be gained in terms of material wealth and status and, and, and quote, unquote, you know, scient physics, virtually nothing. And Plato exemplifies that when he says, look, I, you know, and he was, he was a wealthy man, his family were aristocrats in ancient Athens, and he was poised for politics. And he said, no, thank you, and walked away and chose a life of philosophy. But when you, when you look at what, what Aristotle gives us with the categories, the, the topics, the analytics, all of these kinds of things, is those, those six books that comprise what is called the organon, okay? Organon, meaning tool. They took Plato's philosophy and molded it into a tool. And what this tool did was allowed them to invent physical things and, and, and create a system, a systematic way of understanding the cosmos or really nature's laws around us. Whereas Plato was not as interested at, as he wasn't as interested in communicating solely that. So, so that's, that's what I want to say about that. It's very important because really, the pre Socratics that come before Socrates, who was Plato's teacher, they're all interested in that too. They're interested in natural philosophy. Now, there were a couple, and I've mentioned it on your show before, there were a couple of, of philosophers from that time period who were interested in metaphysics, right? Pharisees, Pythagoras and Parmenides and those that, that's the main sort of tradition that Plato is transmitting. And it's certainly bound up in the, in the Orphic exegesis. He actually mentions the Orphics. He says, man, I wish I could recall which dialogue it was right off the top of my head. But he says in a dialogue, and it's, it's one of the 12 dialogues in the curriculum of the Amblicas. He says that the Orphics believed that the soul was sent into Hades, which is where we are as a punishment. He specifically has Socrates say that in his dialogue they believe that this soul suffered a death in leaving the divine realms to be entombed in the body.

[Chris Ryan]

My friends, I've got some stupendous and tremendous news. I will be joining my brother Chris Ramsey on his It's Probably Nothing tour. You will be seeing me in some capacity at four dates. I will be popping in in San Francisco on August 13th and I will be co hosting Portland, Seattle and Vancouver. Portland on the 15th, Seattle on the 16th, Vancouver on the 18th of August. These shows are going to be one of a kind, irreplicable. There's going to be other special guests and surprises as well. I truly hope you can make it. And I need wonder dippers in the audience. I believe there are still tickets available, but I know some of the shows in particular are getting very, very low, so do not wait.

[Ike Baker]

He says that the Orphics believed that the soul was sent into Hades, which is where we are as a punishment. He specifically has Socrates say that in his dialogue they believe that the soul suffered a death in leaving the divine realms to be entombed in the body as a punishment for something. He doesn't go into what that punishment was, but it's just very interesting. He's quoting Orpheus, he's quoting the Odyssey throughout the dialogues. So I think that that gives us a really strong footing to kind of go forward and, and take a look at what was like what, what, what's precisely are we really talking about in the Odyssey, the Iliad and the Odyssey, according to these ancient philosophers? Unless you have anything to add.

[Chris Ryan]

The only other thing is he also, I know Socrates toward the like in Phaedo says some, you know, he's, he's going through the whole speech just before he's about to die, talking about the afterlife and everything. And he gives the, the whole really it just strange curiosity evoking speech where he's talking about our condition is like we're laying at the bottom of the ocean and we're looking up through the water at the stars. And if one could fly up to the top of the water and see the truth, blah, blah, you know, all of this kind of stuff, that, that would be the true sky and stuff like that. And, and in within that whole context, he also says there are even some who say we're in the underworld now or we're in Hades now. So there's like they, they drop this breadcrumb a few times throughout the dialogues. This idea that this is Hades here, which is like a. Yeah, it's a, it's an interesting idea.

[Ike Baker]

Yeah. The Gorgias too is, is one of the first times we, we see that mentioned. He kind of like, it does this weird thing when he almost like breaks. You could tell he's like breaking the fourth wall of the dialogue and going like. There are some, I have heard some sages say that when we, when, while we think we live, we're actually dead and when we die is when we actually life. And they have. When we actually have life and they have referred to the body as the tomb of the soul.

[Chris Ryan]

And then kind of. Do you believe this?

[Ike Baker]

What's that?

[Chris Ryan]

Do you believe this?

[Ike Baker]

Yeah, 100%.

[Chris Ryan]

Wow.

[Ike Baker]

But it's not, it's not as simple as that. Right? Again, if it, it can't be. Which is why they're using these symbolic terms to talk about it now. This gets expanded to the nth degree with what language they have over the next, you know, thousand years. And that's what we're going to look at a little bit today.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah.

[Ike Baker]

Drastically reduced version of it. But the final thing I want to say about specifically the Odyssey in the Iliad. Right. The epics of, of Homer, the Iliad being the sort of prequel and then the Odyssey being, you know, telling the tale of, of everybody, but really mostly primarily Odysseus's attempt to get back home. These, you know, I, I hesitate to say that these were religious texts so much used in some capacities religiously. What do I mean by that? Well, there's for instance in the Greek magical papyri which are, you know, Greco Roman Egyptian text sourced from Alexandria, Egypt covering about 500 years, mostly in the, in the, in the common era, so AD the first few centuries AD but also a few before in BCE

[Chris Ryan]

this

[Ike Baker]

collection of spells and texts from all over Egypt contain something called the Omeromanthion. Okay So it's a, a text teaching how to divine using lines like I guess canticles from, from the Odyssey and the Iliad. And so you'd throw knuckle bones of, of pigs with, with how they were served as numbered die. Right. They astragalomancy is, is that when you're throwing knuckle bones and then these three numbers would be added up that you'd get. You'd get three numbers. You'd. And you'd, you'd. Or you'd take the numbers and then you would select specific lines from the, the Homeric epics. That are supposed to, in some way. Well, they correspond to the numbers that you've. You've drawn. But they, they're supposed to give you an answer of some kind. They're supposed to be oracular in some way. And there's, there's a modern way that people work this with the Bible. I practice it once in a while. It's called bibliomancy. Right? You just kind of get in a prayerful state and you flip open the book and boom. And then you open your eyes and where your finger lands, it's like. Okay, that's

[Chris Ryan]

maybe even a more appropriate analog would be like the I Ching, because the I Ching is very poetic. And, and in the, and it's, and in the Odyssey's original form, I mean, it's, it's this, it's poem, right? It's written in hexameter, right?

[Ike Baker]

So, yeah, dactylic, I think, originally.

[Chris Ryan]

Okay, okay, yeah. So. So let's just back up and this will make for a good sound bite, maybe for the intro. What is the Odyssey really? If you had to just sum it up.

[Ike Baker]

If I had to sum it up, I would say that the Odyssey is the quintessential epic that like the great literary traditions of the ancient world, including things like the Mahabharata, right? And these ancient texts, they used literature in a way that was not completely secular because their worldview couldn't understand secularism. That the human experience had not yet ripped itself in half. To be able to bifurcate the subjective and the objective into two incompatibles. And the subjective, which is more mysterious in many ways because it's like trying to understand yourself is kind of like trying to understand the soul in many ways with the senses is like trying to look at your nose. That has a religious component to it. But some people prefer the term spiritual component to it. And so at this early stage, these were, they were not separate. So understanding this, you look at something like the Odyssey and you see that it is an epic tale that is supposed to communicate several things on different levels. There is the letter of the story, which is part of the literature, the literary tradition. The beauty, as you say, the, the meter, the, the. The meter wasn't just something that was supposed to be beautiful. It was something to help, you know, the sort of bardic tradition remember, commit these long form poems to memory. There's that, there's that transmission of our great stories and our history. Then there is the sort of soul of the. Rather than just the letter, I consider that kind of the body. If we're going to break this down into like maybe the alchemical triad, the letter, what it actually says, the body, the vehicle, then the soul of, of, of the story is what it is communicating on a moral level, what it is communicating on the level of fantasy and imagination. Stimulating emotions like courage, hope, perseverance. Okay. And then there's the sort of the, the, the, the spirit, the high, the highest, let's call it the, the highest way of interpreting it, which is metaphysical and theological. So the Odyssey effectively is a text that contained poetry, meter, which is music, a story, a history, moral lessons. And it inculcated simultaneously deep, deep, profound truths about the nature of the soul

[Chris Ryan]

in the cosmos and perhaps even literal esoteric practices like ritual.

[Ike Baker]

That's what, that's what Proclus believed for sure.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah. So, so let's dive in, man. I think that's good, I think that's some good exposition. And we gave a bunch of historical context, maybe, maybe, maybe even introducing more than we needed to. But I think it was very important and, and very good to kind of, even if people are not familiar with some of these names, ideas, whatever, like it, it establishes that they're essentially just, just to summarize all of this, you know, like we're all at least from a high level, if you watch a channel, a lot, maybe more so familiar with Plato. And we know he's doing this and he's doing it in a new way.

[Ike Baker]

Right.

[Chris Ryan]

Like the dialogues are not the same as what Homer is doing. It's not the same as what the pre Socratics were doing. But, but there's this, there seems to be this clear unbroken line of exploring the deeper, the deepest possible aspects of reality, all the way from a, a mundane letter level like you're talking about, to, to much deeper concealed levels. So it would be side note, it would be weird if Plato wasn't doing the same thing, which I think you and I both think he was. And it would be equally weird if Homer wasn't doing the same thing, because they all were doing it through, through though the medium itself was evolving and changing. It always had these, this, this multi dimensional aspect to it.

[Ike Baker]

Right. And don't forget Plato was alive in the golden age of ancient Greece. Doesn't mean that it was a utopia. I mean, he was alive during the time of the, the tyrants, many of which were his family members, but he did live in the golden age of, of ancient Greek and specifically Athenian literature. So he was alive, you know, like when the great playwrights were writing Euripides. Sophocles you know, a lot of these famous play playwrights to this two, 500 years ago, they're still famous. It's wild. But some of them are in his dialogues, right? So they, there are personages in the dialogue. So he, he would have been composing these like a play, you know. And actually there's a really interesting book by J.B. kennedy that shows that in at least two of the dialogues of Plato, he uses a musical structure to sort of encode into his, his plays and, and, or his, his dialogues serving somewhat as plays. It's re. It's really quite interesting to see that he just adapted the major storytelling format of his time for philosophy. And then you see everybody after him does it, right? The Corpus Hermeticum and, and, and the other hermetic texts in the broader Hermetica, everything's a, a dialogue, you know, any, any of that pedagogical stuff. The Divine Pymander, the Asclepius, it's all a, a teacher discussing things with his students. So it's. Everything takes a very Platonic characterization after him, which is why really he. Not just why he made a huge splash, it's why we have almost all. We've got everything that he wrote, really, because it just, I guess it was the right time, the right place, the right guy, the right ideas, stars aligned kind of deal. But. So let's take a look at what they really thought about the Odyssey and, or the Iliad and the Odyssey. Effectively they're looking at the highest possible interpretation, remembering many of them writers themselves, that there is an architecture to this symbolic narrative. So like any other symbol system, symbolic vocabulary, you're creating a sequence that we call a formula. In, in mythography we call it a cycle. So they're looking at the formulas that are in interior to and comprise the structure of this symbolic narrative. The architecture of this and the highest level of interpretation we see from volumes of writing over hundreds of years that the Iliad and the Odyssey are really trying to tell the quintessential story of the structure of the cosmos and the story of the soul. And those two things are integral to each other. I guess we would have to start with some, some ground that you've already covered in, in book 10 of the Republic, we have something called the myth of er. Okay, so we have to revisit that at least just to mention the fact that it gives us this cosmology. You know, obviously it's, it's pretty much the oldest or one of the oldest out of body experiences that we have recorded. An Ancient soldier dies on the field of battle. They put him on a funeral pyre. His soul leaves not only his body, but the cosmos. Okay. And it tells us a little bit about the structure of the cosmos in this beautiful segment that talks about the spindle of Anage and the Moirai, her three daughters, Atropos, Lachesis. Yes, the Fates, Atropos, Lachesis and Clotho. Right. And so they weave the soul into this perfect loom. And this weave work encompasses all seven planets and the sphere of the fixed stars. That's the cosmos. And the spindle of Anag, running down as the center of gravity, serves as. As the cosmic axis. And so this, it's a very beautiful description. And we get the story of how the soul, you know, what, what this, what happens to the soul when it leaves the body during death? What it doesn't tell us is what happens when the soul reincarnates. And they did have this belief, and they had a word for it, which was called metempsychosis. Okay, so the transmigration of the soul, the final portion of the myth of her does tell us that souls drink from a river called lithi, meaning forgetfulness. And in that way they go. They go to sleep and then they shoot off with their. Their daimons that are. Serve as these psychopomps, these guides into the cosmos, these spiritual guides into the cosmos, journeying down there with them.

[Chris Ryan]

And we should tell people, when you say into the cosmos, he means in back into nature, into life. Because some people might be thinking like, oh, into the cosmos. Up. No, like you go back into the cosmos when you reincarnate meaning like physical, nature, reality.

[Ike Baker]

At this point, you're on the other side. Yeah, and again, we're speaking mytho, mythopoetically. We're not speaking in terms of they literally thought this happened, but these are ways of talking about the state of the soul and its sojourn into and out of the cosmos. So at this point, they're. They're outside in what we could call maybe pneumatic realm, spiritual realms. And so the soul, it's all trying to say the soul, though it has past experiences, it does retain, enters into embodiment upon reincarnation as a somewhat of a blank slate. Now, it is said by several philosophers that some drink more deeply of that. That river of forgetfulness, and others do not. Okay, they have only a little sip, and so they come back in with, with vague memories. But we're going to talk about what that experience of the soul actually kind of being, being bound back into the Material cosmos was thought to be like by the ancient philosophers. So at this point we have to look at now. Now is where we.

[Chris Ryan]

Did you want to say just a question. I'm trying to remember on the point of them, you know, not, not literally believing this point. Plato will often do this thing where he's saying this is a mythos, this is a logos.

[Ike Baker]

What.

[Chris Ryan]

What does he say about the myth of her? Does he say that it's. Does he just say it's a mythos or what? What does he say?

[Ike Baker]

It's called mythos. But mythos does. Mythos didn't. Yes, Mythos didn't necessarily mean false so much as it meant a retelling. But I do believe that at the end of the myth of er. I'm pretty sure at the end of the myth of Ur. Socrates, something says something to the effect that if we believed in this myth it would save us. If we were convinced by the myth it would save us. So.

[Chris Ryan]

So yeah, I just wanted to. I just wanted to highlight that a little bit because I don't want people to think it's kind, it's kind of like in the same way before we were talking about if you're this deep Pythagorean initiate, your idea of the gods is going to be this transcendent numerical quality which we would symbolize with our integers. But that's not what, what a number is to a Pythagorean. It's sort of like this story is a lower level representation of something metaphysical that they're trying to explain through the, you know, the poverty of language basically that you can't. You, you. In the same way, it's like if you took 5 grams of mushrooms and tried to tell the story, you can't do it. You have a near death experience and try to tell the story. It's going to be kind of like this, but there's going to be so many elements that you cannot capture within the story. So you have to construct a story around whatever the truth of it was. Some. Something like that is. I don't know if you would agree or disagree with that.

[Ike Baker]

So. So here's the thing. In all of this stuff they use such archaic language that has to go through maybe 10 to 20 different filters, translators, epochs, things like this, selections of text that like it's. Even though throughout the Platonic dialogue, the Platonic dialogues, especially in something like the Timaeus, you do get these prefaces, like the preface of Timaeus where he says basically like listen, this is the best I can do. Because we can't talk about this stuff. And me and you, we're just guys. We're just mortals. So, you know, accept what I'm going to say and we'll go from there. And that's. That might be the best we can get. But they're using all this archaic language that's difficult for people to understand. I'm given a course right now called the Magic of Dion Fortune. It's 10 weeks long. We meet once a week. In my research for this course, I found that Dion Fortune, believe it or not, has most eloquently, eloquently, most succinctly given us axioms, things to remember, simple sentences, things to remember as we approach all of this stuff. So she calls this stuff, this type of symbol mapping, she calls it an algebra.

[Chris Ryan]

Right.

[Ike Baker]

Because we're trying to talk about something we don't know. We're trying to solve for X.

[Chris Ryan]

Right.

[Ike Baker]

You gotta use things that you do know. It's like the Pythagorean triangle. We don't know what the hypotenuse is, but we know that we know sides A and sides B. If we have those two, we can get what we don't have. So it's. It's using knowns to approach the unknown. And she calls it a symbolic algebra that we use so that the mind can climb where it cannot fly. Okay, and she. Then she also goes on to talk about the symbolic images she gives, which are very similar to the Timaeus. She claims to have channeled them from the Greek, who she later identifies as Socrates. She says these images are symbolic. They are not meant to inform the mind, they are meant to train it.

[Chris Ryan]

Wow. Okay, so right there, the transcendent Hypotenuse would be the. The. The name of this podcast. If I was using my. My old of. Of naming episodes that didn't care about the algorithm.

[Ike Baker]

Yeah, but I mean, she puts it perfectly. An algebra using knowns to approach the unknown so that the mind can climb where it can't fly. And saying, like, listen, they're not. This isn't meant to instruct you. It's meant to train your mind how to think about and train in this algebraic way. Okay, so, I mean, she was the best, but moving on, kind of toggling back here. So the next point that we would have to talk about is what did they believe happened when the soul came back in and why? So now we get into the Odyssey, specifically book 13 of the Odyssey, which describes a cave in the Port of Forkis. Which is on the island of Ithaca. That's where Odysseus is. It's where he came from. It's where he's trying to get back to. Okay, so this cave is. It has a really interesting description. I'm going to send you the card so that you can put it up. There is a very important commentary on specifically this cave that is written by the Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry of Ty. Student of Plotinus. We think he may have been a teacher, at the very least a contemporary of Iamblichus. I'm sure many of your listeners are familiar with these names. Yeah, Porphyry, actually, he's. He's. He's interpreting this cave esoterically. Again, harkening back to earlier commentators, specifically Numenius, who was a middle Platonic philosopher, not a late Platonic, which is what we call Neoplatonism is the late Platonics. So Porphyry was. Porphyry was around the third century CE and second centuries. Okay, so. And Numenius was much earlier, closer to Plato. But he's using a lot of Numenius's ideas when he's interpreting this cave out of the Odyssey. So the quote that I'm just gonna pull up and.

[Chris Ryan]

And what is ostensibly this part of the Odyssey about? This is like having something to. I know. It has something to do with nymphs and. Yeah, what, what, what is it about exoterically? And then. Well, let's get into the well. And that's.

[Ike Baker]

That's the thing. Porphyry is just kind of like, there's no reason for Homer to describe this cave. It's kind of seems interjected into it. And also, he calls the description patently absurd. So I'm going to just read the quote that describes it from one of the earlier translations. Quote. High at the head a branching olive grows and crowns the pointed cliffs with shady bows. A cavern pleasant though involved in night. Beneath it lies the naiads delight, where bowls and urns of workmanship divine and massy beams in native marble shine, of which the nymphs amazing webs display of purple hue and exquisite array. The busy bees within the urns secure honey delicious and like nectar pure perpetual waters. Through the grotto glide a lofty gate unfolds. On either side the that to the north is pervious by mankind. The sacred south to immortals is consigned. So what are we looking at here? Rather than start like, you know, aggressively quoting Porphyry, I'm going to go through each one of these lines a little bit. So first, we want to talk about a cavern, pleasant, though involved in night. Okay. Porphyry. Basically, he points this out as signifying. Well, he says that it appropriately, the ancients consecrated a cave to the universe. So they. Basically, what he's saying here is caves, when you read about them, when you see them in an ancient context, they're kind of suggesting not just like underneath the earth, but as representative of the cosmos. And he finds justification for that in the verbiage pleasant, though involved in night. And I believe that the words that he uses to describe this is, he says that the material cosmos is filled with sensual pleasures, Right? Visual pleasure is sensual pleasure as well. It's filled with beauty. He describes it. Right? Bowls and urns of workmanship divine the massy beams in native marble shine. There's so much pleasantness that we can see and observe. However, it's involved in night. Why. Why that piece? Well, because caves are also dark. Okay. And so this he speaks about in his commentary, he says, although it is pleasant, there's something obscure about it. It's the whole reason we need to look behind and into things. Yeah, you know, it's. There's something obscure about this realm. For instance, friends, I have been cooking

[Chris Ryan]

up the goods over in the members section on YouTube and at patreon.com forward slash, third eyedrops. What are said goods? And was cooking really the best verb you could summon on this occasion? Well, to the former question, said goods are weekly, at least roughly exclusive content that you are never going to see here on the main feed with some of your favorite guests. By the way, case in point, I am slowly working on a doc that I shot at Contact in the Desert this year with a number of your favorite beings on the topic of UFOs and consciousness. And I will be releasing the full unedited conversations with all of those people only on the members channel and on Patreon. If you do join up over at patreon.com forward/, third eyedrops, you will get access to all of those exclusive videos, plus a patron only discord and occasional live hangs and more. And yes, of course, the doc will be coming out on the main feed. If I didn't make that clear, so much love for watching my friends, while I have you tickle that algorithm like, subscribe review if you are listening on Spotify.

[Ike Baker]

Okay? And so this he speaks about in his commentary. He says, although it is pleasant, there's something obscure about it. It's the whole reason we need to look behind and into things. There's something obscure about this realm. For instance, this bookshelf behind me looks really solid, hard to move. But we know because we have piercing technology that can look down and sort of measure the most minute particles of this.

[Chris Ryan]

That.

[Uber Eats Advertiser]

That.

[Ike Baker]

That bookshelf is not actually still every molecule, and it is. Every atom is vibrating at an incredibly intense speed. That's not necessarily just apparent. So it's. It's a similar. They had these kind of ideas, even though they didn't have microscopes. They understood. And Plato is a great example of this in his dialogues that, like, there's a lot that these senses can't see about the reality behind everything.

[Chris Ryan]

And not to derail this, but it's impossible for me not to also think about Plato's cave because.

[Ike Baker]

Absolutely.

[Chris Ryan]

You know, I don't know. Clearly, Plato's cave came way after the. The Homeric cave of the nymphs being discussed here. But it's. It's intriguing because obviously Plato's cave has a lot of the same themes that you're describing. You know, false reality, the shadows on the cave wall, the people who mistakenly think this is reality when it's not. Yeah. And also it makes me just think of Katabasis, too. But I don't want to introduce.

[Ike Baker]

Well, yeah, I mean, there's. We could go down so many rabbit holes with that, with. Specifically with Parmenides. But anyway, you're right. And Porphyry brings that up. He brings up Plato's cave in the commentary, actually, and he says, like, yeah, look. Look at what's going on when we talk about caves, when the ancient tradition talks about caves. Like, he says, like, this is absurd. First of all, why would Homer need to. And this isn't me, this is Porphyry. Now, why would Homer need to describe this cave? It's this weird aside. He breaks the narrative and. And then that's it. And there's nothing that he really says about it. And not only that, but listen to the description. It's absurd. Porphyry goes on to say, to think that anyone would read this and actually believe that it existed is nuts. So that tells us something. It tells us that he is flourishing to both reveal meaning, wave a flag. Hey, over here. And simultaneously conceal. So that when you get over to where he's at waving that flag, it's not immediately clear what he's saying. So this is why Porphyry feels like he needs to elaborate this in detail. And he does a very thorough, esoteric analysis of it. So this is how what he's talking about, the cavern is Pleasant the universe is. There is pleasantness and pleasure and beauty throughout the cosmos, The. The sensible universe. But we. It's involved in night, which is to say there is a lot of it that's obscure in modern scientific terms. Most of the cosmos is dark matter. Why do we call it dark matter? Not because it's some spooky dark thing.

[Chris Ryan]

It's.

[Ike Baker]

We literally call it dark matter because we don't know what it is. It's the same thing. Dark for not knowing, you know, involved in night, dark because there is so much obscure here. Now, he says, beneath it lies the naiad's delight. What is the naiad's delight?

[Chris Ryan]

Water.

[Ike Baker]

The naiad specifically, as opposed to the dryad, for instance, is a nymph, but a class of nymph, a nymph specifically that loves and binds itself to water and watery places, whereas a dryad normally lives in something like an oak tree and doesn't prefer the water. Okay, so the. Beneath it lies the naiad's delight, he says, where bowls and urns of workmanship divine. Taylor translates the bulls and urns to amphorae. Okay, so if I mention that word, amphorae, it's just because of my. My nose has been stuck in Taylor's version of this for years. And it just means the bowls are urns. So the bowls and urns of workmanship divine. I'm going to skip down. The busy bees within the urns secure honey, delicious and like nectar, pure. Okay, so what's he saying there? Bees are depositing honey for some reason in these strange watery bowls. Okay, why? Well, Porphyry invokes certain myths in his commentaries, particularly the one about how Kronos subdues Uranus and castrates him. It gets him drunk, but what's he get him drunk on? Nectar, Honey. So Proclus actually writes much later, but also basically quoting Porphyry almost word for word. There's only slight differences. Proclus says the sweetness of honey. Right. A cavern pleasant. The sweetness of honey signifies to the theologians of old, the pleasure arising from copulation. Okay, in. In Porphyry's commentary, Taylor translates it as koishan, like coitus, sex. Proclus goes on, quote, honey is indicative of the pleasure which draws souls downward into generation. Okay, so that is from Proclus's commentary on the Republic. So, but Porphyry is invoking that here. Porphyry was like 200 years before Proclus. But, but Proclus is effectively saying the exact same thing. And Porphyry says it, you know, this is free online. Anyone can. Can just go pick it up free, completely for free, the commentary on the cave of the Nims and read it for themselves. But he says the same thing. The honey signifies the material pleasure, specifically the desire for physical sex that lures souls into the generative cosmos. Okay, so then I'm going to go back and look at another line where. And massy beams in native marble shine on which the nymphs amazing web's display of purple hue, an exquisite array. So, okay, here's another strange feature. There are these massy beams. So you can look at these beams, right? These beams are usually structures that hold up a, A floor or a ceiling. Okay. And. And he's saying they're made of. Of, Of. Of. Of marble. And sitting on them, all around them, these little naiads, these nymphs who love water, are knitting these purple garments. This is gonna, this is gonna. We're gonna come full circle. This put a massive.

[Chris Ryan]

No, I'm, I'm. I'm so intrigued, man. I'm so intrigued. I find this so, so fascinating.

[Ike Baker]

Yeah, this. It's gonna come full circle specifically to the garment thing. So keep that in mind. Anybody's listening. The garment is arguably one of the most important factors here.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah, I. I think I know where you're going.

[Ike Baker]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So they're weaving these purple garments, Porphyry says, effectively, this color purple. He says they used animal blood to dye this color purple. That a lot of the colors that they used, the, the blood of living things, certain mollusks would also be ground up. And he also says that this, the purple is indicative of blood and, and sensuality, you know, and there's a connection to the sexual nature there. But he definitively says they're weaving bodies and that naiads are the souls who are incarnating weaving bodies, flesh, terrestrial flesh, around the massy beams of marble, which are our bones. Okay, The, The. He says the beams of marble are our bones which create, you know, the blood out of what they, you know, the marrow. And they, it weaves this, you know, what a lot of people call our meat suit. These, this effectively what he's talking about there. He's using the same verbiage. We, you know, some people, facetiously, kind of in a macabre sense, they'll say meat suit. He's saying garment. He's saying suit. They're saying the same thing. Okay. But he says the naiads are specifically the souls drawn to water. Why, this is very old. This is pre Socratic, this idea that souls like they gravitate towards a moist nature, okay? They like moisture. They like to be in the body. They like the fluids that run through the body. Now, this may sound strange to modern listeners, but I'm connecting the dots for the logic here, for porphyry and ancient people, the way ancient people thought, okay? So that's why they are nyads. That's why the cave is watery. That's another reason why Socrates says, when we're in. In. In materiality, we're in the bottom of the ocean. There's another reason why Odysseus, while he's trying to get home, is on the sea. Okay? It's the. The. This watery nature, right? Heraclitus said it.

[Chris Ryan]

He.

[Ike Baker]

Now that's a very Presocratic philosopher. He said, a dry soul is the wisest. Okay? So. So there's this affinity of the souls that want to incarnate for these material pleasures, most particularly sex. Come in here with this. Because there's all sorts of ideas behind that. It's an energy, it's a creative potency. But the pleasure aspect is, particularly what he's saying, intoxicates the soul and draws it down towards watery, moist nature. And that then, yeah, honey, delicious, like nectar, pure, perpetual waters through the grotto glide. That also goes back to Plato and Heraclitus. Heraclitus. The Heraclidean axiom that Plato likes to quote the most is no man steps into the same river twice. So flowing water is indicative of constant change, let's say it, at the mouth of the river. This analogy, you'd encounter me as a young man, and then somewhere in the middle, I'd be middle age. And then somewhere at the end, I'd be an old man. You're never. Is it the same person? I don't know. Things are constantly in flux here. That's a huge component of water. So it could also be said that not only do they like the moist nature, they like change. They like dynamism. Now, the final thing he talks about are the. The lofty gates on either side, okay, to the north, which is impervious, which is pervious to mankind, meaning mortals can come through there. And the sacred south is where immortals can enter. And Porphyry once again says, this is ridiculous. How could anyone take this literally? How could anyone think that Homer was writing literally? And he basically equates them to the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. So those are the two zodiac, zodiacal signs in which the solstices occur on the one Hand, the Tropic of Cancer has the summer solstice. Now that is when there is the most light in the year. Okay. In the other hand, Capricorn, these Tropica, Capricorn is where the winter solstice takes place. That is the most darkness in the year. So, but he's saying there's something about these two entrances. All right. What he eventually tells us is that these are the, the sort of the celestial clockwork, the wheel work of how and when souls incarnate and leave the cosmos. That's the cycle of this north, south axis, the greatest light, least amount of light. The tropics he's talking about. This is, this has something very, very important to do with the general generative cycles of reincarnation.

[Chris Ryan]

Yep. And, and it, if you, if people get into the whole, a lot of the world's astral ascent sort of mysteries and motifs, they always have something to do with like the northern sky, the pole star, and the soul needing to make that journey to basically get to the realm of the gods or the, the afterlife. You, you don't want to be stuck here, basically. You don't want to be stuck wandering as a soul not knowing where you're going. Which again, has massive allegories to the story of the Odyssey. Right, like taking, you know, Odyssey taking, or Odysseus taking 10 years or whatever to find his way back home and stuff.

[Ike Baker]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. It's, that's exactly what the whole journey is about. And we're going to get to that shortly. The, the, the other thing that I want to mention is Macrobius, who was another. A neoplatonist in the 5th century. He's comment, he comments on Cicero's Somnium Scipionist. The Dream of Scipio.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah.

[Ike Baker]

The Dream of Scipio is a classic Roman text that takes the cosmology of the myth of er as its foundation. And it's this dream that Scipio and I think his grandson or grand or grandfather are. They meet each other outside of what we call the Ogdoad, you know, the, the eight spheres of the terrestrial sphere, the seven visible classical planets that they knew about, and the final sphere, which is this fixed, the fixed stars and the zodiac, which sort of enclose the whole thing like a gigantic ball, like Russian nesting dolls sort of thing. Okay. And they meet out there and they discuss this. And it's a very, very famous work. I highly recommend Members of the golden dawn actually translated it as well. The Hermetic Order of the golden dawn in the 1880s and 1890s. That's how important it is even to modern esoteric traditions. So read the Dream of Scipio. It's. It is kind of short, but Macrobius, this philosopher, comments on it saying Pythagoras thought that the empire of Pluton, meaning Hades. Pythagoras thought that the empire of Pluton, Hades began downwards from the Milky Way because souls falling from thence appear already to have receded from the gods. So that is giving us this wheel work. They believed that the Milky Way was where souls went to sort of wait to reincarnate. The way that it looks, that milky character gives it this like, image of light behind some sort of film or screen. So they thought what they were actually looking at were souls that were sort of trapped just, just beyond the sphere of the, the, the fixed stars waiting, waiting in that river to reincarnate. And what's really interesting is where,

[Chris Ryan]

where

[Ike Baker]

the Milky Way sort of intersects, I think the Cancer, the Tropic of Cancer, where that sort of intersects and where like they would have thought, you know, somebody like Porphyry would have thought like, okay, the souls have to wait and then come, boom, they've hit the Tropic of Cancer and they reincarnate right before that intersection. Maybe like right about here on the axis, there's a, there's a, a constellation called Crater, the mixing bowl, the glass of wine. And this corresponds perfectly to drinking from the river Lethe right before you reincarnate and, and, and, and having forgetfulness. But not just Lethe. Right? Here's what Macrobius goes on to say. As soon, therefore, as the soul gravitates towards body, she begins to experience material tumult. And this is what Plato remarks in the Phaedo, that the soul is drawn into the body, staggering in intoxication. So Leffee is not, you know, those

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[Ike Baker]

Not only the drink of forgetfulness, it is the rushing of material actual. I don't know what they thought it was, but maybe we could conceive of it as atoms and all sorts of material inclinations getting more and more intense in their, in their gravity. And this creates a state of stupor in the soul where it's completely intoxicated and rushes down.

[Chris Ryan]

Well, this could be like the, the planetary accretions. Right. Like you're taking on like the soul is going from this pure form that's unadulterated. And, and what, what they explain in the myth of, er, is when the soul is incarnating and it's passing through all of these spheres, like these planetary spheres, it's taking on those qualities and it's like staining the soul. Not the soul, but it's staining the soul's like pneumatic vehicle, I guess, to use a nerdy terminology. Like, it's, it's staining the soul vehicle. And it weighs the soul down and it pulls it down and pulls it down until it gets here on Earth. So, yeah, it's, there's so much here and. But let's continue.

[Ike Baker]

Yeah, well, I mean. And that's it. The whole idea of like the astral garments, like you're talking about these astral sort of. Or the planetary inclinations of vice and virgin, that actually it, it starts in Numenius, goes to Porphyry, and then Macrobius is kind of the last stop, the final development of that idea, which is why I quote him. So you're actually 100% right. Those that intoxication is, is then it precedes and the, the, the. The investiture of the soul with what we call the astral garments.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah.

[Ike Baker]

That is as they, as the soul then incarnates through the eighth sphere of the zodiac and is drawn closer and further, further down to maybe like the Earth. Right over here you have the seven spheres of the planets. At each one it is invested with a vice and a virtue. Okay. And they weigh the soul vehicle down, like you're saying. Plato says it makes it like, like there's a violence done to it. It makes that soul vehicle angular. And this makes me think of how many ships Odysseus lost and how he couldn't fly, he couldn't pilot them correctly around Caribbes and the winds and all this stuff. It's. That's his vehicle. And, and all this on the waters, the moisture of materiality and continual change. And, and as it, as the soul descends through the spheres and takes on these astral garments, that gives us our, our inclination, our earthly inclination, our character. Right. That's the importance of, say, something like an astrological natal chart in something like these Traditions, it shows you, you know, it's a schematic of character, it's a snapshot, and this is the philosophy behind that. So here we are now, finally bound in. Bound to the body with our garment, in a state of forgetfulness and intoxication. And before us all the pleasures of the cavern, but still a darkness and obscurity, something that we don't understand. And this is effectively where we come to the voyage home. So the cave specifically, as. As commented upon by Numenius Porphyry at the. The uppermost in Macrobius, this Platonic tradition is interpreting the. This cave at. In Ithaca in the Odyssey as an allegory for the material cosmos and how the soul gets drawn into it. Okay, so, I mean, it's fascinating.

[Chris Ryan]

Question, quick question. Like I said, I haven't seen the movie yet. Do they, do they allude to this cave at all in the movie?

[Ike Baker]

I don't think so. I don't remember. I don't. I definitely don't think so. The thing is that the movie wasn't philosophical in this sense. Nolan wasn't really hitting on any of these, at least not in an obvious way. What he was doing is what many other people have done, who. He's sort of Trojan horsing a sociopolitical narrative into this thing. That is, it's actually the probably the opposite message of what you would expect. So based on everything we know about it, it's. The movie itself is a Trojan horse, which is one of the meta things I've ever. I've ever seen anyone do.

[Chris Ryan]

Right. And. And then the text itself also seems to be one because it's, it's representing itself from the outside as one thing, but what's. What it really is, or maybe these, these deeper layers we're talking about is what's really, you know, the, the story is the vehicle for.

[Ike Baker]

Yeah, I mean, and that's very interesting, right, because there's no mention of the Trojan horse in the Iliad and there's. There's only very brief, sparse mention of it in the Odyssey. Really, where you get the story of how Odysseus beat the Trojans in full with the Trojan horse doesn't come until the Ennead of Virgil. So, so that, that's. I mean, that's really interesting because, yeah, later commentators could have still been kind of like figuring out. I mean, it's possible now. It's, it's pure speculation, but it, It's a really cool idea that they would be like, oh, this is kind of like a tro. Like a horse that is wooden. And what's, what's really important is inside of it in these ways people were adding to stuff and, and sort of changing the narrative and making it malleable to their own purposes and their own readings of it, which I think is totally fine. It's completely acceptable. Acceptable. Again, I'm, I'm an esotericist and a student of history. I'm not a classicist, you know, I believe in living traditions. It's not like Christopher Nolan burned the source material.

[Chris Ryan]

Right.

[Ike Baker]

You know, like we still have that, you know. Anyway, so the one, one thing that I want to mention here before we talk about the voyage home is a 2nd century collection of texts which are lost to us called the Chaldean Oracles. The Chaldean oracles were, they were supposed to have been the product of the channeling of the soul of Plato by Julian the Chaldan or Babylonian. And when you say, when they used to say Caldan, they didn't just mean oh a person from Babylon, they meant specifically the priest, a Babylonian priest was a Calledan. So Julian the Chaldan and his son Julian the theurgist. It's believed that the Julian the theurgist, you know, went into an ecstatic state or otherwise induced one into his father and they channeled this information from the soul of Plato or at least Ruth Majersik in her fantastic scholarly translation of it. It's the classic kind of text. She, she says that that is, she explicitly says that that may have been the case in her introduction.

[Chris Ryan]

So I recommend just to connect two dots. You said it's lost but we also do, but it's fragmentary. Like we do have a bunch of, from my understanding we have a bunch of little slices from different sources and they've kind of been re compiled and then there's not even agree and son like what order they go in. Right?

[Ike Baker]

Yeah, well, so what it is, is, is that scholars were looking at Iamlichus, Proclus, Damascus, all of these ancient neo Neoplatonists and they would say oh, the oracle says or according to the oracle or according to the oracles of the Chaldees. So what, what the scholars figured out is like oh, they're, they're quoting the Chaldean oracles here or at least they're claiming to do that. So in the, the fragments of the Chaldean oracles that you will find nowadays in translation, they're actually instances of when other philosophers claim or explicitly note that they are quoting these oracles. So they're Pulled out and, you know, like, probably like anybody else, there's variation. I mean, I don't, I don't know how much. It was a paraphrase and a shortening. It's impossible to know that at this point. But yeah, we, we have it in a very fragmentary nature because of that. So that's, that was good to point

[Chris Ryan]

out and just to get super high level basically there. So there's a very important Neoplatonist named Iamblichus. Basically, from him on, everybody is obsessed with this art of theurgy and they, they consider it, you know, Iamblichus considers it even more important basically than doing any kind of like academic study. Though they're not necessarily mutually exclusive. Yeah, so. So if you, if you read, you know, Plotinus, the most famous Neoplatonist, I don't think you're going to hear it mentioned even once.

[Ike Baker]

Or maybe he's got some quotes in there. He's got some quotes. Because the thing is, in my experience of going through these texts, there is far less disagreement between Plotinus and Iamlichus. Specifically. Specifically on the necessity of, or at least utility of ritual. Certainly, certainly a theurgist engaged in what Plotinus would have called theodia. Right. So divine contemplation. They wouldn't just be doing ritual, they'd be doing theurgic ritual and they would also be doing divine contemplation. So that, that's the interesting thing because some of, some of the most, and I think this is typical of Plotinus, but some of the most, I guess, like poetically grandiose and enigmatic sort of epic lines are literally from him. So it's, it's, it's quite interesting because it's, it's explaining more than how to do theurgy. It's, it's giving the relationship between the mind of the divine and the soul of the human. Yeah, that's really what the Chaldean oracles are trying to impart. And so you can approach that with different methodologies. Right. It's kind of like there's different sects of Christianity and different sects of Judaism and they're. We're all working out of the same book, but maybe different chapters, you know, different aspects of it and so on and so forth. So.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah, so, so the high level is theurgy is this ritual practice or, and whole, you know, ecology of, of ideas and practices and theories of trying to bring the soul into contact with divinity. And either, it depends who you ask, but either elevate the soul or Draw divinity down to the soul so that it can participate in, in things above the cosmic or the, the, the terrestrial earthly realm. And then there's like a whole process that unfolds. But we don't need to necessarily get into that because we're going to get way off track here. But basically it is a, it is an express sacred practice to try to like, commune with divinity.

[Ike Baker]

Yeah, very good explanation. I want to quote here discussing, because we're going to come back to the Chaldean oracles and how they relate to the way that these, these Platonic philosophers were. Late Platonic philosophers were translating and interpreting the Iliad and The Odyssey. But Dr. Anne Sheppard writes in her studies on the fifth and sixth essays of Proclus's commentary on the Republic, she writes, quote, nowhere before Proclus and Sirianus, who was his teacher, is there detailed and systematic application of the Homeric myths to the sphere of transcendent metaphysics. Saying that Odysseus represents the human soul in search of escape from the material world is rather different from saying that Zeus and Hera represent the monad and the dyad, two abstract philosophical concepts. So she goes on to talk about the involvement of Plotinus and. Which is, it's timely because you, you just brought him up and how his, his kind of metaphysic also informed interpretations. Which is all to say basically that we're going to switch over now because we've been talking mostly about Porphyry. We're going to switch over to, believe it or not, Proclus, who has the benefit of hindsight, he is the later famous great Neoplatonist, Platonic commentator and inheritor of the Athenian academy. So he's able to have the works of Plato, the works of Porphyry, Plotinus, Iamlichus. He's able to have them all in front of him and then he synthesizes them beautifully. So what you really see is we really start going deep into the myth of, or the, let's say, the symbolic narrative in the Odyssey that shows the way home and the Iliad, we really start seeing that drilled down by Proclus. So for instance, he starts, you know, he starts looking at the other aspects of the Odyssey, like the episode with Polyphemus the Cyclops. And obviously, you know, Polyphemus is, is famously blinded by Odysseus. How does he blind him? Gets him drunk. We're talking about Kronos and, and Uranus before. We're talking about the intoxication of the soul and the drinking of the vessel before incarnation, that makes us intoxicated, forgetful, in a stupor. Okay? So Proclus translates the blinding as polyphemus to the blinding of the soul to its, its nature, its inherent nature, its inherent divinity by the material pleasures. Okay? And this reverts back to this idea of Leti forgetfulness. The entire trajectory of Platonic philosophy was geared towards what he called the pediatrician, which is the education, but not education. And it's explicitly made distinct. Not education, just in like, you know, learn math, learn Greek, learn this. It was the education of the soul, right? Because specifically in the dialogue Meno, we see Socrates or Plato through his character of Socrates, kind of showing a quote unquote geometric proof that the soul doesn't learn anything in the way we think it does. It's not acquiring new information, it is remembering the, the person is remembering, gaining access to what the soul already knows. Right? Because the soul is transcendent of everything that animates the cosmos. And so it has a prior knowledge of the source of all those things. And this is called anamnesis. And there's a word in there that many of you might be familiar with, amnesia. So this is an amnesis, an amnesia. That prefix of a N means not. Okay, so anamnesis is translated as remembering. Okay? And the word for truth in Greek is alicia. And you see there the word lithy. So it literally means truth means not forgetting, remembering. So there's, there's very much. So this idea that the education of the soul is nothing more than the sort of sobriety coming out of the intoxications of the pleasures and, and sobering up to the fact that like, yeah, no, I'm. This isn't what I am. This, this is not what I am, you know, and we see that also in the Platonic dialogues, right? The whole idea of noti Satan, know thyself, sounds obscure. A lot of people reduce it to like Jungian psychology for some reason. It's completely anachronistic. Plato puts the final nail on the cuff and he says, okay, know yourself. What is self? Self is soul. Therefore, prioritize the way you think, feel and act with that in mind, rather than thinking about the material urgencies and impulses and fears and then acting impulsively in a knee jerk reaction out of that. The way, the way that you need to exist in this world is to have a divine remembrance that you are soul first.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah.

[Ike Baker]

And that doesn't happen intellectually. It happens as a gnosis, which is similar to like going lucid in A dream. Except you're awake. It's not an intellectual thing. Oh God is inside of me. If you, if you take these ideas and you only apply them theoretically and intellectually in a way that the mind can play with, you will self deify and you'll be much worse off than if you had not thought about any of this stuff at all.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah. Due to underscore this, this, this reminds me, I saw this clip of Z slot, whatever his name is basically saying knowing yourself is the source of all these problems. Like you shouldn't try to know yourself. That's stupid advice. And I, and, and immediately I'm just like, yeah, it's stupid advice if you don't think you have a soul.

[Ike Baker]

Yeah.

[Chris Ryan]

Because then you're going to run into the problem you just described. Because you're going to start. You're going to realize that nothing makes sense from a reductive materialist POV you like. But, but if you acknowledge that you have a soul. Yeah. Knowing yourself on the deepest level is the only game because knowing yourself goes. It's knowing. I mean to, to go Jungian in a not reductive way. It's knowing capital S self versus Little S self.

[Ike Baker]

Right.

[Chris Ryan]

Capital S self is the soul. It's, it's what you are underneath the, the corporeal.

[Ike Baker]

Well, and now we're, That's a perfect way to put that because it segues into the next point, which is a discussion of Penelope. Okay. Who is the higher self of Odysseus. Okay. So there was a concept in, in early Platonism that got developed. You see this in, in, in the modern historical evidence of what we have meaning, like what is available to us today. You see it most, I would say most well fleshed out in. You see it in the Amblichus when he talks about the second soul. But you see it most fleshed out in early Gnosticism when they talk about the syzygies, the twins, the divine pairs. One that descends, one that stays undescended. Okay, so this is the interesting thing. A lot of people like to say that while Iamlichus thought that the soul was completely descended, he did and he didn't because he believed there was a second soul. He believed in this celestial twin. He believed in this kind of. The scholar Charles Stang, who's a friend of mine, he, he runs the, the, the Harvard center for the Study of World Religions. He wrote a work called the Divine Double, all about this development. And it's, it's, it's a brilliant treatise. I Remember, I recommend people get their hands on it if they can. But this idea of Penelope, his wife, being his higher self, which in the Platonic tradition would have. Have very closely resembled the daimon, the daimonic aspect of him. Right. Because what does Penelope mean in Greek? It implies a weaver. And what does she do in the Odyssey to stave off the suitors? The suitors are a bunch of men who rush into Odysseus's house as soon as he leaves, and they start using up all of his resources, eating his. His animals, drinking all of his wine, and saying, we're not leaving until you choose one of us to replace him. Them. And so she says, okay, I'm going to weave this garment, and when I'm done, that's when I'll choose one of you. And every night, after a day's worth of weaving, she'd go in and. And pull some of the threads out so that it. It was like this perpetual thing. So there's something very interesting there. Apropo what we talked about with the Fates and the myth of her and how the soul gets woven into incarnation. Why? Because weaving in these mythologies always has to do with fate. Okay. And so Penelope, representing the daimonic aspect of him, the bornless aspect of. Of Odysseus is. Is guiding him home. This is why. And you find the soul often referred to as a maiden. Right. Like Persephone's other name, she's. She's absolutely an allegory for the descent of the soul. Her. Her other name is Corey, the maiden. Why maiden? Why a young girl? It's not meant to denote age, it's meant to denote virginity. Yeah, and the same thing with Penelope. The suitors want to marry her. Guess what else is happening that's really pissing Odysseus son off. They're having sex with all of the servants, the maids, you know, and Telemachus, Odysseus's son, who's left behind, heir to the throne, is like, this is. You know, this is unacceptable. They're defiling my home. And so you see that none of them can get to Penelope. She remains undefiled, ever virginal, in that case. And she's. And it's. It's her he's trying to get back to. It's the most emotional scene, even in the book. I cried reading it. The most emotional scene is when he gets back specifically to her. And in the Symposium. And this is well fleshed out throughout the traditions of Platonism and Hermetism. But let's take the symposium. In the Symposium, everybody's drinking. Socrates is invited to a party, everybody's drinking. And they're going around praising love, Eros. And all of them say these grandiose things. He is the best God. He is the greatest God. Famous playwrights, famous Athenians, they're all going around and trying to one up each other with how great Eros is. They get to Socrates and, you know, as is typical to him, he's like, you're all wrong. Eros is not a God. Eros is a diamond. And then he goes on to explain that. That daimon is the spiritual counterpart that leads us upward to the gods. It is ultimately the love Odysseus has for Penelope, his Eros that is oriented to her, that gets him home, and she remains undefiled. But there's one final step. When he gets home, he has to kill the suitors. So before I talk about this kind of final step of killing the suitors, I want to quote the. The phaedo, which is. It's a. The dialogue you quoted that you were talking about before.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah.

[Ike Baker]

So Socrates says, quote, this is how the soul of a philosopher would reason. It would not think that while philosophy must free it, it should, while being freed, surrender itself to pleasures and pains and imprison itself again, thus laboring in vain, like Penelope at her web. The soul of the philosopher achieves calm from such emotions. It follows reason and ever stays with it, contemplating the true, the divine, which is not the object of opinion nurtured by this. It believes that one should live this manner, live in this manner as long as one is alive. And this is effectively what Odysseus has to do. He has to live by reason in order to get home and not get mad. Which is really interesting because his father names him Odysseus, which has to do with. What's the Greek word? It means anger. To be angry. His name means to be angry. But somehow he's the one who's constantly using his mind, raised the smartest general of all of Agamemnons. He figures out how to trick the Cyclops enchant Cersei, how to get to the underworld to get information. I mean, he finds. He's the only one who finds his way home. Why? Most of his men are killed because they slaughtered the cattle of the sun God. What's that? Appetite. Appetite. He can live by reason, which allows him to actually successfully make it home, pulled by love, despite the motions of the ocean. Okay, so which we've. We've, you know, established materiality the changing nature of everything. So the suitors now, you know, it's. It's kind of said in passing in certain philosophical texts, but I. I found this is my own kind of interpretation, or let's say, comparison. I wanted to take a minute to. To talk a little bit about the suitors because they play a big part. They have overrun his home, attempting to defile the. The divine twin of Penelope and take usurp the throne of the king. To usurp the throne. But none of them are kingly. Why? Because they're all slaves to their appetites. All they want to do is have sex and eat and drink and party. They party like 20 hours a day, every day. Okay, so there is a work in the Corpus Hermeticum called Corpus Hermeticum 13, the secret sermon on the Mountain. And this again is a father talking to his son in dialogue format. We know the Hermetica is. Is massively informed by Platonic philosophy. It's not solely Egyptian, the Platonic philosophy. The Platonic dialogues predate any Hermetic document by at least like 60 to 100 years. So Hermes is kind of the teacher, and his son is taught in this. And it could be like master to disciple. It doesn't have to be biological. But he says, quote, hermes says to tot, withdraw into thyself and it will come. Will, and it comes to pass. Throw out of work the body's senses, and thy divinity shall come to birth. Purge from thyself the brutish torments, things of matter. Tot responds, I have tormentors in me, Father. Hermes says, yes and no. Few, my son. Nay, fearful and manifold. Hermes says, or Tot says, I do not know them, Father. Hermes says, torment. The first is not knowing son. The second is grief. The third, intemperance. The fourth, concupiscence, chest to do with lust. The fifth, unrighteousness. The sixth, avarice or greed. The seventh, error or ignorance. The 8th is envy. The 9th, guile. The 10th is anger. 11th, rashness. The 12th is malice. These are in number 12, but under them are many more, my son. And creeping through the prison of the body, they force the man that's placed therein to suffer in this his senses. But they depart from him who hath taken, who hath been taken pity on by God. The same way Athena takes pity on Odysseus. And this is it which constitutes the manner of rebirth. And now no more do any torment of the darkness venture here. But vanquished, all have fled with whirring wings. You know now, my son, the Manner of rebirth. So this is effectively the vanquishing of, of the appetitive suitors. It's the same thing that, that Hermes is talking about. And they put it in other terms in, in, in, in Platonic philosophy. Now this number 12 is also significant because it's ultimately 12 ordeals that Odysseus undergoes to get home. It's 12 ordeals. And now I wrote about it, I sort of listed all them out, talking about it in my, my upcoming book, it's coming out this November with inner traditions. It's called Esoteric Mythology. So if you like what I've been doing with the Odyssey here, like I do it with a lot of other myths in all across the world, like Taoist, Norse and Celtic, all sorts of mythology. But I go through all 12 of these ordeals. They resemble, right. I go through the 12 labors of Hercules. I go through. I talk about the 12 apostles of Christ, you talk about the 12 tribes of Israel, you talk about, even in some versions of the tale, the 12 Knights of the Round Table, there's always this 12. And most significantly, Proclus tells us that there is one passage or one chapter in the iliad in book 23 that describes the theurgic ascent ritual. A ritual for theurgic ascent. Right. The manner of it, the way that you would perform a theurgic ritual is in book 23 of the Iliad. Proclus tells us it's when Achilles sends his man Patroclus off into the underworld by funeral pyre. The invocation of the winds, the presence of Iris, messenger of the gods and pouring out of libations. Okay, so Proclus tells us that this ritual right here, talk speaks about the method, the manner of rebirth, so to speak. And guess what, guess how many Trojans Achilles sacrifices to the funeral pyre.

[Chris Ryan]

12.

[Ike Baker]

12 Trojans are sacrificed in order to send Patroclus home on the winds. Okay, so very, very, very, very interesting here.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah. What about the zodiacal aspect of the 12 too?

[Ike Baker]

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and that's, that's, that's kind of the whole thing, right? Because the zodiac is. The zodiac is the final. It comprises the final sphere. Now, it is thought to be more significant than other constellations for simply one reason. The zodiacal constellations are traditionally the ones along the ecliptic. What is the ecliptic? It's the apparent path of the sun in the sky. So it's these zodiacal animals. Right. That's what Zoan means, that that prefix of Zo, Zodi Means animal life. He passes through these animals, the sun passes through these animals and every, you know, 24 hours and, and then not only that, but it, it, every, every year really, it passes through the annual cycle, passes through the, the zodiacal signs. Right? It's like, that's what we call, that's what we call like Leo season. It's just started and it's going to go until about this time in next month in August. Okay. So it's like the sun right now is in Leo. And that would correspond, say in, in like in some of the ancient Greek myths to Hercules slaying of the Nemean lion. Okay. So this kind of stuff, this animal story, it's essentially the archetypal journey of the soul as the sun, the center of light, the center of gravity, as it moves through in material incarnation. And it has to complete that circle in order to evolve past all of these challenges and redeem itself from its fallen state. The same way Odysseus has to redeem himself from war. He left home to go to war, you know, and Hercules accidentally, in a fit of blind rage given to him by Hera because she, she didn't really like him, he slays his family. And so to redeem himself from that mistake, that stupor, that intoxication, he undergoes the 12 trials and then is set among the stars. So, and Plato would call this a return to our starry soul, our starry nature. So, so odysseus undergoes these 12 trials. You can read all about them in my book this November. It's available for pre order right now. You can do that on my website, ikebaker.com I K-E B A K-E R.com now the final, the last piece of all of this I gotta circle back to is the garment we talked about how, okay, what inclines us towards these, these or what kind of encases us and, and, and right. We have this stupor. We're given the vice and the virtues of the planets, our character is cemented and we're put here in the material world constantly chasing all of these things when really we need to orient that desire for exterior things. I want a new house, I want a new partner. I want a new book. I want to not want things. It's still a want. Yeah, because the soul is, is by nature having left its source, erotic meaning. It desires things. It desires to go back. But in the stupor that manifests down here as I want things. Right, because what do you do with a lover? You unite with them. What do you do with a glass of wine, you unite with it. What do you do with a chicken leg? You unite with it. You know, it's possession is the dark twin of actual union, soul union. So now we need to orient our eros up, back up to the divine paradigm of ourselves, we might even call it the Platonic form of the individual soul, that is Penelope, and slay the suitors. And so here we have an expression, a beautiful expression by Proclus, who is quoting the call and oracle. We talked about the nymphs weaving these garments. We talked about, you know, Macrobius and, and these astral garments. When odysseus slays the 12 suitors, he cannot show back up to his home because there are too many of them, cannot show back, back up triumphantly as himself. He has to wrap himself in the, in the, in the rags of a beggar and masquerade throughout the land, getting slowly closer and closer and closer to the place his, his throne room where the suitors have been partying and, and wasting all of his resources and trying to screw his wife. So he disguises himself in these rags and at the right moment, when he is primed to slay them all, he casts off the rags and one by one he takes each one of them down and slays the tormentors, the suitors. Okay, so Proclus says this about, he said, he compares that the, the penultimate scene really of Odysseus casting off his rags, announcing, I am home. It is a true Odysseus. And then taking his home back with the divestiture of the garments that, that were woven by the Naiads, that were, that were foisted upon us by these planetary natures. He's, he's quoting the Chaldean oracles in the, his commentary on the Cratilus, I believe. Another Platonic dialogue. He says things divine are not attainable by mortals who understand the body alone, but only by those who, stripped of their garments, arrive at the summit. Okay, so. And he goes on to talk about how that moment of Odysseus casting his rags off is that moment he has finally, through pain and eros and, and, and perseverance and by living by reason and being given grace by Athena. And Hermes comes to help him too. You kind of pointed out Hermathena connection, right?

[Chris Ryan]

Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm obsessed with that man. I feel like that's going to be, that's going to be a symbol that I, I use a lot. I like, I, I like, kind of forgot about it. And then I thought about it Again I'm like, man, that's, that's so dope. Yeah, yeah.

[Ike Baker]

So full circle we go back to the myth of her where we started. There's a, there's a point where Socrates is telling what happens, how souls pick lives. They draw by lot and they draw, they don't draw the life by lot, they draw like who gets to pick from the stock of lives first. So they draw lots and all this stuff. And of course the more rash people who draw lots quickly, they run into the life of a tyrant, they run into the life of a philanderer, they run into the life of an adventurer, they're still intoxicated, they drank too much Lethe there they dive into these lives. But Socrates again kind of does this weird thing where he's talking about the souls and he says, well, Odysseus was actually there, er, sees Odysseus drawing lots. And so I'm going to read this quote.

[Chris Ryan]

Remember that?

[Ike Baker]

Yeah, he says he's going to read this quote and he says and it fell out that the soul of Odysseus drew the last lot of all and came to make its choice. And from memory of its former tolls having flung away Am. I'm sorry. And from memory of its former toils having flung away ambition went about for a long time in quest of the life of an ordinary citizen who minded his own business and with difficulty found it lying in some corner, disregarded by the others, and upon seeing it said that he would have done the same had he drawn the first lot. And he chose it gladly. So, and that basically brings us to a nice neat little sort of circle on the Platonic. And again, this was only very cursory. So there's a lot more for people who are interested. I forget the name of the author, but it's, it's, it's quite a, an older book. It's called Homer the Theologian. It talks all about these connections and these ancient Neoplatonic interpretations of the Homeric epics. If you're more, if you're interested in more of that.

[Chris Ryan]

Dude, mind blowing. So fascinating. One thing how I understand that it's probably not expressly explained by Proclus how this theurgic ritual is done that is mimicking the, you know, the pouring out of libations and the, the sacrifice of the Trojans and, and whatever, but has this been reconstructed and established and like actually practiced by esotericists?

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[Ike Baker]

So I don't want to, like, I don't want to give, I don't want to speak. Kind of like in ignorance. I think to my knowledge there is one person I'm aware of who has reconstructed a sort of ritual of ascent, but it involves the usage of datura, which is. I'm not, I'm not interested in, in applying psychedelics to any of this stuff. The way that I look at what Proclus is pointing out.

[Chris Ryan]

Well, and side note, are you familiar with Dora as compared to other things like Tryptamines and the differences?

[Ike Baker]

Yes.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah, it's, it's, it's spoken of with a lot of fear and respect and don't even go there kind of energy by most psychonauts. It's, it's very disassociative and terrifying and dark and you know, even people like the McKenna's talk about it like it's just.

[Ike Baker]

Well, and the person who, the person who reconstructed this said if you are going to leave your body it's going to be because of the tour. So. But the thing is, I don't, I think it's personally and I have a tremendous respect for this person, he's a good friend. But I think personally understanding what Iamblichus has to say about living a theurgic life and the trajectory, as a trajectory of practice, I think that is more so the way that. Right. The sacrificing of the 12 Trojans is the divestiture of your investment in these 12 tormentors. Guilt, or I should say guile, greed, envy, lust, appetite. All of this stuff. You have to sacrifice those on a funeral pyre. You have to pour out libations. What is, how do you. What was the use in ancient Greece, if you understand their religion, was a point of pouring out a libation. It was an offering to the gods. You have to humble yourself, offer to the gods, offer yourself to the gods. Right. Iamlichus talks about this, Proclus talks about this, this idea that like Iamlichus in more particular, the sacrifices are not for them, they're for us. You're getting yourself to a state of remembrance so that you can receive the divine grace. Right? You have been pitied by God and then assisted to be brought home. This is how you do it. You humble yourself and you give up that which seems important to you. And it's actually a wonderful thing. You'll see in a lot of modern adaptations of, on the, on the big screen of, of the Odyssey, they incorporate Agamemnon's sacrifice of his. Of his daughter Iphigenia. And that's not in the original texts either. That's a, That's a later interpolation from, you know, the feminization of Athenian society. They didn't want to view their ancient ancestors as. They didn't want to view these brutish people as, as noble anymore. So they're like, no, Agamemnon wasn't noble. He killed his daughter to. But that's, again, it's an interpolation. People have been changing the story and adding their own details for, For. For centuries, but they put it in the movies, and it was useful in Nolan's film because it enabled Matt Damon's Odysseus to say, the power of a sacrifice is in the cost to the person who offers it. And that is a theurgic truth, the power of the sacrifices in the cost to the one who offers it. So if you go through the funeral pyre ritual and you understand the theology, the metaphysics and the, the theurgic techniques of Iamlichus in particular, but also Proclus, what you will see is it's not like a ritual we did in an hour. It's. This is the way a theurgis has to live. Every day is a recapitulation of the funeral pyre. Every day, every moment, if you can. You remain in that sad, prayerful state, invoking the winds. You know why? Because the, the airy nature as opposed to the moist nature, you know, and, and using what else?

[Chris Ryan]

Fire.

[Ike Baker]

You're right. And what are you sacrificing? You're sacrificing earth, you're sacrificing water. There's an elemental thing you bring. You're calling the. The dry elements in. You're.

[Chris Ryan]

You're.

[Ike Baker]

You're casting out the solid and the moist. And all of this has analogy to what everything that we've just talked about. And see, this is their way of talking about. It might not make sense to us because we have different words. We have scientific vernacular. This was their scientific vernacular. You know, this was their way of saying, you know, Whatever. Expressing certain laws through words. So it's, it's no more or less precise than ours. It's just specific to their time. The trick is we have to meet those texts on their own terms so that we can understand what they mean by them. We don't want to be saying the same words and everyone's using a different dictionary and they're, they, they. I mean, there's so much written about what they mean by these terms and, and how, how they thought of these things working together. It's just, you know, it's quite a labor to consume all of it and then assimilate it and then keep, keep the, the modern person that wants to keep wanting. That keeps wanting to sort of jump to modern conclusions. Knock that guy down.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah, right. Yeah, knock away, dude. It's so brain melting. And speaking of synthesizing all of it, I'm so grateful to have you here to do it because I, I just always feel like such a neophyte in all of this stuff. Like, I just look at these ancients and these texts in such awe and, and I deeply feel my own, like, intellectual micro penis when I'm trying to, when I'm trying to, you know, grok all of the various dimensions of it. It's. It's just unbelievable. So I'm so glad you're, you're here to help me and us do it and more collaborations in the future, man. We're talking about doing something together soon that I'm, I'm very excited about that I won't announce yet because we haven't even like, talked deeply about it, but, but it's, it's going to be on the horizon, I think so just. Always a pleasure, man. Always fun, dude.

[Ike Baker]

I mean, you're one of my favorite people to talk to you. I've honestly become like one of my favorite people to chat with. And, you know, you set the stage perfectly. You rein me in when that needs to happen. You drop the kind of, you know, contextual information in a very artful way. And I just appreciate you, like, you have, you have a great platform for this and that I don't have. And I really appreciate you being able to allow kind of the work I'm doing to reach more people, because I am, I'm not doing it to, to become intellectually fat. I'm not doing this to be like, super smart. I'm not doing this because I, you know, to say who has an intellectual micro penis or not, it's just more so like, I, I don't know. Why. But I understand Platonism like the, I, I think as close to the way an ancient platonist is go, you know, that, that a modern person is able to get at this point. And so I wanted, I want to just spread that as much as possible. And it's great to have friends like you that I can talk to about this stuff because you're, I don't, I don't view you as a neophyte. You know, I, I certainly, in this territory, I certainly don't.

[Chris Ryan]

Thanks, man. I appreciate it. Yeah, I'm excited to see what people think of this one, man, because it's like, it's. We went deep. We went deep and, and there's more dimensions still, I think. But I feel like we did do a nice lap around everything that I was hoping to get to. So good. Thank you again, man. And look, look forward to the next one, as always.

[Ike Baker]

Yeah, absolutely.

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[Ike Baker]

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