The Ilion Mystery – Part 2
We saw in the previous article – The Ilion Mystery, Part 1 – that the Trojan War was a pictorial description of a great inner conflict concerning the evolutionary direction beyond liberation of Spirit. On the one hand, the Trojan coalition expresses the view of the most advanced realisations of a yoga in the heights of the mind. Homer calls them Trojans, Lycians and Dardanians, i.e. those who work for liberation in spirit and enlightenment in a yoga that separates spirit from matter, and thus the spiritual quest from ordinary life. This coalition is led by the ‘divine’ Hector, a symbol of an upward expansion of consciousness. The most advanced of these achievements is represented by the queen of the Amazons, Penthesilea, who represents the ability to abstract oneself from suffering through perfect mastery from above.
On the other hand, the Achaean coalition expresses the view of the other parts of the adventurer’s consciousness. Homer calls them Danaans, Achaeans and Argives, i.e. respectively those who work in a spirit of unity, those who concentrate or aim at an annihilation of the ego, and those who work for further purification. This coalition is led by Agamemnon, the symbol of the strongest aspiration for ‘something else’. His brother Menelaus, ‘the one who cares about freedom’, is the king of Sparta, ‘that which arises, the new’. He is married to the most beautiful of Greek women, Helen, the symbol of the right evolutionary direction towards more freedom, ‘for beauty is truth’. She is a daughter of Zeus, and thus a new impulse of the overmind in human evolution.
To this Achaean coalition belongs Achilles. He is the son of Thetis, daughter of the ‘old man of the sea’. She symbolises the roots of life in its emergence from matter. When we consider the meaning of her name, she represents ‘the root of life’, the physical or cellular consciousness. Through his father, Achilles belongs to the lineage of the Titan Oceanos, thus to the process of purification/liberation. He is the king of the Myrmidons, a term meaning ‘ants’. He is therefore the symbol of a yoga of purification which works in the minute movements of consciousness down to the most archaic body consciousness, which cleanses down to the bone, as ants do. He is therefore a symbol of a very advanced purification. Although Helen was born among the Achaeans, the Trojans, through the intermediary of Paris, took her, considering that the evolutionary truth was on their side.
When the poem Ilion begins, the conflict has already been going on for ten symbolic years, the time of a long maturation, and the events described there take place on the last day of this tenth year of the conflict. At the beginning of this advanced phase of Yoga, the adventurer does not clearly perceive whether the divine evolutionary direction is towards an improvement of the present mental man and a continuation of the quest in spirit, or whether it is a radical reorientation. But the highest of the overmind knows this, even if the seeker is not aware of it in all parts of his being. This is why Zeus decided the outcome of the war in advance, having promised Achilles the greatest glory, and promised Agamemnon that he would only return to Argos once the city of Ilion known as Troy had been destroyed:
My friends, Danaan warriors, squires of Ares, great Zeus, son of Cronos, hath ensnared me in grievous blindness of heart, cruel god! seeing that of old he promised me, and bowed his head thereto, that not until I had sacked well-walled Ilion should I get me home; [i]
From the very beginning of Ilion, through the voice of the goddess of the dawn, Eos, who in Greek mythology belongs to the supermind, Sri Aurobindo reminds us of this inescapable outcome decreed by the highest of the overmind:
Looking on men who must die and women destined to sorrow,
Looking on beauty fire must lay low and the sickle of slaughter,
Fateful she lifted the doom-scroll red with the script of the Immortals,[ii]
The unfolding of the Ilion epic is then no more than a detailed description of a number of purifications on all levels, of the ultimate hopes of the ancient spiritual forms to perpetuate themselves, and of their final annihilation. By “ancient spiritual forms”, we must understand those that have survived to the present day and are based on many centuries, even millennia, of practices, experiences and realisations.
What can we understand about the symbolic meaning of a city and its inhabitants? A city is the symbol of a coherent, well-established and organised structure, in this case, for Troy or Ilion, that of a yoga consolidated since time immemorial, that of liberation in the spirit. The name ‘Ilion’ means ‘the liberation of consciousness’. And its inhabitants represent what works within this structure, namely the practices (the heroes), the achievements towards which these practices tend (the heroines), and the new emergences (the children). The city of Troy is thus a symbol of a yog