The Edge into which We Bravely Sail
Ancient Greeks, the Horizon Line, & the Place we put our Myths
When the ancient Greeks first set out to sea in the 8th century BC, the lands beyond their coastlines were a misty edge. All they knew of the far-off places on the other side of the Aegean Sea were in the stories brought to port by traders.
Likely at first from the Phoenician traders of the Levant, who had been crossing and connecting the Mediterranean for several hundred years. Then from the first Greek merchants who took up the risk of sailing into the barely known to seek their fortunes.
When the Greeks first started sailing out in numbers, the vicious political-economic pressure cookers of the city-states (poleis) were beginning to burst. Cut-throat oligarchies shook the poleis with their political, and sometimes all-out, warring. Available fertile lands that turned food into profit on the vast, demanding Mediterranean markets were running out…
…and such land was an important, almost magical, key.
A key that unlocked wealth… which was the key that unlocked status… which was the key that unlocked power.
Just a generation or two before, it was possible for a local leader, a small-time merchant, or a prosperous farmer to become a very rich man by turning his lands from local farming to international trade production.
Such newly made men could enter high society. The ancient Greeks had no noble-family requirement to enter their top ranks; what mattered was wealth and the ability to compete… and to compete hard.
By the 8th Century BC, generations of hard competition and a lack of available mass-production farmland were quickly making such possibilities a thing of the past.
A growing number of people- some oligarchs exiled by or tired of political war, others middling merchants with dwindling prospects- saw no place in the homelands for their ambitions.
So they began to chance the waters with what little they had to guide them: blurred stories of lands in estimated directions, perhaps laid out on questionable maps etching out what lay beyond the Aegean.
Onto this hazy frontier, these Greeks had also placed their myths.
The demigod Hercules had gone the farthest. All the way to the westernmost end of the Mediterranean where a mountain separated the Sea from Oceanus, the ancient Titan who watery body covered the world.
Such was the strength of Hercules that he pulled the mountain apart, right down the middle, which opened up a passageway between the waters and created two pillars, one on each side of the strait.
This is how the Mediterranean and the World Ocean were first connected.
Their human hero, Odysseus also had much of his saga out there in the misty lands beyond the edge of his homelands. Out of those places where the Known gave way to the Unknown rose otherworldly wonders and dangers.
An Island of One-eyed Shepherd Cyclops. The House of the generous King of Winds. Beautiful Sirens who used Song as a Lure to reel in ships to their death. A Six-Headed Sea Monster who lived next to a Whirlpool. Fields devoted to grazing the Sun God’s Cattle.
It was precisely to such mythic lands that the 8th Century BC Greeks set sail.
Lands known to us today not as the Island of the Cyclops across from the Whirlpool Monster not far from the Fields of Scared Cattle but simply as:
Sicily, Sardinia, and the Italian South1.
Such verges, rims, horizons, brinks, frontiers…. the Great Out-Theres. These are a natural part of human life.
These are the razor-sharp edges where our knowledge runs out, where the Rules fall apart, where the Known bows to the Unknown, the Certain to the Mystery, the Material to the Mythic.
Much of what is beautiful, exciting, hard, horrifying, confusing, inspiring, and meaningful about human life happens out there. On the edge.
The frontier of scientific knowledge thrills us. The pioneer history of the US burdens, inspires, informs and sobers us. Trailblazing technology dazzles and frightens us. The brave step outside our comfort zone triggers us.
The edge brings out the best and worst of human nature. It summons our full human drama, and it sends our minds into overdrive.
In the “The Storytelling Animal,” Jonathan Gottschall details what happens when our brains are presented with the Unknown:
“The storytelling mind is allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and coincidence. It is addicted to meaning. If the storytelling mind cannot find meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose them. In short, the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can’t.”
Perhaps, lies is a bit strong of a word. Maybe it’s more like inventions. After all, our minds aren’t purposefully telling falsehoods. They are doing what they were designed to do.
To automatically process incoming info in a way that provides useful meaning by leveraging their built-in organizational system: The Story.
With or without evidence, our brains are going to get their job done.
When they run out of the Known, Verified, and Acceptable, brains do the next best thing they can. They make it up. They fill in the blanks with the ideas they have available to them. The ideas already housed inside of us.
Then, they hand us a smooth account of “The Way Things Are” with no footnotes flagging which parts are fact and which parts are assumptions based on pre-existing brain files.
It’s all the same seamless story to them, so it becomes all the seamless story to us.
Frontiers with their Great Unknowns tease the hell out of this meaning-making process of ours. Out on the Edge of the Known, Uncertainty takes over and our brains spin wild stories.
The Mythic rises out of us to fill in the Mystery. Shadowy corners of our minds settle on top of real-life locations. Our Hopes build a House on an Island where a King gives us the blessing of always having the Wind at our back…
….which is good news, because we must skirt by the Sea Monster who wants to suck us into a Void. This is why she made her home next to a very real, scientifically-verified Whirlpool….
…and unfortunately we must pass that way in order to reach the Idyllic Pastures that a traveler told us about. They’d been there once or twice to trade, and something in their story resonated. Since then, we’ve this gut feeling that those Pastures have an answer we’ve been looking for…
Into this Landscape of the Material wrapped in Myth, we, like characters in a story, set out with our questionable maps.
In this terrain, we behave differently. The normal rules don’t always apply, the normal resources aren’t available, our normal selves aren’t always so useful.
We are away from the centralized, gravitational force of the Status Quo that normally keeps us in a nice, neat orbit. Instead, we need to negotiate our way through a place where the Rules may fall apart.
Here in the studio, my visual arts partner and I are playing with futuristic frontiers precisely because we need a such place. One where the Rules (or the Rule) of a technological advanced society fall apart.
Like many action stories set in the times of firearms or forward into the future, we need to find a believable way to get the characters out of their shells of sophisticated weaponry and back to the basics of physical fighting.
The kind of bare-knuckles, hidden-knives combat that, in stories, tends to be viscerally satisfying in a way that high-tech, disembodied clashes often struggle to deliver.
The Edge of the Known where the Rules fall apart can take many forms. Some of the ones we’re looking at are geographic: space, the ocean floor, a ignored hinterland, a forgotten urban center. Others are socially produced: an cultural space hiding the forbidden in the wide open, speakeasies, the black markets, cigar-filled rooms.
The Edge of the Known can also be a time period, an epoch, an age, an era…possibly brought on by a disruption, a discovery, a collapse, a movement, a great shift. These types of brinks can occur without the characters ever moving a muscle.
The pandemic, in this sense, created a worldwide brink. Even for those in very center of their society’s stable status quos and comfortable, usually unshaken middles.
When Covid hit, you didn’t need to get up from your chair to go out to a frontier. Covid brought the frontier to you. We remain today on this edge that the pandemic alongside other crises has created.
Everyone can feel it. The shaking, the pressure cookers, the edge.
Since we are out here on the Horizon Line with no way of turning back, with our only option being forward, it’s helpful to know how our minds work under such conditions.
How our honestly held perspectives are actually a folding-over of the materially verifiable and our brains’ inventions. How we walk around and tell each other these honestly held, part-fact, part-myth stories. How we naturally raise the status of the other people’s stories that sound like ours…. and likewise, lower the importance of other people’s stories that don’t sound like ours.
Working with this truth of human nature without shame, cynicism, or despair can help us avoid Whirlpool Monsters as we make our way to not-perfect-but-good-enough Future Pastures.
With curiosity and bit of flexibility, we can find working answers to questions like:
What part of our preferred stories might, in fact, be inventions?
How can we tell fact from myth?
Where is the right place for Myth, Mystery and Belief? And for Evidence, Non-Partisanship, and the Material? What do we do when that gets hard?
How do we wisely navigate this map that we know is going to sometimes be right, sometimes be wrong, and sometime be a muddle of the two?
Answers need not be perfect, just good enough to get going, and occasionally reflected upon for learnings and revision. This is how we improve our questionable map.
Out here on the Horizon, it’s just Us, our Map and the Mysterious. But now we also know some handy things about how the three of us operate.
We know that the Ancient, Eternal, and Archetypical will rise up to meet the Unknown. We know that this is a Landscape where Material Reality and our Conjectures intertwine.
We know that our modern trappings may falter. That the Status Quo is loosened up. That our normal Rules may run out of bounds.
We know that all of this is frightening, exhilarating, and deeply concerning. We know that, if, we work the silver linings and have a bit of luck, these times could catalyze the shifts needed for a better future.
We know to expect that there will be times we are stripped of our shells and left with only our essentials. Our closed fist and open hand. Our courage, fears, hidden knives, and hopes. Our curiosity and ambitions. Our best and our worst.
This is the edge into which we bravely sail. This is the horizon from which there is no turning back.
And so, as wisely as we can, we chance the waters.
Likely locations of mythic lands: Cyclops Island: Sicily. King of Winds: Aeolian Islands, Sicilian Coast. Sirens: Sirenuse island, western coast of South Italy. Sea Monster & Whirlpool (aka Scylla and Charybdis): Strait of Messina between Sicily and Calabria. Field for Sun God’s Cattle: Sicily .
Tunisia, Turkey and Greece are also home to mythic lands mentioned in the story of Odysseus.
Resources
Sicily and the Making of the Greek Mediterranean (Tides of History Podcast)
Competition, Tyranny & the Birth of Ancient Greece (The Tides of History Podcast)
Colonization and the West (The History of Ancient Greece Podcast)
What Are the Pillars of Hercules Mentioned in Greek Mythology? (Greek Reporter)
Follow The Trail Of The Odyssey In The Modern Day (Travel.Earth)
The Storytelling Animal (Jonathan Gottschall)
omgoddess this was beautiful! I love how your brain works. i love the epic sweeping feeling of this, the merging of myth and reality (if we can even separate those), the provocation and invitation to consider what brings us to the brink now and how we story it. All of it. Also makes me think of how David Abram writes about past, present, and future (the underground as the embodied past, the air we breathe as the embodied present, and the horizon as the embodied future) in The Spell of the Sensuous. Thank you for you, and this.