Anticlea

His Mother's Face.

Anticleia.

That was her name.

His mother.

He meets the soul of his mother.

Odysseus tells us, "But look, the ghost of my mother came, my mother dead and gone now, Anticleia, daughter of the great-heart Autolycus, whom I left alive when I sailed for sacred Troy.

I broke into tears to see her here.

But filled with pity, even throbbing with grief, I would not let her ghost approach the blood till I had questioned Teiresias myself." If you recall, that was part of Circe's instructions to Odysseus.

His mother, Anticilia?

Anticlea.

Anticlea.

If you can't tell, I didn't spend a lot of time in mythology.

Like Cleopatra, I think.

So they remember, you know, the names of their family and maybe how they died, their relationships, their anger, [chuckles] if you're Aias, um, their heroic reputations, uh, and legacies like Achilles and Agamemnon Maybe a lot of their former lives.

So that is not saying that death is erasing their identity, but there's no physical nature to them, as we remember Odysseus trying to hug Anticlea, that make memory being integrated into that physical being while they're alive, uh, active.

When Circe sends Odysseus to the underworld here, uh, to get the prophecy from Tiresias, there's a reason for that, and that's that Persephone has allowed Tiresias alone, him by himself in the underworld, to retain his noose, which is his full mental understanding that he had during life, and separates him from all the other shades just flittering about.

And so the, the sacrificial blood that Odysseus gives in this chapter, um, maybe strengthens that interaction that Tiresias and these other shades have with the living.

I think if we look at it through that lens of strengthening an inconsistent and fractured person, it goes a long way...

Not that we have to solve these things, but it goes a long way to the inconsistencies between Tiresias and Anticlea and Elpenor.

You know, everyone who has a slightly different experience with or without the blood helps us, you know, better understand why that is.

Okay.