Homeric Greek

And so that these stories are being crafted and told to us over time.

And that in like the Homeric stories or Plato, these kinds of stories are woven together like a collection of songs and that these inform us about who we are.

And I'm basically using the groundwork of Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, and Gregory Bateson as like my three pillars.

And I'm saying that these guys are like the Homeric poets or philosophers of our time period of like the 1980s and 90s period where cyberpunk was born.

And those people are playing the same role or like the cyberpunk authors that we know today are playing the same role like Philip K. Dick, Blade Runner, Matrix, those kinds of things are doing the same job of creating and telling stories about who we are and what our modern experience is.

And they're very similar to those poets and philosophers of the past who would have articulated a complex vision of what it was like to live like them at that time period.

So I guess my argument is that cyberpunk metaphysics is a story about who we are and that it's not just a fanciful science fiction story, but it's actually a fully articulated version of a modern Homeric epic in the digital era.

How does it like associate with Atlantis though? Like where's the connection there?

which can be grouped around the term of cleromancy, namely any kind of practice based on dice or throwing out the number, a cipher.

I include in this category also the Homeric, the romantic practices.

Okay, Homeromantion,

yeah.

Yes, the Homeromanteion, so where you basically, you take out a number from a bowl with pebbles marked with numbers, you take out one, and then you go in this list of Homeric lines, of Homeric hexameters, and then you read one.

and the sortes astramsaki are basically the same thing.

I don't know if anyone is familiar with this term of the sortes astramsaki.

Exactly.

Great.

That opening passage, I'm glad you know it, where he contrasts Homer, the Homeric narrative style with the narrative style in Genesis.

I just find that so rich and so illuminating and such a great, I think the reason it affected me more than so many other things I've read about the Bible, was it just brought out how strange, like the Bible is the the story of Abraham which is the one he's talking about the story of the binding of Isaac this is such a strange type of narrative um and the way he contrasts it to Homer I'll very briefly recapitulate just for anyone who doesn't know it I haven't seen the new movie of the Odyssey by the way so I don't know if this scene is in that It may be, but Odysseus has returned home.

He's still in disguise.

It does not seem wise to press too far the words of a poet, who must always be vague in referring to disease, but if he had any particular sickness in mind, it may well have been typhus or typhoid, disorders which have often proved disastrous in wartime.

The other references to disease in the Homeric poems are vaguer still.

In the island of Syria there is no death and no hateful sickness falls on wretched mortals.

In this passage the poet appears to be thinking of disease in general, but more in particular of the famine plagues, usually of the nature of typhus, which occur so frequently in early civilization before the importation of corn makes the inhabitants independent of the local harvests.

Chapter 5.

The Extent to Which Malaria Prevailed It is unfortunately impossible to assert positively that malaria was unknown in Greece during the early period.

The argument from silence is proverbially dangerous, but it is at least remarkable that the ancients themselves threw doubt upon the meaning of the Homeric reference to Pareto's, while some of the best scholars hold that the word epilos, as used by Theognis, means nightmare, not alg.

On the other hand, excellent authorities have been at a loss to reconcile with the presence of severe endemic malaria the high state of civilization which is known to have existed.