When the
Odyssey brings Odysseus onstage after a four-book focus on Telemachos, he has no connection to the circumstances with which the poem has so far been concerned (the crisis the suitors cause in Ithaka for Telemachos and Penelope).
He is off the map, as far as normal human existence is concerned. To insert Odysseus into its plot the
Odyssey draws on three overlapping genres of myth. In placing Odysseus in a paradise where he could remain forever and be immortal, the
Odyssey employs key motifs from creation myth. In his relationship with Kalypso, the
Odyssey draws upon the mythic genre of the hero's involvement with a goddess who offers to make him her consort, as Gilgamesh depicts in his encounter with Ishtar. But Book 5 combines these two types with a third genre of myth, a hero's blessed afterlife in a paradise set at the ends of earth, to which the
Odyssey briefly alludes in Menelaus' encounter with Proteus (
Od. 4.561-9). All three genres focus on the possibility of the hero becoming immortal. The first and third types overlap in their paradise setting, which by definition is
cut off from usual mortal existence.
KALYPSO AND OGYGIA, PARADISE AND CREATION MYTH
Since epic can incorporate any kind of myth, it is not surprising that the
Odyssey draws on creation myth for several elements of Book 5. In the Deception of Zeus, Book 14 of
Iliad also incorporates elements of creation myth, as several commentators have shown. The background story involving Okeanos and Tethys that Hera tells Zeus draws on cosmogonic and theogonic creation myths.
Gilgamesh incorporates extensive motifs from creation myth in its account of the creation of Enkidu. The goddess Aruru fashions Enkidu from clay, creating him in the form of an adult male (
Gilg. I. ii), just as Yahweh does Adam. Also rather like Adam, Enkidu lives a pastoral existence, associating and able to communicate with animals. While Tigay (2002: 194-7) discusses the theory that
Gilgamesh here draws upon the
Atrahasis, the correspondences are strictly generic resemblance, and therefore it may be that
Gilgamesh draws on the idea of creation myth, rather than on the specific instance that is the
Atrahasis (but see Carr 1996: 215-16, 242-5 on how the
Atrahasis probably influenced the Genesis creation myth). The examples already noted illustrate that elements of creation myth can occur in myths set in later times.
The depiction of Odysseus in the first half of Book 5 employs standard features of creation myth also found in the myths of Enkidu and Adam. Ogygia is commonly held to be paradise (Crane 1988: 15: "An island paradise on the edge of the world"), with a careful sense of design (Austin 1975: 150: "her landscape has idyllic perfection"). Even Hermes stops to admire the beauties of Ogygia when he first arrives (
Od. 5.73-6). Austin has perhaps best summarized Ogygia's paradise features (149):
[T]here is an encircling forest, flourishing with alders, black poplars, and fragrant cypresses...not simply a grove but a grove of three kinds of tree, not simply birds but three kinds of birds, a meadow of two kinds of plants, the smell of two kinds of burning wood.
His emphasis on the trees accords well with the description of Eden, "The Lord God planted a garden in Eden...made trees grow up from the ground, every kind of tree pleasing to the eye and good for food" (Gen. 2:8-9). The four fountains on Ogygia (
Od. 5.70-1) offer an unexpected parallel to Eden's four rivers (Gen. 2:10-14). Eden's four rivers are probably to be thought of as supplying water to all parts of the garden ("There was a river flowing from Eden to water the garden" Gen. 2:10), much as S. West conjectures of Kalypso's four fountains (1988: 263), "The four springs presumably water every quarter of the island." Though Odysseus has parents, and grew up in the world of mortals,
the Odyssey first presents him as an adult male in paradise, much as with Adam, and Enkidu.
By first depicting Odysseus in such an environment, Book 5 in a sense "creates" Odysseus within the Odyssey. In the
Odyssey's opening divine council Athena calls Ogygia the "navel (
omphalos) of the sea" (Od. 1.50). Though commentators usually argue
omphalos here has some figurative meaning (e.g., Chantraine [1990] regards it as meaning "center"), it is cognate with Latin
umbilicus and English "navel," and if taken more literally, reinforces a paradise and creation modality.
[SNIP]
Leaving the omphalos, Odysseus cuts the umbilical cord that ties him to paradise and to a divine, non-aging life centered around Kalypso. Ogygia, under Kalypso, has womb-like associations; Odysseus' departure from it draws on metaphors for birth.
