To the problem of continuous initiation in the Homeric epic: Odysseus as a trickster hero.

Abstract

The article updates the initial nature of the construction of the Homeric epic, the poems Iliad and Odyssey. The image of the hero of both works – Odyssey – is viewed through the blade of continuous initiation characteristic of the characters of ancient literature. The ancient author creates an image of a peculiar trickster hero – a character who, due to his ingenuity and curiosity, implements the concept of the ancient Hellenic – a man who changes himself and changes the world around him.

The article emphasizes that the behavior of the characters of the poem "Odyssey", in particular its main character, is most appropriately identified with the initiation, since it is the possibility of permanent movement between the worlds, the acquisition of new roles and the loss of the old, which is, however, not the final decision , a fact, because it is hardly possible to assert confidently that one or another hero unconditionally accepted a new role and completely dissolved in its behavioral norms. Odysseus is a protagonist, his force - in the ability to constantly change, to surprise himself and the characters who surround him. He is a conscious embodiment of a continuous search, written, however, at the limit of initiation, since mythological thinking is not intended to allow someone to contradict the theses suggested therein. Therefore, we can state that all Odyssey's bosons against the relatives and friends of the enemies of him and the Achaeans of the gods are only part of the global plan of the world, approved by the heavens for the purpose of posing the mortal to the fact: the permission of the Odyssey is unlikely ever to be available to an ordinary person. The time of the heroes puts forward not only super people (notwithstanding the fact that they are vulnerable at critical moments, because although they are super-people, but still people who are not able to escape the will of the gods), but also smart, creative thrills, cunning and unscrupulous which sometimes allow them to save life where they are lost by recognized heroes (of course, within the limits permitted by the gods).

Odysseus appears as the embodiment of knowledge, the first cultural trader and cultural recipient of world literature. He realizes the expansion of culture, with its help he masters new spaces and spheres, personally embodies the technology of its self-development, simultaneously developing individually.

Thus, Homer's fantasy depended not so much on personal imagination as on genetic birth memory, from subconscious psychological motives rooted in the depths of the collective subconscious. It is this that allowed the author to develop universal and psychologically comprehensive story models that have survived centuries.