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The Secret of the Odyssey: Unlocking the Mythic Map of Self-DiscoveryA 3-session workshop with Carlos A. Segovia
3 consecutive Fridays: November 28 & December 5 & 12
* Sessions are connected but independent, so you can attend any one – or all – as you prefer.
Staying/departing, wandering/returning, remembering/forgetting, descending/ascending… We find ourselves once and again confronted with the same existential knots that Ulysses – in that extraordinary poem that is the Odyssey – manages to undo thanks to his “untamed intelligence” and its talisman – Athena, the goddess of “clear eyes (= vision)” – which turn the worst possible scenarios into a chance to grow personally. Not so much to find oneself as to produce, and in that sense discover one’s own being – one’s own “figure” – against a background of competing forces, false appearances, and latent possibilities. Neither mere adventure – though there’s certainly adventure in it – nor just inner journey – though there’s in it something of this too – the Odyssey defies us to rethink carefully what we are and what we can become. That’s its secret. Myth and thought thus combine in it challenging us to find ways through life’s many twists, splits, and figure/ground reversals, to unite its oftentimes unconnected dots, and to be able one day perhaps – like Ulysses – to tell our own story.
In this three-day workshop we will reflect together – after a few textual fragments, images and musical excerpts – on thirteen key episodes in the Odyssey (Ulysses’s purpose,Telemachus’s quest and Penelope’s dilemma; Calypso’s invitation to Ulysses to stay in Ogygia; Ulysses’s encounter with Polyphemus and his subsequent shipwreck, caused by Poseidon; his arrival at the island of the Phaeacians and his telling of his own story; his encounter with Circe and with the lotus eaters; his descent into the underworld and his later encounter with the sirens; his return to Ithaca in disguise and his killing of the suitors) and relate them – somehow, that is, tentatively – to our very own biographies. Again: not so much to find out external parallels as possible inner coincidences in terms of vision and choice; and not so much looking for resembling psychological archetypes as for inner awareness and attitudes – from the viewpoint, then, of the early Greek mentality, for which life is an open-ended collection of ever-shifting enigmas that sting our capacity to think at the crossroads of two antagonistic powers: those epitomized by Athena – the (young) goddess of “clear (blue) eyes” – and Poseidon – the (old) god of “dark-blue hair.”
Session 1 - 28.11.2025
Of self-discovery and self-forgetting
Ulysses’s purpose: what does it mean to struggle for one’s psyche?
Calypso’s island, the lack of boats and the risk of yearned-for paradises
The sirens and their beautiful but untimely song
Two important side stories: Telemachus’s quest and Penelope’s dilemma
Ulysses’s means and Athena, the young goddess with clear blue eyes
Session 2
Telling one’s own story
Poseidon, or the wrath of an old god with dark-blue hair
Ulysses and Polyphemus: immediacy, distance and transgression
Ulysses’s shipwreck and the encounter with the Phaeacians
What does it mean to tell one’s own story?
And what does it mean to descent to the underworld?
Session 3
Things need not be what they seem
Circe and the lotus eaters: on caution, courage, diplomacy and intelligence
Back to Ithaca, but why in disguise?
Ulysses’s killing of the suitors
Ulysses’s return, before and after…
Ulysses and us
Carlos A. Segovia (PhD) is an independent British-born, Spanish contemporary philosopher and diagrammatic artist currently based in Berlin and working on meta-conceptuality, contingency and worlding in a post-nihilist key, at the crossroads of the philosophy of mythology.
Doors: 19:30
Start: 20:00
Donation based entry
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The Fool
Skalitzerstr. 43 Berlin
#greekmythology
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