[Evans Lansing Smith]

Interesting that for the early Christian commentators the mast was analogous to the Cross, and Odysseus to Jesus in his resistance to and rejection of the song of the sirens, which for them, as for the Gnostics, represented the lure of the flesh, from which the soul must liberate itself, in order to return to the homeland of the spirit, symbolized by Ithaca. For the Pythagoreans, of course, it was just the opposite: the sirens offered the hope of spiritual transcendence.

What a wonderful round of posts! Thank everyone so much for participating!