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“Phil Cousineau always notices what nobody else does — a sure sign of a sharp writer. His odyssey through the Odyssey uncovers new sights at every site.”
— Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, author of A Series of Unfortunate Events
A fresh, modern companion to Homer’s Odyssey that illuminates its timeless lessons on change, resilience, and the search for home.
For nearly three thousand years, Homer’s Odyssey has captivated audiences with its tale of Odysseus’s perilous return journey after the Trojan War. In The Wisdom of the Odyssey, mythologist Phil Cousineau distills the epic into twenty-four chapters that mirror Homer’s original books and connect their lessons to our own lives. Readers follow Odysseus through his ordeals and changes of heart, as he’s sustained not only by cunning and grit but by love for his wife, Penelope; his son, Telemachus; and his homeland, the island of Ithaka. In his delightfully strange world of monsters, tricksters, and sorceresses, Homer reveals what it means to be human. Timed for release with Christopher Nolan’s much-anticipated film adaptation, this volume shows how Odysseus’s enduring story is more relevant than ever, and how it can guide us toward perseverance, meaning, and a richer inner life.
“Phil Cousineau always notices what nobody else does — a sure sign of a sharp writer. His odyssey through the Odyssey uncovers new sights at every site.”
— Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, author of A Series of Unfortunate Events
“If there is such a thing as a world soul — an anima mundi — it would address our times in something like Cousineau’s voice.”
— Huston Smith, author of The World’s Religions
“If our common human story is a journey of exile, ordeal, and homecoming, then the account of Odysseus is arguably the single narrative that best incorporates the self-deception, moments of temptation, endurance, cunning, resilience, and abiding will to survive that characterize our species. Homer’s account is timeless because, no matter what changes in cultures, the human psyche is timeless. Phil Cousineau’s introduction of and road map to the wisdom of the Odyssey brings us both learning and re-cognition as our archetypal ancestor seeks his path home. If character is fate, then we all have much to remember, much to learn, as we try to make our way through the Symplegades of our lives.”
— James Hollis, PhD, Jungian analyst and author of The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife
“Phil Cousineau is my go-to for mythic reveries. His encyclopedic knowledge of Homer is astonishing, and The Wisdom of the Odyssey is destined to become an instant classic. This is a book I will read again and again and be the better for it. It’s a revelatory work and a fitting tribute to this story, which has endured for millennia and will continue to do so.”
— Brenda Knight, author of Women of the Beat Generation
“Phil Cousineau makes his word stars flow with new versions of a howling chaos and poetic cosmos. Everything he writes is imaginative and brilliant. His syllables float with fun, fire, and mischief. Beware. Once you read his reflections on Homer’s Odyssey, you will be captured forever. He paints his word pictures of the epic poem with surprise and wisdom. His words glow.”
— Willis Barnstone, author of The Poetics of Ecstasy: From Sappho to Borges and African Bestiary
“One of the great tragedies of our time is the relegation of Homer’s Odyssey to university Classics departments, which are winking out, one by one. In his brilliant new book, The Wisdom of the Odyssey, rooted in a lifetime of reflection, Phil Cousineau reverses this trend by creating a manuscript that brings Homer alive in the twenty-first century. Cousineau concisely recounts Odysseus’s epic journey chapter by chapter, concluding each with a luminous précis. Careful contemplation of Cousineau’s work awakens in readers the life wisdom necessary to navigate the hurly-burly of our time.”
— Brian Thomas Swimme, author of Cosmogenesis: An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe
“Phil Cousineau takes us along his own ‘hero’s journey’ as he guides us through a fresh interpretation of the Odyssey that provides relevance, context, and immediacy to Homer’s age-old epic. We see how humankind’s struggles replay through the millennia, how greed, arrogance, and violence give way to love, honor, and courage. With his own beautiful prose and deep psychological insights, Cousineau highlights the poem’s eternal lessons, how ancient myth informs our present reality, and how all of this matters to us even now. Homer still has much to teach us, perhaps more today than ever.”
— Terry Tarnoff, author of The Bone Man of Benares
“I loved this deep, wise, and courageous book — blessed, no doubt, by the gods and storytellers of ancient Greece, for it carries their weight and wisdom. In this retelling, Odysseus and Penelope participate in the vast liturgy of the universe by showing how the return home — and the protection of it — can be both the most numinous and dangerous part of our journey through life. Cousineau reveals how our homecomings must be utterly transformative if we are to help forge peace out of war, turn our warriors into storytellers, and so reenchant our disenchanted world.”
— Valerie Andrews, author of Our Story of Home: Tales of Longing and Belonging
“The great stories are always still being told, shaping and reshaping themselves like pearls to be handed to the future. Our own great storytellers take the ancient texts and illuminate the divine details to bring out their timeless meaning and convey their eternal music. That’s where Phil Cousineau comes in.”
— R. B. Morris, author of The Mockingbird Poems and songwriter of “That’s How Every Empire Falls”
“Navigating the twists and turns of one’s life journey can feel lonely and confusing. In The Wisdom of the Odyssey master traveler and mythologist Phil Cousineau connects the reader’s personal adventure with archetypal knowledge that has guided and inspired for three thousand years. The individual search for home gains support from universal dimensions of shared wisdom found in Homer’s mysteriously beautiful poem.”
— Anthony Lawlor, author of A Home for the Soul: A Guide for Dwelling with Spirit and Imagination and The Temple in the House: Finding the Sacred in Everyday Architecture
“In The Wisdom of the Odyssey Phil Cousineau achieves his goal of bringing stories home by returning pleasure, delight, joy, and no little awe to the experience of Homer’s poem. His writing on wisdom illustrates how one is awakened by a literal connection, and he shows a depth of understanding about the power of mythopoesis by reckoning with and shaping the myth into a new form, as Homer himself achieved. Finally, with his meditations on wisdom itself, Cousineau points to how we may return to our own sources on our current path home.”
— Dennis Slattery, author of From War to Wonder: Recovering Your Personal Myth Through Homer’s Odyssey
“The Wisdom of the Odyssey has the rare ability to captivate every reader, young or old, first-time reader or classics professor, with its reflections on Homer and his epic poem. Phil Cousineau’s learned text contains multiple levels of understanding of our national poet’s complex story structure and also the Odyssey’s infinite levels of poetic, mythological, and psychological meanings. Many of these overlapping aspects are revealed in Cousineau’s book, which for me echoes the countless hours I have spent excavating in the field around Greece and my own explorations of the real and symbolic Ithaka, the island that I call home.”
— Spyros Couvaras, Greek archaeologist
Phil Cousineau is a writer, teacher, filmmaker, storyteller, and cultural historian. The author of over forty books, he was a protégé of mythologist Joseph Campbell and cowrote The Hero’s Journey. He has consulted on mythology in the movies for Warner Brothers, Pixar, and Lucasfilm, and has led mythology travel programs to Greece for three decades.
PhilCousineau.net