Each time Ulysses asks to be released, Eurylokhos and Perimedes will tighten the ropes. He can then hear what no mortal has heard without dying: the scream-songs (at the same time phthoggos and aoidè) of the Sirens.
The end of Homer’s scene is more inconsistent.
When silence has returned to the sea, it is in all likelihood the sailors, whose ears are plugged, who hear the Sirens’ song fading in the distance, since it is agreed that if Ulysses were to ask that the ropes be loosened, they would only be tightened by Eurylokhos and Perimedes. In short, the sailors, whose ears are plugged, upon hearing the silence, hasten to remove from their ears the pieces of wax that Ulysses had cut with his bronze knife and kneaded with his fingers.
At that moment, Eurylokhos and Perimedes untie (anelysan) Ulysses. It so happens that this is also the first time the word analysis appears in a Greek text.
The simple act of inverting the episode seems to me to give it its soundest meaning.
With their supernatural song, birds attract men to the place strewn with bones where they perch: with their artificial song, men attract birds to the place strewn with bones where they nest.
The artificial song that serves to attract birds is called a birdcall. The Sirens are birds’ revenge on the birdcalls that make them victims of their own song. Archaeological digs in the oldest caves reveal whistles and birdcalls. Paleolithic hunters mimetically lured the animals they hunted and from whom they did not distinguish themselves. Reindeer and ibex horns were depicted on the nocturnal walls. They are exhibited in books as illustrations flooded with light: it must not be forgotten that horns can also sound. The first human depictions sometimes hold a horn in their hands. To drink its blood? To hail the animal of which it is a sign (a sign that falls in the forest when it is shed) to the point of becoming the sound that signals it?
The speculation can then be articulated in the following way: Homer’s text retells in an inverted episode a prototypical tale about the origin of music, according to which the first music was that of hunters’ whistles-birdcalls. The secrets of hunting (animals’ speech, that is, the cries they emit and that call them) are taught during the initiation. Kirkè is the Sparrowhawk. If vultures and falcons, eagles, owls have been “deified” gradually by their status as celestials, to which hunters left a part of the prey that they had put to death at the ritual moment of sacrifice (detaching the skin, severing the limbs, and separating the organs from the flesh), the calls that attracted them were gradually “theologized.” This is how music, subsequently, became a song that attracted the gods to man, having attracted birds to hunters. It is a later development but the function remains the same.
Their ears lead them to the birdlime where their feet are ensnared: the wax in their ears prevents them from hearing the decoy.
In Rome, deer were considered cowardly animals — unworthy of senators who preferred boar — because they fled when they were attacked and were thought to adore music. Deer were hunted with calls or decoys: either a sort of syrinx mimicking a breeding grunt, or a live bound deer, bellowing and serving as a lure. Deer hunting, considered servile, was done not with spears but with nets: the antlers would become inextricably entangled in the mesh.
All tales tell stories of young men who acquire, in the course of an initiation, the language of animals. Both the call and the decoy hail the emitter in its song. Music in no way consists in bringing something into a human ronde: it allows entry into a re-created zoological ronde. The imitations bring about one another mutually. Birds are alone, like humans, in knowing how to imitate the songs of neighboring species. Mimetic sounds, which are the prey’s acoustic masks, bring the celestial animal, the terrestrial animal, the aquatic animal, all predatory animals including man, thunder, fire, sea, wind into the predatory ronde. Music makes the ronde turn through the sounds of animals in the dance, through images of animals and stars on the walls of the oldest caves. It intensifies the rotation. For the world turns, as do the sun and the stars, seasons and changes, blooms and fruits, ruts and reproductions of animals.
After predation, it ensures domestication. A call is already a domesticator. A decoy is already domesticated.
Ulysses is something of an Athenian. The rite of the Anthesteria in Athens relies on ropes and pitch. Once a year the souls of the dead would return to the city and the Athenians would tie up the temples with ropes and smear the doors of the houses with pitch. Should the errant breaths of the ancestors try to enter their former homes, they would get stuck outside the threshold like flies.
For the entire day clay pots full of food that had been prepared for them were displayed in the middle of the streets.
These breaths (psychè) were later called ghosts (daimōn) or even vampire-sorcerers (kères).
Sir James George Frazer reports that the Bulgarians, at the beginning of the twentieth century, had kept the following custom: in order to ward off evil spirits from their homes, they would paint a cross in tar on the outside of the door while hanging over the threshold a tangled skein composed of multiple threads. Before the ghost could count all the threads the cock would almost certainly crow and the shadow would have to hasten back to its grave before light started to spread, threatening to erase it.
Ulysses bandaged to his mast is also a tireless Egyptian scene. Coming out of the Underworld, Ulysses knows death and resurrection through magic song, surrounded by mummies whose ears have been plugged with natron and resin. Pharaoh in his solar boat crosses the celestial ocean.
Ithyphallic Osiris, on the walls of the tombs hidden in the pyramids, impregnates the bird Isis, who is straddling his belly, conceiving the bird-headed man, the falcon Horus.
The deceased (dark shadow) is depicted before the gates of the underworld preceded by his ba (the colorful siren spreading or folding its wings).
The mummification of corpses was accompanied by the embalmers’ singing. In the funeral accounts, the first budget entry is the linen, the second the mask, the third the music. The Harper’s Song, written in every tomb, repeats the refrain:
The call of the song never saved anyone from the grave.
So make your day happy and do not grow weary listening to the funereal call.
See: no one has brought his belongings with him …
See: no one has come back, who has left.