Awakening to One's Conscience

"Awakening to One's Conscience: Inner Journey into Human Nature {3} by Art Aeon" is a fictional narrative poem in the tercet stanzas. It unfolds imaginary episodes that follow Helen's crucial revelation on the human causes of the Trojan War. The characters Odysseus and Penelope adventure to Troy. On the way, they meet the characters Idomeneus in Crete, Diomedes at sea, Chryseis in Thebe, Tecmessa and Telamon in Troy. Overcoming many formidable adversities, Odysseus and Penelope eventually fulfil Helen's last wish to be united with Paris in Troy, even ashes. But they are captured by the new Trojan king, Helenus. In magnanimous foresight, Helenus sets free his worst foe, Odysseus, to serve Aethon, the holy sage at the shrine in Mt. Ida. Odysseus pursues a new life as a humble hermit with sincere repentance of his past life. Penelope becomes a trusty friend to Queen Andromache in Helenus's new kingdom. One day, Odysseus finds a lad who is identified as Helen's son by Paris, called Ganymede. He succeeds to Helenus as a wise new king. Odysseus and Penelope learn from wise Aethon about the wisdom and theology of ancient Egypt. They realize that personified deities are not real entities but mere wishful illusions, invented by humans in their minds. Eventually, the character-listener Homer-Outis becomes enlightened, and he confesses to the character-narrator Odysseus in sincere remorse that he has been misled in proud vanity to follow guileful minstrels who abused the fake muses as their poetic conceits to justify their travesties of absurd divine affairs. He vows to sing of the plain truth deep from his conscience without the poetic conceit of phantom 'muses.' Odysseus and Homer-Outis become mysteriously transfigured into one enlightened being. At this moment, the imaginative great bard Homer-Outis wakes up from his numinous dream, inspired afresh to write a new epic: "Inner Journey into Human Nature."