Chapter 6 — Captain Odysseus

Playing Pirate with the Gods

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The Way Back Home

It was a piratic raid that was to cost him dear. As he sailed to attack the Cicones on the island of Ismarus, to punish them for supporting his enemies in a recent war, the captain of a flotilla of Greek warships could not have known that doing so would see his journey home delayed by a whole decade. The war he had just finished — though some likened it to more of a series of pirate missions on strategic coastal communities — had itself been 10 years in the fighting, so this was some absence. But then again Odysseus, or Ulysses to the Romans, had raised the ire not just of Troy and its supporters, but of the community of gods looking on too.

Frustratingly for him, the bloody Trojan war had actually been started by these deities in the first place. Eris, the goddess of strife, had made a golden apple, a gift to be given to the goddess judged the fairest. Paris — a Trojan prince — had decided that Aphrodite should have it, because she promised to make Helen — the most beautiful woman on earth — fall in love with him. The problem was, Helen was already married, so when Paris took Helen to Troy, Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and Helen’s brother in law, decided honour was at stake, so he set out to besiege Troy and get Helen back. Countless lives were lost, enormous suffering was caused, and many were displaced or traumatised. But, to add insult to injury, the gods who had started all this then cried out about the desecration of their temples in the battles that followed, and subjected men to their wrath.

Odysseus became a particular object of that anger. Though he had fought bravely in the war, a war which, though fought amongst men, was an attempt to restore what the gods had unbalanced, he fell from favour. Poseidon — a supporter of Troy — was angered by Odysseus’ arrogance in victory and his subsequent sacking of the Cicones; Odysseus increased the divine wrath against him by killing Poseidon’s son, the Cyclops Polyphemus. Thus his way back to Ithaca was blocked. Though he longed to return home and enjoy the simple pleasures of his land, his estate, his people, he was confined and confounded by divine powers.

His ships scuppered, his crew killed, Captain Odysseus endures his greatest and most difficult voyage, repeatedly coming up against gods who wanted to delay him, and women who wanted to seduce him. All the while, back home, a band of 108 suitors are trying to seduce his wife, Penelope, and pillaging his wealth through their constant gluttony. Though grieving as if he is dead, Penelope refuses their advances. Their son, Telemachus, is visited by Athena and given hope of his father’s continued survival. He is instructed to get a ship together and go in search of him, and yet his journey eventually leads him back to Ithaca, and the old swine-herd Eumaeus, who is hiding Odysseus. Rejoicing and reunited, father and son return and slay the suitors. Odysseus is restored to Penelope, and peace returns to Ithaca.

Like many of the Greek myths the antiquity of The Odyssey narrative belies — or perhaps has informed — its psychological and spiritual maturity. Having explored some of the roots of the pirate archetype, we can now approach this complex pirate story equipped to consider some of its deeper meanings. Like the Vader-Skywalker and the Wendy-Mr Darling-Captain Hook stories, The Odyssey is about a father who is blocked, and who is again, surprisingly perhaps, led to release by his own child. Telemachus, in Greek, means ‘far from battle’ — and we can thus read into Odysseus’ son an understanding that he is a slightly different person to his father. He is no pacifist, no. But his location in the story as distant from the goings on in Troy is significant as it places him apart from his father, with whom he wants to be reunited. Like Luke Skywalker, like Wendy, Telemachus leaves home on a quest involving an absent father. Yet he does so not out of some feud with the gods, but on the counsel of Athena.

Athena, like the rest of the cast of these myths, is not a straightforward character. However, her key traits tend to be that she dislikes fighting and prefers to use wisdom to settle disputes. She is the goddess of courage, civilisation, justice and just war, and also mathematics, craft and skill. She is, in other words, the antithesis of Poseidon — Odysseus’ nemesis — who is the god of earthquakes and sea monsters, who loved war and was second only to Zeus in the number of illicit sexual liaisons he had.

Here is Odysseus’ inner struggle set projected onto the canopy of heaven. On the one side is Poseidon, with his urges to war, power, destruction and sexual conquest, and on the other Athena, with her virtues of justice, wisdom and civilisation. With this in mind we might now consider, from a psychological perspective, what was really preventing Odysseus from returning to Ithaca. Although dressed up as a divine drama, with him as a pawn in their petty games, it was perhaps Odysseus’ own struggles with himself that were blocking his own return.

Part of his saga begins at the point of his greatest hubris. Taunting the Cyclops Polyphemus, Poseidon’s son, Odysseus tells him that his name is ‘Nobody:’

“So, you ask me the name I’m known by, Cyclops?

I will tell you. But you must give me a guest-gift

as you’ve promised. Nobody — that’s my name. Nobody —

so my mother and father call me, all my friends.” […]

They lumbered off, but laughter filled my heart

to think how nobody’s name — my great cunning stroke —

had duped them one and all…[1]

It is here, torturing and goading the son of a god, calling himself ‘Nobody’ as a joke to himself, because he really thought himself somebody, that Odysseus stokes Poseidon’s ire. Remaining ‘imprisoned’ by various strong and alluring women, hiding his identity and only revealing it through a breakdown as he heard a poetic recital about the war he had long fought it, Odysseus can appear a man with a terribly blocked inner life, who would rather blame the gods for his inability to return home than take responsibility for his actions and struggles himself.

In his book The Idolatry of God, Peter Rollins explores how, in early child development, we experience a ‘loss’ or ‘separation’ when we come to realise that our mother’s breast is not a physical part of us, that we are separate individuals. We grieve for this perceived sudden separation, yet in fact, there is no loss as we were never, in reality, anything other than separate.

‘At this point, the world is experienced as “out there.” With the advent of the “I,” there is an experience of that which is “not I.” So then the sense of selfhood is marked indelibly with the sense of separation. This means that one of our most basic and primal experiences of the world involves a sense of loss, for when we feel separated from something we assume that there was something we once had. The interesting thing to note, however, is that this sense of loss is actually an illusion, for we never actually lost anything. Why? Because there was no “me” before this experience of separation. Before the experience of loss there was no self to have enjoyed the union that we sense has been ripped away from us. The very birth of our subjectivity then signals a sense of losing something that we never had in the first place.’[2] [IofG — p ?]

Rollins goes on to explain how this false loss creates in us a false urge to fill this false void. And religion — the creation of a system of divine other(s) who hold the strings to our lives — is one of the key ways that we do that. In the waters we have explored so far we have met pirates who did battle against the enclosure of the land that supported them and pirates who fought against the brutal exploitation of their labour in the Atlantic. We have also met pirates who fought to unshackle information from the powerful, liberate music from those who would try to own it and control access to it for profit and, in the previous chapter, pirates who spring from films and books to do inner work to release us from bonds that may have arisen through family or other relationships that hamper our personal development. Yet there are deeper centres of blockage and enclosure too, where the battle is not against an economic system or a media environment, nor even against the parts of ourselves that may have suffered through the way we have been brought up. The final battle is where we have to play pirate to the gods.

Some may feel that this is a skirmish which they have no need to join in, yet, even if people themselves carry no religious belief, it is very clear that we live in a world where religion and ideologies concerning a ‘big other’ still carry enormous importance. The militant Islamism of Al Qaeda, and the threat of terrorism that they still carry is a matter that should concern us, even if we are liberal atheists ourselves. Similarly, the move towards a highly conservative religious right in American politics is important the world over — just as is the evolution of Chinese communism as it explores the embrace of certain elements of capitalism.

These religions and ideologies are enormous and highly complex systems with long social and political histories. Yet, just as the battles pirates had with emerging globalisation boiled down to individual acts taken in individual levels, so our engagement against the enclosures that religions place on us must take place, first and foremost, at the personal level too. Capitalism gave birth to a separation between our labour and our rewards for that labour: what we did was no longer intimately tied in with a craft that we may have learned or with the substance of our humanity. We simply worked, and were payed. Yet a parallel process of separation took place deeper within us in our beliefs too. It is here, at the level of very personal separations, in the false voids we each have and each fill with false urges towards ‘big others’ whom we long to abdicate responsibility to, that we must allow pirates to work. So in reading The Odyssey we see that, having fought his big battles and played pirate with the Cicones, and, perhaps, the Trojans, Odysseus is now forced to face up to the profound blockage he has as a religious person. On the one hand he feels draw to war, to battles and beautiful women, yet he still feels the urge to go back to his wife in Ithaca and to the stable life of civil society. Unable to make a strong decision either way, his life becomes blocked and marooned: he moves from place to place, ostensibly trying to make it back home, but apparently stopped from doing so by various divine impediments.

In his own eyes Odysseus has become not just ‘villain of all nations’ but a villain of divinities too. The religious, meta-physical meta-narrative that he tells himself is that his return to comfort, to the theatre upon which he can to live out his days, to his commons, has been blocked by gods again and again. He is experiencing, to use Rollins’ language, a profound separation and loss from some primal, original place — and has abdicated responsibility for what he is going through to some external, divine agency. And yet, when Telemachus does finally find him, he is not on some far-flung distant shore, but hiding away on Ithaca itself, with Eumaeus the swine-herd. His terrible separation is shown up to be not a separation at all. Why had he not simply gone home, to the very place he supposedly pined for? What had blocked him from these final few miles?

The tale that Homer tells is that Odysseus is afraid of the suitors who are pestering his wife and eating him out of house and home. Yet this excuse rings rather hollow. Odysseus is still the definitive man of the house, and husband to Penelope. He is a feared warrior and a highly respected citizen. Would the suitors really have the gall to challenge him? Any that did so would surely lose any chance of winning Penelope’s heart.

Odysseus, wracked by a long war and the spiritual oppression of a religion that insisted he was fighting a divine cause, had become so enmeshed in the stories of these warring gods that he felt unable to overcome the separation he felt from his own home. Like Vader, Odysseus needed his son to play pirate with his beliefs. In practice this meant that Telemachus had to show his father that the separation he felt was really no separation at all, for he was already in Ithaca, he was already home.

We have already seen how the Atlantic pirates of the 18th century challenged the comfortable Christian practice of the ruling classes. They subverted their imagery in the creation of the Jolly Roger, and took such a radically different view of the value of life and the meaning of death that it petrified those in power, who responded by labelling them villains, to be rejected by the whole of humanity. And yet the irony was that their equitable treatment of men regardless of rank or class or disability, and their practice of wealth distribution, put them closer to original message of the gospel than those who fawned in high churches, yet trampled on the poor.

Telemachus can be seen as performing a similar function. Though Homer’s narrative presents him as still one who could be very violent, his name is significant in showing that he carried a different perspective on war, and on the gods too. Under the guidance of Athena, Telemachus is led to where Odysseus is hiding, although he doesn’t yet recognise him. While Eumaeus is away, Athena restores something of Odysseus’ youth to him, and tells him to present himself to Telemachus. He does so, and tells Telemachus everything that has happened. Then, Homer tells us,

‘with those words Odysseus kissed his son

And the tears streamed down his cheeks and wet the ground,

Though before he’d always reined his emotions back.’[3]

This is an important passage, because it reveals that Odysseus has changed. The transformation that Athena has worked to restore him to more youthful looks is significant, but perhaps only as a signifier of the inner work that has taken place. The warrior father, mentally scarred by so much violence, away from home and pulled one way then the other in his conflicting thoughts about power and masculinity, has these leathered and distressed coats stripped away, and a new, fresh surface revealed. This new Odysseus is now able to express his emotions, and not hold them back. Unfettered by the dead layers that had built up, he is finally able to confront the son he had been so absent from, and he breaks down in front of him.

We need to be clear here: this is a key turning point in the story, and represents a reinvigorated Odysseus who has broken free of some of the neuroses that bound him, but what follows is still a violent and complex tale. Father and son return home, Odysseus disguised as a poor beggar. The others mock him, and Penelope finally proposes a test: if any of them can string Odysseus’ old bow, and shoot an arrow through twelve axes, she will accept them. Odysseus is the only one who can, and he turns the bow on the suitors, who are then all killed. It is gory stuff, and references to the gods are peppered throughout, yet there are differences here too. Odysseus is no longer the passive victim, trapped and taunted by the gods. His return home as a beggar is a mirror of his arrogant joke to Polyphemus that he was ‘Nobody.’ Now he is nobody, but can, from that humble position, begin to become again who he really is meant to be.

The Odyssey reveals to us something of a litmus test for works of genuine piracy: the old order ends up transformed and reinvigorated. Yet there is a deeper archetype to uncover here too. Looking at the story from a psychological angle, we note that it is the heresy of the child that brings the parent’s redemption, and this pattern is repeated in the Star Wars films and Peter Pan too. In the case of the Skywalker family, we see Darth Vader-Anakin Skywalker’s redemption and release from the enclosing black mask at the end of the series of films. With the Darlings we see Wendy return home and move towards her mother, who in her own blocked youth had met Pan. These are the happy endings, satisfying conclusions where, just as Telemachus and Odysseus together bring renewal to their home, the listener is left in no doubt that the world within which the story has occurred is now a better place than it was at its frustrated beginning, and this regeneration, this unblocking of something that was preventing the family or grouping to move on, is precipitated not by some courageous act of the parent, but by an act by the child which is experienced as heresy. For example, when Telemachus arrives at Eumaeus’ house, he refuses to take Odysseus’ seat, and is generous to a fault — promising, despite the suitors ravaging his house, to clothe and feed him and set him on his way. Odysseus’ heart is ‘by god, torn to pieces’ hearing this. (Book 16, line 103) There is regeneration here, and a dismantling of the religious narratives that had bound Odysseus, yet, after all his travels and travails, it ends with his son providing the key to finally unlock his heart and allow him to truly come home. That home, we might suggest from reflection on Salvatore Maddi’s work on The Quest for Human Meaning in the previous chapter, is a place where the three dimensions of commitment, control and challenge are all in balance — in high contrast to the warring, rootless ‘quest’ Odysseus has experienced, where all of these elements were distorted, and these distortions were sanctified by the gods.

The Tragedy of the Prodigal Son

Odysseus, we are led to believe at the end of Homer’s epic, does find peace at last. Yet these stories of playing pirate with a blocked life do not always end happily. There will surely be parables or religious legends from many faiths that could be mustered as examples here. My own experience, and thus my own journey of piratic engagement, is within the Christian tradition, where we find a parallel story to that of the journey-and-return narrative of The Odyssey in the story Jesus told of the prodigal son. The traditional telling frames it as one of gracious restoration, as brilliantly and loving expounded by Henri Nouwen in his extended meditation on Rembrant’s painting, The Return of the Prodigal Son. The basic plot may be familiar: a young man commits a terrible act of heresy against his doting father. He approaches him to ask for an early payment of his inheritance — an act that, in true pirate style, signifies that his father has already become dead to him. The father consents, and the son goes off, squanders the money in wild living before falling on hard times, whereupon he decides to return home. His father has been watching out for him and, even though his oldest son is scornful and resentful, the father welcomes the young son back into the family, throws a huge feast, and declares that ‘this brother of yours was dead, and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’[4]

Nouwen’s ‘light’ reading of this parable is that it is really about the journey that both sons must make towards becoming fathers themselves. It is a journey from youth to parenthood, from wild living on the younger son’s side, and resentful labour on the older son’s side, to gracious, generous, forgiving love that the father models.

However, I believe that, reading Luke’s words in parallel with The Odyssey — and Luke, as man well educated in Greek culture, must have been familiar with it — we can uncover a ‘dark’ inverted version of this parable, which presents the son’s journey from youth to adulthood not as one of heresy and redemption, but as a tragedy, as a failed act of piracy and an unsuccessful attempt to escape from and change the powerful draw of his father’s empire.

Luke begins his story ‘there was a man…’ and we can thus see the perspective from which the story is being told. Luke could have had Jesus beginning ‘there was a young man…’ but he chooses not to. We should perhaps not read too much into this, other than to mention the adage that most history is written from the point of view of the powerful, and we might hint that the ‘light’ version of the parable, the reading where the son is lost and resurrected, is very much the father’s reading. He is overjoyed, has compassion for his son, and celebrates his return to the family empire with a large and lavish feast.

Our ‘dark’ reading is an attempt to see the same events from the point of view of the young son. He had a grouchy and overly-dutiful older brother who had no choice, as the first-born, but to work in the family business. But our younger son had a bigger vision. He knew that there was a wider world outside of the safe and comfortable empire that his father had built. So he approached him, and asked for his inheritance. This, he knew, would be like a dagger to his father’s heart. The property his father had built up would have to be split prematurely, potentially forcing his father and older brother to live more modestly. There is no great detail given about the true state of the father’s estate, but we do know that the end of the story sees the son returning to a situation where there were hired servants, a fattened calf, music and worked land. In other words, the young son, awful as his request was, most likely knew that the estate that would remain after the split was still large enough to sustain some level of wealth.

The story is also carries no mention of what the son’s intentions might have been when he asks for his inheritance. It was some time after he had received his share that he ‘got together all he had…’ It is not impossible that the father viewed his son’s request as him taking some initiative and being something of an entrepreneur. The boy might even achieve a good return, and add to the family’s riches. The next parable Luke places in his gospel narrative is that of the ’shrewd manager,’ who was profoundly dishonest and underhand in his dealings with his master’s finances, and yet was commended for it. Jesus’ concluding remarks on the story are quite shocking: ‘I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.’[5]

The economics in these parables are not straightforward, and certainly do not always carry convenient moral platitudes. So, while the ‘light’ reading of the prodigal story is able to carry the message of the father’s generosity, the context within which it is placed does allow the ‘dark’ reading to sustain a more complex economic narrative. Perhaps, we might imagine, taking the young son as protagonist, he had hated the wealth that his father had pooled for himself, and had always dreamed of sharing it more widely. He had lived all his life in the comfortable, walled compound that his father had built — an empire he claimed he had created through efficient land management and astute economies of scale — but perhaps the son saw the injustice here, and thought it amounted to sweat-shop labour and class discipline. We can imagine him looking at his own future: his father and older brother worked so hard there was a deadness in their eyes… he didn’t want to die that way. He had to get out. He asked for his share of the property (though whether that meant actual land assets is unclear) and his father agreed. Once things had settled, he liquidated the lot, and left, for the first time feeling truly free. He celebrated in style by spending wildly and generously, sharing out the money that had lain gathering cobwebs, letting it all go with an extravagant potlatch. He took Jesus’ words to heart: used his worldly wealth to find friends… Far better than keeping it locked away, isolated and cold.

Building on this different perspective on the son’s motivations, we might wonder if he wanted to do useful work where it was really needed. Like an ancient Christopher McCandless, here was an idealist wanting to step out from his privileged background, explore a wider world and do something more authentic. If he hadn’t sought out a more ‘real’ life, it certainly soon found him. Famine struck. The friends he had bought disappeared and he was left with nothing. This was hardship like he had never known, but resisting the urge to go back to the dead comfort under his father’s wing, he hired himself out and got on with honest labour. It was shitty work, with the very animals his father had always despised, and he was constantly hungry. He’d never known hunger before, and even sat for a while in the animal feeder, considered eating the pods that the pigs had to fatten them up for some wealthy bastard who still ate well.

It was too much, too soon. In an area of famine no one had anything they could share with him, and nor did he deserve it more than they. So rather than be an extra burden, he came up with a compromise: he would never live freely off his father’s riches again, but he could return as a servant. This way he could rebuild his strength, and do so with honest labour. More than that, he could show his father the error of his father’s ways, tell him about the hungry people that lay dying not so far away, and turn his father’s heart to compassion for them.

So the son returned home. But his father saw him coming. He’d watched every day, worried about the ideas he might come back with, concerned that his other son’s head might also be turned. All he had worked for and gathered around himself was at stake. He could not risk it being redistributed in some ridiculous lefty scheme.

As it happened, he needn’t have worried. The young son was tired, thirsty and splintered. He could only speak with half a heart, and the ideas that had felt so clear and sharp far from home now felt confused and tumid. His father refused his pleas to have him work. He gave him a warm robe, which, if a little heavy on his thinned frame, felt sumptuously comfortable. He was given the family signet ring, which invested him with an odd feeling of pride. He was someone again, with a strange but alluring sense of power. There didn’t seem to be the time or place to challenge his father and persuade him to widen the radius of his generosity…and so he settled back into his old ways, and accepted his old seat at the large and loaded dinner table.

‘I was alive,’ the young man said to himself as he sat listening to his father toasting his return at the feast… ‘but now I am dead again.’ His older brother seemed disappointed and angry, and his head hung low as the music raged and his father grew enraged. He’d tried to break out and had failed; he’d let both of them down. His plan to escape was in tatters. It was over. The father was too strong. They would both become like him.

This is another story about children and parents, but, unlike Peter Pan or Star Wars, here is an attempt to play pirate that ends in tragedy, for the old order defeats the rebellion of the young son and, as the story closes, the empire is sustained. We should take careful note here: not all pirates should be valorised, for not all piracy ends with regeneration of the commons nor lives reinvigorated. Some, like the prodigal son, launch out as pirates, but then find the cost too high, and soon take refuge in the economics of the old order they set out to critique. The prodigal’s life — and he is a prodigy perhaps, one with prodigious vision and talent — is presented in the opening of the tale as blocked by the father. Only his symbolic killing permits the son to break free. He almost escapes the father’s gravity, but the draw of power and comfort is too much. Rather than being a redemptive story of a lost son who returns to his senses, in our dark reading, this parable can be explored as a tragedy about a young pirate who left the legal strangulation of father’s deadening empire, did experience sensation for a while, lived a ‘short but merry life’ and yet eventually fell back into the temptation of the trappings of wealth… via a stint in the service of a swineherd.

Whether Luke meant it or not, the tale he wrote has fascinating parallels with The Odyssey. In both stories we have a father and son who are ‘blocked’ — although, again in both stories, it is only really the son who appreciates properly the truly nature of that blockage. In both stories we have one party who has departed, and thus created some dramatic separation and tension between the two protagonists. But this is where the stories differ, for only in The Odyssey does one step out and go in search of the other. In the prodigal son, the father watches out for his son’s return, but never appears to leave the boundaries of his property to find him. This is odd, because the preceding two parables in Luke’s gospel give us a shepherd who leaves the flock of 99 to go on an exhaustive search for the single sheep who has strayed, and a women searching for a prized lost coin, who empties her whole house on to the street in order to find it. Yet in the parable of the prodigal son the father remains rather passive.

Telemachus, on the other hand, goes on a journey to find his father — an act of compassion and active empathy that is missing in the prodigal son, whose attempts to play pirate with his father’s empire appear born of more selfish things. Both stories, oddly, appear to turn on decisions made while in a degrading place: working with pigs. Pirates have always been born in places of oppression and dirt, and it is here, in amongst the filth and the grunting, that true character is shown. For Odysseus and Telemachus, there is a decision to change. Odysseus sees that he must go home — indeed, that he can go home. The separation he thought he knew from Ithaca was an illusion. His blocked life is released. The young prodigal, however, sitting among the pig feed, decides on compromise. ‘I am no longer worthy to be called your son, make me like one of your hired men.’ He won’t change his father; his father has changed him.

Pirates among Pirates

What is it that enables change in one story, and not the other? One possibility is the difference between the place of women in the two stories. In Luke’s prodigal story, all mention of women has been expunged. Other than hints we might take of them involved in the son’s ‘wild living,’ and the older son’s accusations of his brother using prostitutes, there are no female characters at all. This is in contrast to The Odyssey, where Odysseus’ wife Penelope is the calm fulcrum around which the whole tale balances, and Athena is the goddess (of philosophy and just war) whose interventions are the key to the unlocking of the narrative.

It is here that it is right to digress a moment and discuss why it might be that so few women are mentioned in traditional pirate literature. History, as we have already noted, is written from the point of view of the powerful and, as far as the empire-builders of England and Spain were concerned, women had no significant role to play. They could not vote and women of any social position were never expected to work or do anything of much interest whatsoever. They were reduced to sexual objects. The Trojan war was fought over a beauty contest, and women were not allowed on naval vessels lest they caused lustful argument. Yet, in the end, it is Athena who brings peace, careful thought and justice; it is Wendy’s mother — and Wendy — who meet Peter Pan and make the moves to unblock their family, and it is Luke Skywalker’s sister, Princess Leah, who is the calm, intelligent diplomat.

Women struggled in these worlds — and still do — because the force of male power was so strong. But many, like Anne Bonny and Mary Read, did break through, becoming pirates among pirates — unblocking the enclosed the life that others had set out for them and living lives of adventure and drama.

Almost all the information we have about Anne Bonny is based on Captain Johnson’s General History, so verifiable facts are difficult to come by. Johnson has her born in Ireland and then moving to North America where her mother died. Her father initially struggled, but then made a substantial fortune as a merchant and Anne was considered a very eligible young woman. However, she ran off with a young and poor pirate, James Bonny, and ended up in the Bahamas — a sanctuary for English pirates. At some point around 1718 she started a relationship with the pirate John Rackham, and with Mary Read the three of them stole the Revenge and began gathering a crew.

Mary Read had had a less fortunate upbringing. Born ‘illegitimately’ to the widow of a sea captain. Her older brother — of more acceptable birth — then died, so, to keep inheritance payments coming in from his grandfather, Mary’s mother pretended that Mary was the son, and dressed her as a boy. She remained cross-dressed while she worked as a footman, and later a sailor. Joining the British army, she fought bravely and then fell in love with a Flemish soldier — dressing as a woman for the first time when they were married. He unfortunately died, so Mary returned to male dress and took passage on a ship to the West Indies. They were intercepted by pirates — Rackham and Bonny — and Mary was forced to join them. It was only after Bonny became very keen on her that Read told her she was a woman. To prevent Rackham becoming jealous, he too was let in on the secret.

As women and pirates life was doubly tough for Bonny and Read. Pirates were hated with a passion, and women who took on men’s work equally so. Yet it can be argued that their legacy is a significant one. Their lives were documented by Captain Johnson, and the Dutch and French editions of his Historie der Engelsche Zee-Roovers carried an engraving of Bonny, showing a bare-breasted female pirate carrying a sword and torch, pushing forwards beneath a Jolly Roger, some official royal decree being trampled under her foot. On one side of her are fellow pirates, hung on gallows, and on the other a burning ship. The direct link is impossible to make, but it seems likely that this scene was the inspiration for Eugéne Delacroix’s famous painting of the French Revolution Liberté Guidant Le Peuple — Liberty Leading The People — which came to symbolise one of the great uprisings against oppressive empirical power in modern history.

Marcus Rediker writes:

‘It seems that the liberty seized by Anne Bonny and Mary Read — the liberty they found so briefly, so tantalisingly, beneath the Jolly Roger — took a strange, crooked path from the rough rolling deck of a ship in the Caribbean to the polished, steady floor of an art salon in Paris.’[6]

Women were often denigrated as no more than pretty objects or child-makers by those in power, yet the power of these two connected pictures shows them as central to the rhythm of life and socio-political renewal. Marching under the Jolly Roger in the engraving, marching under the Tricolore in the painting, brave women are seen as leading people onward through traumatic change, through death and social upheaval. This is not the violent revolution of the masculine soldier, but the determined re-naissance of the feminine mutineer. Their ability to give birth is matched with their courage to provide the necessary link between death that surrounds them in fallen fighters and hung pirates, and new life. It is women who allow the rhythm of renewal to continue.

To return to the parable of the prodigal son, the lack of women in the story means that the motifs of death — the father becoming dead to the son as the son asks for his inheritance, and the son dying again as he returns to the feasting table — are given no balance by feminine characters, meaning that no new life is possible. The story is sterile; the sons and their father are stuck. In contrast, though Odysseus is a brave warrior, he is utterly unable to find release from his situation without the intervention of Athena. Similarly, Telemachus — though similarly brave — is unable to leave Ithaca to find his father without her encouragement. All the while Penelope remains constant and faithful as the suitors harangue her and demand she give up on her husband and child.

Though their names are often passed over, it is these radical — the historical Anne Bonny and Mary Read and the fictional Princess Leah and Athena — who carry the vital link between one generation and the next, and thus create the conditions within which the rhythm of death and rebirth is made possible. It is only with their feminine influence that narratives can be balanced, so that the heresy of the child can bring the parent’s redemption, and thus the cycle of life continue towards greater maturity.

The Divine Pirate

It is thus the women who make the difference between the triumph of The Odyssey and the tragedy of the prodigal son, and it is perhaps this lack of femininity in the way that the Christian West developed that has led to such continued blockages and enclosures. This is a church that is only just beginning to accept women as leaders, a church that has historically made women remain silent and covered up. And yet central to the crucifixion and resurrection narrative is a woman who resolutely does not remain silent, and — in traditional tellings — certainly had not always remained covered up. Mary Magdalene had had ‘seven demons’ cast out from her, though there is no evidence to support her status as a prostitute — something that appears to have been invented in the 6th century. Regardless, it was her who was the first witness to Jesus’ resurrection — a ‘rebellious’ woman who again stands at the interface between death and new life.

Given this central place of one Mary at the nativity and another at the resurrection, it seems extraordinary that Christianity for so long rejected women in leadership and repressed their contributions to the growth of the faith. By doing so, however, we can now see that it is no surprise that much of Christianity has been a force for conservatism. With a Christian theology that sees the return of the prodigal son as a good thing, we see a tradition which venerates the masculine conservation of the empire, rather than a more feminine rhythm of heresy-fuelled renewal.

A good example of this can be seen in the male-dominated priesthood of the Church of England. Begun as a Protestant schism from the Catholic Church in 1534, arguments continued between those in seats of power as to the extent of its Reformed or Catholic leanings. By the time its Thirty Nine Articles had been published in 1563, its doctrine had settled down, and England became more consistently Protestant.

As the sociologist and economist Max Weber saw it, this move to Protestantism was an important factor in the adoption of capitalism — and thus the expansion of empire. The old Catholic theology of salvation assured people of their place in heaven if they simply received the sacraments and obeyed religious authority. With Calvin and Luther sweeping those assurances away, people needed other means of becoming confident in their salvation, and hard work at one’s ‘vocation’ or ‘calling’ became the main ways in which people gained this. With economic success being a sign of successful and fruitful labour, the Protestant work ethic paved the way for modern modes of organised labour and the capitalist systems of waged work.

Equally importantly, Martin Luther emphasised the individual nature of salvation, and coupled with the impact that Protestant beliefs had on economics, the sense of shared labour on a ‘commons’ was replaced by individual graft for personal gain. Indeed, the new Protestant Church of England seemed so intertwined with capitalism and the enclosure of property, that the penultimate statement in its Thirty Nine articles — its list of core doctrines — makes it absolutely clear that it is ‘anti-commons’:

The Riches and Goods of Christians are not common, as touching the right, title, and possession of the same as certain Anabaptists do falsely boast.

What I have worked hard for, to assure myself and others of my worth for salvation, is mine and mine alone.

What is remarkable is just how completely at odds this is with the practice of the early church, where we read that ‘all the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as they had need.’ [Acts 2:44, 45]

It is possible to see hints here of the same struggle that the prodigal son engaged with — and similarly failed to conquer. The young son, like the young church, can be seen to have attempted a radical departure from the socio-economic and religious structures that enclosed them. Branded as heretics who risked pulling the house down on everyone, their practices were denigrated as filthy and disgusting by those who considered themselves morally superior.

The early church was ridiculed and despised and rumours abounded that they ate flesh and drank blood, and that they were morally deviant. Their ‘parent’ — the orthodox Judaism of the day — was a religion which Jesus himself had pronounced ‘blocked.’ Pharisees and Sadducees were denounced as little more than ‘white-washed sepulchres’ — images of undecaying death again — and criticised for loading common people with intricate and complex laws, while not following these laws themselves. The temple in Jerusalem was also attacked for its injustices. The gospels relate an episode where Jesus got so angry that he turned over the tables of the money-changers in the temple forecourts, and drove out the religious peddlers with a whip. As I have argued in a previous book The Complex Christ, this should not be seen as a ‘cleansing’ of the temple, but rather as Jesus unblocking the way into the cleansing that the temple was meant to offer. Here was religious capitalism at its worst: worshippers had to buy ‘clean’ temple money at unfair rates, in order to purchase specially purified (and thus expensive) animals which could then be sacrificed. It was a money-making scam, an enclosure of temple practice for profit.

The early church can therefore be seen in pirate terms as a community of men and women who went ‘on the account.’ They declared mutiny against the religious powers that had enclosed them, and, using the teachings of their leader, departed from Jewish orthodoxy into the heretical waters of an inclusive Christianity based on ‘the commons.’ Just as the Atlantic pirates were hunted down and executed in gruesome ways as a warning to others not to join their revolt, so the early Christians were rounded up and publicly stoned to death too — just as their leader had been. Crucifixion was the gallows of the day — public, horrific and often slow. Jesus was taken to Golgotha — ‘the place of the skull’ — and with two bandits three beams were raised like masts against the sky. With the crossed bones of the condemned this was the Jolly Roger acted out in all its gore. Jesus was crucified for the simple reason that his teachings threatened the power of the Jewish religious leaders. He declared that people could be forgiven without having to spend money on expensive sacrifices. He challenged the Jewish classifications of what was ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ — and thus what was acceptable and unacceptable. These heresies were not only objectionable to the religious beliefs of the Pharisees and other leaders, they also threatened their power to control believers, and thus their status and wealth too. Like the English monarchs of the early 18th Century, those who diverted income streams away from the empire and inspired lowly labourers to consider themselves free, needed to be got rid of, and done so in ways that would deter others from following them.

It is likely that the deterrent was effective to some extent. The first Christians were full of fear in the days immediately after the crucifixion, and scattered. They found strength and verve at later, but, as with the prodigal son, power and personal comforts were finally the undoing of radical, early Christianity. Having been opposed by Jerusalem, and then by Rome, Christianity eventually became the religion of empire, and quickly settled into the easy throne of fattened calves, of comfortable robes and jewellery. The tragedy of the prodigal son is thus the tragedy of the church: a radical departure that resolved, through an act of heresy, to bring renewal to a deadened Judaism, yet quickly lost heart and returned to the temptations of power and comfort.

This was not how it was meant to be.

Returning again to the pivotal parallel moment with Odysseus hiding out with the swineherd, and the prodigal son lying filthy among the livestock, it is hard not to assume that Jesus may have been alluding in his parable to his own beginnings, born into a stable. In his telling of the tale, Jesus surely recognised himself in the young son.

Taking a traditional trinitarian view for a moment, as the familiar nativity story tells it, Jesus had walked away from heaven, from his own Ithaca, from his own paradise, and landed, naked, poor and hungry in a manger, totally dependent on the generosity of others. He came to earth from a place of comfort and experienced hunger, saw suffering, and knew pain. He came from a ‘kingdom of heaven’ into an occupied territory, where he was excluded, disenfranchised, and, in all likelihood, economically exploited. Yet, born as a Jew, he also entered a religion that had a long history of divine violence, of exile and bloody wars and power abuse and petty arguments about doctrine, as well as bigotry, racism and sexism. As son of the ‘Father God’ whom Jews worshipped, he knew that all of this had been to his benefit. Yet the few vignettes we have, looking in on Jesus growing up, we see someone changing their thinking on what this temple religion meant.

The first time we see Jesus entering a temple or synagogue is when, as an adolescent, he leaves his parents to spend time with the teachers of the Law. ‘Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?’ was his reply when Mary and Joseph asked where he had been. Here was a faithful young boy — keen to learn from wise elders and clearly considering the temple — the centre of worship of his Father — as his true home.

Later we see him in a local synagogue at the beginning of his ministry, reading from the prophet Isaiah:

‘The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed…’ [Luke 4: 18]

This is a classic pirate text, full of unblocking and the breaking of oppressive practices. The interpretation that he placed on it — personalising the text, and claiming it fulfilled by himself — outraged those who heard it, and he was driven out of his home town as a result. Here is someone who is clearly radicalised and not the loyal, supplicant believer any longer. His message is not centred around time spent in dedicated worship and contemplation in the temple, but about social justice and release from captivity.

Jesus gradually grew up to experience Judaism — the religion that worshipped his father as God — as blocked and oppressive. It kept the poor in their place, and the powerful in theirs. What would he do? As he prayed in the wilderness, and subsequently in the Garden of Gethsemane, he knew he had a decision to make. Hungry, tired and alone, here was his temptation: to return to his father having changed nothing. He could accept his father’s mantel with the old order still intact, and thus accept power and influence and the trappings of both. He could do that… or he could commit heresy against that old order, and reveal it for what it was: a form of social control which served to keep a priestly elite well fed and very wealthy, while loading the poor with endless rules about what they could and could not do — and how to pay for forgiveness if they did err.

In the final vignette we see Jesus approaching the temple in Jerusalem, disgusted, as we have seen, at the exploitative economics at work at the money-changers tables. This is Jesus returning to the place he had visited as a child and ‘beating the bounds’ — smashing down enclosures and barriers that kept the poor from their common place of worship. This, we must remember, was the place the young Jesus had considered to be his home. And now he was returning to break down its high walls to allow free access to the riches within, riches that had been blocked and enclosed by those who guarded the gates.

Unmasking the Father

Jesus’s passion can be read as the story of paternal piratic action par excellence, for Jesus does refuse to compromise, does commit terrible heresy against the empire’s enforcers — simultaneously refusing to play along with the Empire of Roman rule, and sacking the money-changing tables in the temple in true buccaneer style. It was very likely this act of protest in the temple courts that led to his arrest and crucifixion. In taking a whip to the money-changers who worked in the courts of his Father’s house we see Jesus’ dramatic decision to not give in to the temptation to let the religious status quo remain. It is here that we see him acting differently to the prodigal son, and thus avoiding the tragedy of another young man failing to overcome the draw of power and comfort offered by the distortion of his father’s empire. No. He would follow through with his piratic act, and live as if everything the temple stood for was dead, was fallen.

Jesus embraces death; the place of crucifixion standing like mast and cross-beam from which a skull and crossed-bones hung. After a ‘short but merry life’, penetrated by the marvellous, he is crucified by the Romans and Jews as a heretic. St Paul writes that Jesus ‘became sin’ — like Odysseus he is the villain not just of all nations, but of God too. Yet, as we know from the pirate archetype, his actions will bring renewal to that dead orthodoxy. By beating the bounds of the temple, by subverting those who hoped to enclose religious practice for their own benefit, Jesus aimed to open up the commons of heaven again. (Yet, as we can now see, it can only do that through the courage of brave and faithful women: the Mary who gave birth to him, and the Mary who was the first to announce his resurrection.)

The philosopher Slavoj Žižek has written of how this heretical work of Jesus as God’s son allows God ‘to see himself through the distorting human perspective.’[7] In other words, the traditional idea of the incarnation being as if God brought a piece of heaven down to purify the earth is reversed: Jesus’ tortured body rips open the easy paradise of heaven to allow a little earthly dirt to enter and do it’s work of reinvigoration. This is the incarnation as a truly piratic act. Through his miracles and highly controversial teachings Jesus subverts the blocked orthodoxy of his father’s empire through a series of happenings — TAZs if you will — that are totally outside ‘the law’ as it stood, yet are about the restoration of freedom to those who have been oppressed. This true kernel of Christianity has been almost entirely lost, and it has become a religion just as blocked as any other, yet its roots place it not within a western capitalism that seeks to pool resources for the few, but within a revolutionary society looks to return the commons to the people.

We have already seen how Telemachus’ act of piracy — his ‘distance from battle’ and setting sail under the banner of careful thought — exposed Odysseus’ separation as a myth. He was already home in Ithaca and had simply to admit that to himself and live as such. With reference to Peter Rollins’ writing, we have already explored this myth of separation within each of us, and how religions rise to attempt to fill that gap we perceive between us and the gods. However, Rollins goes even further and proposes a radical extension.

The sense of loss between ourself and our mother is itself a loss that has to be lost, because the separation between us was never anything else. In a similar way, on the theological plane, Jesus’ death is not to be seen as some kind of sacrifice that crosses the gap between us and the divine, but an event that explodes the myth that there was even a separation to grieve between us and God in the first place.

There is a dramatic visual expression of this at the moment of Jesus’ death. As he breathes his last, the curtain in the Jewish temple ripped from top to bottom. This curtain separated off ‘the holy of holies’ — the very place where God’s presence was said by the Jews to dwell — so this tearing open of that material expression of separation was a radical enactment of the destruction of the barrier between humanity and God. Traditionally, the ripping of the curtain has been taken to symbolise how, through Jesus’ death, God was able to ‘escape’ this enclosed space and begin to dwell amongst his people without the need for priests or religious structures. But there is a more radical interpretation: the rent curtain can be seen as Jesus ‘unmasking’ his father God and exposing the reality behind the screen. In this reading, it is not that God was there and escaped; rather, the pulling back of this veil that separated common humanity from the ‘holy of holies’ exposed as false the myth that God had even been there behind the curtain all along.

In rather beautiful symmetry this potent image of ripped fabric carried through into the radical actions of protesting sailors. Inspired by pirate rebellions, sailors on merchant vessels refused to be brutalised any longer and, in protest against the powers and structures that had done so much violence against them, ripped the sails of their ships from top to bottom. This ‘striking’ of the sails, from which the idea of a strike as industrial dispute comes, was an exposure of the essential emptiness of the merchants’ threats. The ripped fabric billowed freely and the ship would not move. For all their pomp and power, the merchants and princes were nothing without the labour of working men, and the striking of the sails was a powerful symbol of the puncturing of the pretence that it was ever otherwise.

In a similar way, with the ripping of the temple curtain, the ‘bogey man’ God that the High Priests had espoused was punctured and deflated. They had preached a religion of an angry God who needed placating with sacrifices, and was so intolerant that only the most holy, perfect priest could enter this special place once a year. This amounted to enormous social control: the priests could demand certain behaviours of the people, and levy taxes and other ‘offerings’ from them too in return for promises of forgiveness.

Jesus’ willingness to face up to every threat and scare tactic that this empire can throw at him — eventually leading to him being handed over and killed — leads to the ripping open of that empire’s desolate heart. And yet, even as they do their worst and kill him, the threatened apocalypse does not come. The curtain is torn, the light pours in and the Emperor’s inner sanctum is exposed as empty. Just as we see at the end of the story of The Wizard of Oz, there was no emperor after all, just a system by which his myth allowed those in power to remain so.

We have seen how the Jolly Roger was a standard raised that announced that those who sailed under it embraced the Empire and powers of this world as dead. Now, in this pirated view of Jesus’ cross, we can see it as a standard raised that those who live by it embrace the death of religion too. The crucifixion explodes the myth of an angry, hidden, divine other. God is unmasked, yet this is no cause for grief.

Odysseus was free to go home, because the gods that he thought were binding him were no more than the ties he himself had made. And for those first Christians, this revelation of the death of religion brought an extraordinary new way of being that was no longer bound to the temples and idols of angry divinities. Freed from religion, they became agents of a radical new way of being that lived beyond the old distinctions of class, ethnicity and gender. In parallel with the liberal and inclusive pirate societies that grew up centuries later, early Christians believed that ‘there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female…’[8] They took a similarly pirate view of property in that, in contrast to the enclosed personal fortunes of the few, they preached that in their community ‘they held everything in common…’[9]

The religious authorities had preached (and still do) that life without an over-bearing God would lead to unbridled hedonism and the destruction of community. This is the same fear-filled message that was used to brand pirates as ‘villains of all nations’ — for if they lived outside of the authority of the church and state, then there would be no end to their depravity. In a similar way, early Christians were described in grotesque terms, and St Paul understood these accusations in his letters when he wrote that the Apostles had become ‘the scum of the earth, the garbage of the whole world.’[10]

The message of the powerful has always been that without a ‘big other’ things would fall apart — best summarised in Dostoevsky’s maxim that ‘if God doesn’t exist, everything is permitted.’[11] What pirates and these early Christian communities showed was that not only was this false, but that the opposite was true: it was in the name of omnipotent figures — Gods and monarchs — that endless violence and injustice had been done. Going to Golgotha, raising the Jolly Roger, living as if these deities were dead, released humanity to live as responsible for themselves and each other, rather than abdicated blame and responsibility for their actions onto a higher being.

We return again to Salvatore Maddi’s conclusion:

‘There are definite signs indicating when the psychotherapeutic process is complete…The capstone is when the client assumes responsibility for their own lives, despite all the outside pressures that can easily be blamed for what happens to them…’[12]

This assumption of responsibility, this self-determination, lies right at the heart of the pirate spirit. The Atlantic pirates would no longer tolerate being alienated from the fruits of their labour, and those who rose up in the Midland Revolt wanted to resist the removal of responsibility for the land to some private owner. Maddi is talking here about the process of stepping out from under the enclosure of parental or familial pressure, but we can also see now how equally relevant it is for the move away from a life blocked by the ‘big other’ of religion too. The early Christians, like the Atlantic pirates, rejected the religious viewpoint that bound people to obedience and supplication and set them in their place in the order of things. By living as though this violent and angry God were dead, they re-released the radical message of the universal worth of all human beings, and thus were able to take full responsibility for their own actions. Far from being the rebels and retrogrades, the villains of all nations and scum of the whole earth, in pirates and early Christianity we see models of psychologically mature communities, living without separation anxieties and thus, like Odysseus at the end of his travels, finally able to feel at home in the world.

Aliens and Tenants

The most obvious outworking of these beliefs was an acceptance of all, regardless of gender, ethnicity or social status, and a release of property back into the commons. This was fully in keeping with the message that Jesus had preached. His reading in the synagogue from the prophet Isaiah was one of his first public proclamations, and it in turn referenced verses from the early law book of the Old Testament, Leviticus. It is here that the principle of the ‘jubilee year’ is outlined: after every 7 cycles of 7 years, the land that the Israelites inhabited should be ‘reset.’ As the land had originally been partitioned fairly according to the families of the various tribes, this meant a regular fair redistribution of property rights. As God decrees in Leviticus 25:23, ‘the land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you are but aliens and my tenants.’ In other words, there should be no permanent private enclosure. The economic separations that had been created should be torn down.

The principle went further than this, however. Beyond this period return of land to its original owners, debts were also cancelled, slaves and bonded servants were set free, the land was left fallow for it to recover and no work was to be done. A life of leisure and liberty, and the return of the commons to the people — the jubilee is truly pirate in its vision. It a principle that Jesus chose to support in the opening words of his ministry, and one that the early Christians gathered around as they celebrated the death of the religions that had bound them.

Tragically — or inevitably — this radical kernel of Christianity was soon lost. Embraced by the Roman Empire as its official religion, within a few hundred years Christianity had become just as oppressive and legalistic as the Judaism its founder had subverted; by the time we reached 18th century England, the Christian religion was similarly synonymous with rich, powerful elites and self-serving clergy. Yet a radical element always remained, and the English revolutionaries of Captain Pouch’s day employed the same jubilee teaching that Jesus and the early Christians had practiced as a way of campaigning against land expropriation. The Newcastle radical Thomas Spence penned a hymn to the tune of ‘God Save the King’ which ran:

Hark! How the trumpet’s sound

Proclaims the land around

The Jubilee!

The sceptre now is broke,

Which with continual stroke,

The nations smote!

Hell from beneath doth rise,

To meet thy lofty eyes,

From the most pompous size,

Now brought to nought!

Since then this Jubilee

Sets all at Liberty

Let us be glad.

Behold each man return

To his possession

No more like drones to mourn

By landlords sad![13]

His lyrics were sung in taverns and hawked in pamphlets, even etched on walls, and by 1802 the Prime Minister was informed that barely a wall in London existed that did not have ‘Spence’s Plan and Full Bellies’ chalked on it. Men did not want to be idle; they simply didn’t want to be factory drones who were alienated from the rewards of their work. Their response to the capitalist mode of organising factory labour was to resurrect the ancient idea of the jubilee. It was similarly to this radical view of economics and social restructuring that the early Christian abolitionists turned when trying to rid the then developing world of the scourge of slavery — the separation of a person from their labour taken to the worst extreme. Robert Wedderburn, born in Jamaica in 1762 of a slave mother and slave-master father, mined the jubilee passages in particular when rousing up Jamaicans to revolt. Addressing Jamaican slaves, he knew that land ownership was central:

‘Without [the land] freedom is not worth possessing; for if you once give up the possession of your lands, your oppressors will have power to starve you to death, through making laws for their own accommodation; which will force you to commit crimes in order to obtain subsistence.’[14]

He also knew that this had been the experience of the poor thrown from enclosed land in England, which was likened to a man stealing another’s handkerchief, and then employing him to embroider the new owner’s initials on it. It was a quip nicely made, but one that rather trivialised the horrific reality of people being hung for protesting land enclosures and the high price of bread.

Though the jubilee principles were set out plainly to the Israelites, it appears that they were not followed properly, if at all. What is clear is that the land-owning father of the prodigal son story has a wealthy estate — which likely meant enclosed lands and hired, unlanded labourers to work it. He intends on handing this on to his sons, as he probably was handed it by his own father. The conservative message of the parable spoke of continuity in land ownership, not periodic redistribution — and the interpretation I have offered concerning this highlights this lack of sharing as a tragedy.

I can find no evidence that the Christians of the 18th Century understood this dark reading of the parable, but they certainly understood that the annual ritual of the stamping down of the boundaries was tied in heavily to this principle of jubilee, this symbolic return of the land to God — reaffirming it not as the landlord’s private property, but as a common place in the public domain from which all could benefit.

It is a shame that they didn’t, for taking this reading along with the psychological insights we now have into The Odyssey, we can see that the jubilee is also a regular act of remembrance not that the land belongs to some God from whom we are separated — for this separation is in fact a myth. Instead, it belongs to us all, in common, and when this commons comes under threat pirates — young heretics caring nothing for death or property or separations between sacred and profane — rise up to do their work of unblocking.

Or, at least, some do. For, as the story of the prodigal son teaches us, not all who sail out as pirates contribute to the strengthening of the commons. Some who begin as pirates but fail to follow through on their actions actually end up strengthening the empires of enclosure, and taking them on to another generation of oppression. Their selfish desires for wealth end up overriding the longing for justice that took them ‘on the account.’

This is the classic story of the young music star, sampling and borrowing at will, raging against the structures that hold him back…who then slams eternal copyrights all over his work, and pursues other samplists with packs of lawyers.

It is the classic story of the freedom fighter turned tyrant — one that has played out in Cuba and China… and, one fears, will play out again in parts of the Arab world following the uprisings ignited by Mohamed Bouazizi.

And it is also the story of religions, so often begun by young idealistic pirates like Jesus or Mohammed — rebels convicted as heretics by the establishment — who break down the old religious enclosures around them and lead a group of disciples into a new place of freedom… who then, usually after the death of the founder, then go on to build more walls and enclosures, and commit more acts of barbarism as they protect their ‘special’ status. And so the Christian church moves from Peter saying to a beggar in the courts of the temple ‘silver and gold have I none…’ to the Pope — Peter’s direct descendent, according to Catholics, who lives in the gilded opulence of the Vatican, sending out papal bull to control the lives of the faithful. If the prodigal son is the failed pirate individual, then religion is the failed pirate state: it is Libertatia turned Alcatraz.

This needs to be our note of caution then, for no matter how much we love pirates, and laud them for their brave acts beating the bounds, they remain ambiguous figures, violent, sometimes selfish, sometimes deeply flawed, often moving beyond the initial embrace of death to seek eternal significance. Beneath their fine clothes they, like all of us, wear the human dress. Not all of them will follow the fight through to liberty. Not all of them will lead us home again.

Jump to Chapter 7

[1] The Odyssey, Book 9, 408-411; 461-463 (Penguin Edition, 1996, translated by Robert Fagles)

[2] Rollins, P., The Idolatry of God, (forthcoming)

[3] The Odyssey, Book 16, 215 — 217 (Penguin Edition, 1996, translated by Robert Fagles)

[4] Luke 15:32

[5] Luke 16:9

[6] Redicker, M., Villains Of All Nations, Beacon Press, 2004, p 125

[7] Žižek, S., and Milbank, J., The Monstrosity of Christ — Paradox or Dialectic?, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2009, p. 81

[8] Galatians 3:28

[9] Acts 2:44

[10] 1 Corinthians 4:13

[11] Dostoevsky, Fyodor, The Brothers Karamazov, (Part IV, Book XI, Chapter 4.)

[12] Maddi, S., The Quest for Human Meaning, London, Routledge, 1998, p 23

[13] Linebaugh, P., The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Verso, 2000, p 292

[14] Redicker, M., Villains Of All Nations, Beacon Press, 2004, p 314