Blog: Epic the Musical’s “Ruthlessness” and the Pagan Mindset.

Last year, I became aware of an online musical called Epic by Jorge Revera-Herrans, which is a musical retelling of Homer’s The Odyssey. What sets it apart from other musicals is that it isn’t an actual play but is nine albums of four songs each that focus on different parts of The Odyssey, with the first album (The Troy Saga) focusing on the sack of Troy and Odysseus’s return home and finally ending with The Ithaca Saga, which is about Odysseus finally making it home. I’m currently trying to listen through the entire album in order to do a more in-depth review for you guys, but one of the songs that has stood out to me so far in Epic is “Ruthlessness,” which is the fourth song in The Ocean Saga, in which Poseidon confronts Odysseus for blinding his son, Polyphemus. It’s a good song for many reasons and I can totally understand why it’s probably one of the most popular songs in the entire series, but good composition, voice acting, and singing aside, there’s one main thing that stands out to me about this song, and that’s Poseidon’s philosophy.

As I mentioned before, the backstory of this song is that Odysseus has just escaped Polyphemus’s island and is caught in a storm. Odysseus tells his men to keep sailing towards an island where hopefully they will find either refuge to wait it out or help. However, they realize this is no ordinary island, as it’s the home of the gods of the wind and Odysseus, not seeing much other option but to go there, climbs the mast to ask them for help. Odysseus prays to Aeolus and asks her (because Aeolus is a girl for some reason in this musical) for help, so she gives him a bag of winds, but she and her winions (her helpers) trick some of his crew members into opening the bag, telling them that there’s treasure inside. They open it, the winds are released, and they’re blown through the ocean to the land of the giants but run into Poseidon.

Now we can actually get to the song in question. Poseidon opens up by explaining why he’s so angry at Odysseus. He tells him that because he blinded Polyphemus instead of just killing him, Odysseus must be punished. He even says that “I mean, you totally could have avoided all this/ Had you just killed my son/But no.”

From here, we get the overall message of the song, “Ruthlessness is mercy upon ourselves,” which is repeated constantly, which is the line that I want to dissect, since it’s this line that really encapsulates the pagan mindset. Though it can be agreed on that there’s a place for ruthlessness in certain contexts (for example, had Israel been ruthless in getting rid of Hamas, the war would’ve been ended within a few months), when heard in the context of the rest of the song, what Poseidon is saying is that Odysseus should’ve thought of his own preservation and killed Polyphemus. Poseidon would’ve been happy with that because his son being blind forever seems to be a greater punishment than death. He ignores the fact that Odysseus didn’t want to kill Polyphemus because it had been a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the methods used were to let him live while letting Odysseus and his men escape.

The reason why I say that this is a pagan mindset is because pagan cultures (by which I mean cultures that don’t revere the God of the Bible) do not have a high view of life. Stretching back to the ancient Greeks that this musical is about, your life was determined by your worth to the family. If you were born a girl, were weak, or had a deformity, you would most likely be a victim of infanticide. In the Roman empire, this was such a problem that unwanted babies were just thrown onto trash heaps to either die or be picked up by someone who was willing to raise them. (This also isn’t mentioning things like human sacrifice or gladiator fights.)

In the modern day, we still see this. In countries like India, baby girls are often killed or allowed to die of illness for a myriad of reasons, including quality of life. In the West where we’ve become largely secular, we also see this low view of human life in the form of abortion, which is also often justified with the question of “quality of life.” Many parents who raise children with congenital deformities/disabilities are even ridiculed and mocked online for having the baby in the first place (as in the case of David Wood, who has faced criticism from atheists for having two kids who have major disabilities, one of whom passed away).

This low view of humans results from the core beliefs a pagan mindset. In religions like Hellenism, humans were kind of fun, and the gods viewed them as pets, but didn’t put a very high value on them. Furthermore, given that these gods are often the worst parts of humanity made all-powerful and omnipotent, it makes even more sense that humanity is not worth much in these religions. In religions that believe in reincarnation (like Buddhism and Hinduism), death also isn’t a big issue since the person will just get reincarnated.

Further, in a secular worldview, such as atheism, humans just evolved somehow from the same primordial goo that everything else did. This means that the logical conclusion to that is that humans have no more inherent worth than the fly buzzing around your house. If it wasn’t for empathy (where did that come from?), we could just kill people, and it would be fine. And if you’re weak or disabled, it’s better you die since there’s no worth to you anyway and you’re just more work for everyone else. It’s just natural selection after all.

Thus, the line “Ruthlessness is mercy upon ourselves,” takes a whole new meaning when you see it through that lense. If you’re stoic to the suffering of humans so much so that you’ll kill them and justify it as “It’s for the greater good,” even when it isn’t completely necessary, you have a low view of humanity. You have adopted a pagan mindset.

However, how does this compare to the Christian mindset about life?

Well, the Christian mindset believes that there’s inherent worth in human beings. For starters, we were created in the image of God, reflecting some of His attributes like creativity, logic, moral agency, etc. For another thing, God cared so much for humanity that He became man as Christ. Thus, Christians realize that humans are valuable, even if they are flawed, which is one reason why mercy is seen as a virtue in Christianity. This mindset was what drove early Christians to perform acts of charity, to adopt unwanted children, to be good citizens, etc. so much so that several Roman historians and politicians spoke on it. Today, we still see this in how many hospitals are named after saints and Biblical landmarks, how many Christians adopt children, how much of the pro-life movement is Christian, etc.

Until next time,

M.J.