The Iliad: The Male Totem

Abstract This book offers an interdisciplinary reexamination of Homer's Iliad, using a multilevel conceptual schema that bridges literature, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and natural science (pp. 5, 10). Moving past traditional historical, philological, or purely social interpretations, the author treats the text as a poetic exploration of the male soul and a manifestation of universal, diachronic archetypal structures (pp. 5, 9, 26). The central thesis introduces the "succedaneum theory"—a reductionist framework based on molecular and behavioral neuroscience—to model how primitive mental processes operate via continuous layers of symbolic substitution and degradation (pp. 14, 16, 22). Through close textual analysis of the original ancient Greek, the commentary investigates critical Homeric motifs, symbols (such as night, water, and the fig tree), and recurring behavioral patterns among warriors (pp. 3, 10, 43). Key anthropological concepts like mana, taboo, and fetish are reevaluated alongside the scala totemica, illuminating deep-seated mechanisms such as the ritualistic wear of divine armor and the dynamics of bestial battlefield transformations (pp. 3, 6, 23). Ultimately, this work frames the Iliad not merely as a chronicle of the Trojan War, but as an irrational, dreamlike space that preserves the timeless phyletic drives, aesthetic values, and evolutionary psychological structures governing the primitive male psyche (pp. 26-27, 35).