The Wooden Horse: The Liberation of the Western Mind, from Odysseus to Socrates

The Wooden Horse is a powerful, provocative, and engaging new work—by perhaps the world’s most insightful and acclaimed historian of the ancient world—that establishes the foundation of the Western world’s conceptions of society, philosophy, and poetry by tracing the processes by which consciousness evolved from its roots in the mother cults of Ancient Greece, with its attendant matriarchal mode of thought, to be replaced by a patriarchal world of laws with a religious counterpart in the Olympian gods.

By examining Homer’s great epic poems, The Illiad and The Odyssey—the West’s most comprehensive picture of the heroic age, which documents the fact that the Trojan War stalemate was resolved through strategic thinking (via Odysseus’s invention of the wooden horse) rather than brute physical superiority—Keld Zeruneith explores this fundamental paradigm shift, which constituted nothing less than the liberation of the modern mind.

With close analyses encompassing the poetry, drama, philosophy, and history of the ancient world, Keld Zeruneith casts a new light on our cultural ballast and provides startlingly original insight into the psychological forces behind the genesis of European culture.