The Symbols of Life

      The Trojan War was precipitated by the abduction of Helen of Troy, the Spartan queen and the most beautiful woman in the world. The rescue of an abducted wife, in some versions an abducted sister, daughter or mother, is a theme found in the myths and folktales of many societies, and features the heroine’s return to life from darkness and death.
     I hope to show that the myths associated with the Trojan War hide a very different meaning other than that of a rescue attempt by a Greek fleet of a thousand ships, a rescue that inspired Homer’s great epic poem the Iliad, and will lead to a remarkable and unexpected conclusion. In addition I will attempt to decode the symbols of life that play an important role in Helen’s adventures, because she is not all that she seems to be. Along the way we will also need to look at a variety of myths, even if at first they appear unrelated to the main subject, because we will find that many are in fact closely linked.