and humankind’s death, finally become clear to him, finally become one.But as the above passage’s metaphoric richness makes apparent, Eiseley’sart/scienceshouldbereadasanattemptto“readtheresults,”andthuscom-prehend the meaning, in autobiographical fashion, of Circe’s admonition—to interpret oracularly the telos of his Odyssey. (Similarly, Eiseley writes inhis Foreword to The Night Country that his books are “the annals of a longand uncompleted running,” written “lest the end come on me unawaresas it does upon all fugitives” [1971, p. xi]).It is not too much to say that the Odyssey was the controlling metaphorfor Eiseley’s own life and for his understanding of human longing as well.James Joyce read twenty four hours in the lives of Leopold and MollyBloom, Stephen Dedalus and Dublin, as a reenactment in modern dress ofthe epic’s basic morphology; Loren Eiseley saw not just his own life butmankind’s as versions of the Odyssey’s mythic tale of a voyage out andback.Amyth,Levi-Strausshastaughtustosee,consistsofallofitsversions.Eiseley’s work, I would like to suggest, may be read as an evolutionaryinterpretation of the Odyssey myth, an interpretation in which both thehuman mind and Eiseley himself function as dual heroes. Eiseley read thestory of the Odyssey as an allegory of the human journey in search of atrue spiritual home, guided by a homing instinct; to him its was but avariant of the story of the Prodigal Son. Both are evolutionary tales. Butin a post-Darwinian world, such a home to him could be only earthly,not transcendent; it had to be attainable within what Darwin—at the endof The Origin of Species—called the “tangled bank” of evolution, or notat all.In an illuminating essay, “The Body and the Earth” the poet WendellBerry (1977) suggested that the Odyssey’s significance for us today is to befound in its celebration of essentially ecological values: in its profound un-derstanding of “marriage and household and the earth” (p. 124). A writerwho has long criticized the unearthly longing of humankind and cele-brated the holiness of place, Berry finds inspiration in its hero’s explicitloyalty to a home: “Odysseus’ far-wandering through the wilderness ofthe sea,” he reminds us, “is not merely the return of a husband; it is a jour-ney home. And a great deal of the power as well as the moral complexityof The Odyssey rises out of the richness of its sense of home” (p. 125). In-deed, Odysseus’ “geographical and moral” journey, Berry suggests, canbe “graphed as a series of diminishing circles centered on one of the postsof the marriage bed. Odysseus makes his way from the periphery towardthat center” (p. 125). He praises the commitment to placedness implicit inthe famous “secret sign”—a marriage bed made from a rooted tree—bywhich Penelope tests and then recognizes her husband’s authenticity. Heasks us to recall that Odysseus had embarked on the final leg of his journey