The king of the Greeks, Agamemnon, sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia for the promise of victory, before leaving Greece. War is an environment where men are prompted to call on the personified potencies or archetypes, what the Greeks called gods, and pagans and Christian theologians call hypostasis or powers of God.

Consider the psychospiritual environment in which soldiers besieging Troy lived. Daily rituals, prayers and animal and human sacrifices, continuous ceremonies invoking the gods’ assistance or beseeching their protection combined with strenuous daily combat created a hyper-charged psychic environment hospitable to the invocation of, and possession by, the gods. A collective state of mind where the line between the realm of the abstract, imaginary and the material world is indistinct, where the world becomes dreamlike and the gods whisper their secrets in men’s ears.

In Homer, Apollo is described by name and image; the naming activates a corresponding archetype within, and the man is said to be possessed or “filled” with the god; while this is so, a man is capable of godlike feats. We are “made in God's image” and have within us a microcosm the same forces, aspects of our own nascent Unity. When we balance the aspects of God within us by daily prayer and meditation, Judgement and Mercy are reconciled in Christ, and we become shepherds ourselves. What we guard against are the powers and principalities, the unbalanced forces active within us.