Possession and realization in Homeric and Sanskrit epic: Helen, Draupadi, and Sita through a geometry of consciousness

Helen, Draupadi, and Sita each become the object of a transaction they did not authorize: a divine promise, a wager at dice, a forcible abduction. This paper asks whether, in these three epics, gaining possession or control of a woman brings with it an adequate relationship with her and with what she is taken to represent, and, where it does not, what each narrative shows about why. The corpus is the Iliad and Odyssey, the Critical Edition of the Mahabharata, and the Critical Edition of the Valmiki Ramayana, read through a small set of shared questions applied separately to each figure. The comparison is typological and assumes no historical contact between the traditions. The analysis uses a vocabulary drawn from the author's Liberation Mathematics programme (field, vector, node, boundary), treated as a formal metaphor and not as a measuring instrument. Its organizing distinction is between acquisition and realization: custody, control, or a formal claim over a person does not of itself produce recognition, reciprocity, or liberation. The three cases test this distinction in different ways. Helen's case rests most directly on the text, since Iliad 3.383–420 shows her recognizing Aphrodite, resisting her, and yielding under threat. Draupadi's case adds an interpretive analogy, proposed by the author and argued as such, between her anger and Vadavagni, the submarine fire which in the Aurva narrative (Mahabharata 1.169–171) originates in injury and is held in reserve. Its main yield is a distinction between the persistence of a principle and the adequacy of the relationships formed around it. Sita's case separates captivity, release, public ordeal, banishment, and final departure, and declines to treat them as stages of a single path to liberation. The finding is that acquisition fails in all three narratives, but for different reasons and through different institutional and cosmological structures, and that none of the epics reaches liberation in the technical sense within its central action. The limits of the argument are stated: the fire analogy and the reading of Sita as a figure of liberation are interpretations, not textual claims, and the framework organizes the evidence without proving anything about it.