Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad...
To drive the human from the ground of the human. Because, bluntly put, a human grounded in the human could defy them. And madness is the honor of strange gods.
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In the history of pigeons, a species that sort of reveals to city-dwellers how far they've been driven from their own self-possession, as the city transforms the form of a bird into a neurotic, pacing, circling, twitching thing, it apparently has never occurred to a single one of them to fly straight up for as long as they could, just to see what was there. (Or if it has, if there has been the occasional Cortez or Columbus of the species, they vanished, and the habit never caught on.) This is perhaps because a pigeon knows what it is to be a pigeon. An internal map of a relatively modest territory to be traversed at relatively low altitudes is what gives them meaning as themselves, and they would likely think it a negation of their own nature to investigate a high cloud one day.
Perhaps our grounding as ourselves does give us strength and a measure of self-possession. The sorts of things that would likely prove essential at moments of daring attempt. When we dare, we dare as ourselves.
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Another Holy Week. Not to cast oneself up into it, not to honor it as a strange constellation that has suddenly hove into view, but to observe it. As ourselves, in self-possession and recollection of the event. To honestly observe the feast.