In Sunday night's Westworld episode, "Riddle of the Sphinx," viewers got closer to understanding the true purpose of Westworld and the Delos corporation. Turns out, it's what humans have been after for as long as we've been around: immortality.

Viewers arrive at this revelation through the plot of James Delos, the Delos CEO before Ed Harris' William/Man In Black takes over. In S2E2, we learned that James Delos was dying. And since he's died, his son in law/protege William has apparently been using him as the guinea pig for reincarnation in an artificial body. In "Sphinx," viewers see the progress of this experiment through three of 159 failed attempts by William to essentially bring back Delos from the dead by imprinting his mind onto a host body.

But the reincarnation doesn't take, and, in the third and final attempt that we see, William (now, the Man in Black), leaves Delos to descend into madness.

That descent is deep. As Elsie and Bernard explore Outpost 12, they find a destroyed room cast in red light. And, around the corner, the man we know to be James Delos riding a stationary bicycle, while peddling backwards.

Journey into night? More like journey into hell! Hooray! Image: HBO

After a struggle, Delos, with his face covered in bleeding, self-inflicted scratches, delivers a cryptic speech. The speech is significant – not just because it's given by the man who financed all of Westworld and is now imprisoned and suffering thanks to a fate of his own design – but also because it contains echoes of some of our greatest legends that inform our understanding of life, death, and creation — or, all the themes of Westworld, too.

Drilling down on "life and death," the show more specifically tackles the question of who has the power to give life. It interrogates morality and expresses skepticism over the quest for self-discovery. All of this is present in Delos' speech.

I'm all the way down now. I can see all the way to the bottom. Would you like to see what I see? They said there were two fathers, one above, one below. They lied. There was only ever the Devil. When you look up from the bottom, it was just his reflection, laughing back down at you.

But embedded within the speech are plenty of allusions. These in particular give texture and context to the mystery of Westworld, and perspective on some of the big questions that this show dares to ask.

Here's a close reading of James Delos' speech. We've teased out as many references to classic literary, mythical, and biblical texts as we could find. But, hey, this is Westworld — who knows what else could be hiding in there.

Went way too deep into the maze. Image: Rachel kraus/mashable

"I'm all the way down now"

This line invokes three texts: Dante, Milton, and Hindu mythology's idea of the "world turtle."

Since we're dealing with talk of the devil, the obvious place to start is Milton's epic, Paradise Lost. Much of the popular imagination of the devil as a cunning adversary of God actually comes from this text, not the Bible. And with his scratched face and red lighting, Delos certainly looks devilish while he delivers the speech.

Going "all the way down" echoes the idea of "the fall," during which Satan attempts to battle and unseat God in Paradise Lost. But, thankfully for Earthlings, he loses, and falls back to hell. The Fall also doubles in meaning in reference to Eve and Adam's "fall" from grace in the garden of Eden, when they eat the fruit of knowledge in their quest for knowledge that doesn't belong to them. Sound familiar? When it comes to Westworld, the reference to the "fall" in Paradise Lost (and the Bible) invokes a failed attempt to take power from God, the creator of life.

Dante's epic "Inferno" also tells the story of the author's journey through the nine circles of hell. Getting "all the way down" means traversing nine different sins of man — most of which viewers can easily find in Westworld. The ninth and lowest circle of hell ("the bottom") is for those in hell for "treachery" and "betrayal." From the original feud between Ford and Arnold, betrayal runs deep in Westworld. Westworld is indeed a hell of its creators' (Arnold, Ford, and Delos) own making.

Finally, "all the way down" invokes the aphorism "it's turtles all the way down." This phrase (whose origin is unclear) refers to the creation myth in Hindu mythology that the world rests on the back of a giant tortoise. The phrase is the philosophical answer to the question of what the world-bearing turtle stands on — more and bigger turtles; as in, something with no beginning. This inclusion implies that chasing creation and immortality is a foolhardy mission. Since we have no way to know how life really began, the quest to re-create it by Delos is futile. There will always be something missing in humans-turned-hosts, like James Delos, which is why the experiment keeps failing.

"Would you like to see what I see?"

What's the deal with this week's episode title, "Riddle of the Sphinx," anyway? It refers to the myth of the Sphinx, that guarded the Greek city of Thebes, and would only allow travelers who could answer her riddle to pass.

In Sophocles' telling of Oedipus Rex, Oedipus enters Thebes in order to specifically avoid his fate — of killing his father, and marrying his mother — that an Oracle has foretold. But answering the Sphinx's riddle ~ironically~ enables him to fulfill his terrible fate, because that's where his real, biological mother lives and is... seeking a husband! Spoiler alert: Oedipus unknowingly marries his mom, and kills the man he later learns is his biological father along the way.

In addition to its riddling tone, Delos' speech invokes this powerful myth about messed up families (hello, Delos!) in other ways. It mentions "two fathers," which overtly refers to God vs. Satan. But it could also invoke Oedipus' two fathers: the one who takes him in, and the one whom he ultimately kills. Additionally, Delos asks Elsie and Bernard if they would like to "see what I see," so the idea of vision, and learning the truth, is crucial to this riddle. Oedipus famously scratches out his own eyes as punishment for what he's done, because he can't bear to see the horror of his actions. Ultimately, blindness is Oedipus' punishment for knowledge. And, crucially, of his own hubris for thinking he could escape his fate.

The Oedipal imagery in Delos' speech refers to the horror that comes from learning that you have made your own bed, and now you have to lie in it. And to the idea that no one can escape their fate; or, in this case, the fate of all humans, which is death.

"It was just his reflection, laughing back down"

The imagery of Delos' realization that Delos himself is the devil, laughing "back down" (and back up, and back down again, and again, and again), ties all these themes, references, and big questions of the show together.

In the Greek myth of Narcissus, a beautiful man (named Narcissus) falls in love with his reflection when he finds it in a pool, and dies wasting away in front of it. It's not hard to see the connection here. James Delos' self absorption causes his own posthumous torture, and reveals himself to be the devil of his own torment.

The endless reflection also gestures to the concept of "infinite regression" once more, with creation as an impenetrable concept humans can't crack.

Realizing that he himself is the devil, and his own creator, alludes to a scene from the finale of Season 1, and a classic painting by Michaelangelo, too. In the scene, Ford explains that Michaelangelo's "The Creation of Adam" was thought to communicate the idea that God gave Adam the gift of life.

God's gift to man? Maybe, not so much. Image: Wikimedia commons

But Ford points out hidden meaning in the painting, suggesting that humans are our own creators.

"It took 500 years for someone to notice something hidden in plain sight: the shape of the human brain," Ford says. "Message being that the divine gift does not come from a higher power. But from our own minds."

This revelation reflects Delos' realization: not only that there is no god, but that there is no devil, either, because we are all our own Satans.

But this implies a curious conclusion: that if we, like Ford, think the gift of consciousness comes from ourselves (and not from something divine or otherwise not replicable by humans), that we are bound to be our own torturers. This is actually consistent with Ford and Arnold's thesis, revealed in the Season 1 finale, that the key to human consciousness is suffering.

Perhaps James Delos' speech, with its allusions, twists, and turns, implies that there's another, better way, than Ford's and Arnold's (and Delos' own). If we don't seek the bottom — the answers, immortality, control — then perhaps we are free to enjoy what's in the middle. Which is the journey to the center of the maze, and not the center itself.

Gelos, the Greek god of laughter. Look familiar? Image: Flickr/theojunior

Bonus Clue: Gelos is the Greek God of laughter. Gelos + Devil = DELOS? Hmmmmm 🤔