Bearers of an opposite perfection, new and unimagined, Apollo and Athena were jealous of the perfection of the undifferentiated. But, in line with the division of the spoils between the sons of Kronos, they couldn’t intervene in the watery realm of Poseidon, nor in the subterranean kingdom of Hades. That left the earth as their playground. And meant they would have to play out their game with the snake. Athena killed Gorgon, who was crowned with snakes. Apollo killed Python, coiled around the spring of Castalia. Gorgon’s snakes stirred in the wind on Athena’s breast. They had become the fringe of the aegis. Python’s teeth and bones were kept in the bronze pot of the tripod, from which the Pythia chanted Apollo’s prophecies. Python’s scales were wrapped around the omphalós, the navel stone. The navel is the point, the only and indispensable point, where the perfect links up with the perfection of the undifferentiated. It is Europa’s foot dipped in the sea.
Two sovereign lines descend from Zeus: that of Dionysus and that of Apollo. Dionysus’s line is more obscure than Apollo’s; only rarely does it emerge from the shadow. Since he is both snake and bull, all history before Zeus is recalled in him and begins again with him. Apollo’s line is the more visible, yet even more secret than Dionysus’s when it comes to Apollo’s transgression against his father. Apollo is neither snake nor bull, but he who kills snake and bull, either loosing off the arrows himself, as with Python at Delphi, or sending his emissary, Theseus, to bury his sword in the Minotaur in Crete or capture the bull in Marathon.
Dionysus and Apollo: one is the weapon, the other uses the weapon. Ever since they appeared, Psyche has been running back and forth into the arms of first one, then the other.
When Hades asked to carry off Kore, Zeus sensed the time had come for a new ring to be added to the knot of the snakes. But this time it wasn’t up to him to act. He would be a consenting witness. The invisible would now reassert its rights over the body of the visible more strictly than before: their dealings with each other, long diluted and mingled together in life on earth, would find a new center of gravity.
Hades was claiming the supremacy of a world that was other: isolated, separate, and silent. But this other world culminated in the flower of the visible, and that flower was Persephone. With her, the secret of the snake, a secret passed on from snake to snake right up to snake Zeus, would now go over to the invisible world, and Zeus himself would have to surrender it if it was to go on functioning. Hades’ visit was prelude to a moment of enormous imbalance, both on Olympus and on earth.
It was a place where dogs would lose their quarry’s trail, so violent was the scent of the flowers. A stream cut deep through the grass of a meadow that rose at the edge to fall sheer in a rocky ravine into the very navel of Sicily. And here, near Henna. Kore was carried off. When the earth split open and Hades’ chariot appeared, drawn by four horses abreast, Kore was looking at a narcissus. She was looking at the act of looking. She was about to pick it. And, at that very moment, she was herself plucked away by the invisible toward the invisible. Kore doesn’t just mean “girl,” but “pupil” too. And the pupil, as Socrates says to Alcibiades, “is the finest part of the eye,” not just because it is “the part which sees” but because it is the place where another person looking will find “the image of himself looking.” And if, as Socrates claims, the Delphic maxim “Know thyself” can be understood only if translated as “Look at thyself,” then the pupil becomes the sole means of self-knowledge. Kore looked at the yellow “prodigy” of the narcissus. But what is it that makes this yellow flower, used at once for the garlands of Eros and of the dead, so marvelous? What sets it apart from the violets, the crocuses, and the hyacinths that made the meadow near Henna so colorful? Narcissus is also the name of a young man who lost himself looking at himself.
Kore, the pupil, was thus on a threshold. She was on the brink of meeting a gaze in which she would have seen herself. She was stretching out her hand to pluck that gaze. But Hades burst upon the scene. And Kore was plucked away by Hades. For a moment, Kore’s eye had to turn away from the narcissus and meet Hades’ eye. The pupil of the Pupil was met by another pupil, in which it saw itself. And that pupil belonged to the world of the invisible.
Somebody heard a cry. But what did that cry mean? Was it just the terror of a young girl being carried off by a stranger? Or was it the cry of an irreversible recognition? Some early poets suggest that Persephone felt a “fatal desire” to be carried off, that she formed a “love pact” with the king of the night, that she shamelessly and willingly exposed herself to the contagion of Hades. Kore saw herself in Hades’ pupil. She recognized, in the eye observing itself, the eye of an invisible other. She recognized that she belonged to that other. At that moment she crossed the threshold she had been about to cross while looking at the narcissus. It was the threshold of Eleusis.
If the pupil is kórè, it follows that the eye par excellence is Hades’. For it was in that eye, as he carried her off, that Kore saw herself reflected. It was then that this girl within the eye became the pupil for us all. As if the eye had only now stormed out on a raid from the kingdom of the dead. Vision was a prey. And the eye pounced from the shadows to capture a girl and shut her away in the underworld palace of the mind.
The meaning of Kore in Hades’ eye is twofold: on the one hand, insofar as Kore sees herself in her abductor’s eye, she discovers reflection, duplication, the moment in which consciousness observes itself: and paradoxically that duplicated gaze is also the ultimate of visions; it can’t be divided up anymore, for every further division would merely be a confirmation of the first. On the other hand, in meeting the pupil, the cavity of vision for the first time welcomes and draws into itself its great desire: the image. For a split second the extremes of the mind are copresent in the eye of an abductor.
What happened in Eleusis was the separation and reunion of the dual goddess Demeter-Kore (Deó), she who sometimes appears as two barely differentiated figures, cloaked in the same mantle. It was the drama of the reflection that detaches itself from the body, from every object, from the earth even—to then be reunited with its origin. But only in certain recurrent moments. Like the eclipses.
With the arrival of Kore, the marvelous passes from the object to the act of looking. At the beginning of her adventure, Kore looks at the narcissus, “that wondrous, radiant flower, awesome to the sight of gods and mortals alike.” At the end, when she returns from the underworld, Kore herself is “a great wonder for gods and mortals alike.” By repeating the same formula, the anonymous author of the Homeric Hymns intended to underline the completion of an irreversible process: the passage to the soul. And the formula alerts us to the fact that the event was a source of amazement not just in the history of men but in the history of the gods too.
When Hades asked his brother Zeus for a living woman, he upset the simple world order that had pertained hitherto: life abounded, was marked and scarred by raiding gods, then consigned to an empty, inert, incorporeal afterlife. Zeus wouldn’t have his mortal mistresses vanish. He would possess them, then abandon them. But Hades wanted Kore as his bride, wanted to have a living person sitting on the throne beside him. We could say that with this demand death aimed to inflict a further outrage on the earth above. But it is precisely now, in its insolence, that death deceives itself. With the abduction of Persephone, death acquires a body, acquires body: in the kingdom of the shades, there is now at least one body, and the body of a flourishing young girl at that.
In the past, few had had the privilege of being led by a god to the Elysian Fields with their bodies still intact. And Hades was defined as that place where there is no body. But now, along with Kore’s body, Eros penetrated the kingdom of the dead. The slender-ankled Persephone was the supple arrow Aphrodite ordered Eros to let fly at Hades when the goddess summoned her son to the black rock of Eryx. The world had reached a point at which the economy of metamorphosis that had sustained it for so long through the period of Zeus’s adventures was no longer enough. Things ha
d lost their primordial fluidity, had hardened into profile, and the game that had once been played out between one shape and another was now reduced to the mere alternation of appearance and disappearance. From now on, it was a question not only of accepting life in a single immutable form but of accepting the certainty that that form would one day disappear without trace. Demeter’s anger is the revolt against this new regime of life. But the goddess didn’t know that at the same moment a new regime of death had also been inaugurated.
When Persephone took her place on Hades’ throne and her scented face peeped out from behind the spiky beard of her partner, when Persephone bit into the pomegranate that grew in the shadow gardens, death underwent a transformation every bit as radical as that which life had undergone when it had been deprived of the girl. The two kingdoms were thrown off balance, each opening up to the other. Hades imposed an absence on earth, imposed a situation where every presence was now enveloped in a far greater cloak of absence. Persephone imposed blood on the dead: not, as in the past, the dark blood of sacrifice, not the blood the dead used to drink so thirstily, but the invisible blood that went on pulsing in her white arms, the blood of someone who is still entirely alive, even in the palace of death.
Dionysus wandered about Greece looking for an entrance to Hades. He wanted to go down to the underworld to bring back his mother, Semele. One day he found himself on the shores of a lake whose water was uncannily still. This was near Lerna, and the lake was called Lake Alcyonius. The water was still as metal. In the silence all around, reeds and marshgrass bowed in the wind. Dionysus saw Prosymnus (or was he called Polymnus?) coming toward him. He asked him the way to Hades. Prosymnus said he would show him, on condition that Dionysus let himself be made love to like a woman. Dionysus promised he would, but only after he had returned from Hades. Together they approached the water. Nothing could have been calmer than that dense surface. But the small lake was bottomless. Try to swim in it and it would suck you down, endlessly. Prosymnus told Dionysus he must dive into that water if he was to get to Hades.
To a man, the ancients kept quiet about what happened at the end of Dionysus’s journey to the underworld. But one of the Fathers of the Church spoke out. With the brutal directness of those early Christians who had previously been initiated in the mysteries, Clement of Alexandria tells how Dionysus sodomized himself. “Dionysus yearned to go down into Hades but did not know the way. A certain Prosymnus promised to show him, but not without a reward [misthós] and the reward he wanted was not a good thing, though good enough for Dionysus; this favor, this reward Prosymnus asked of Dionysus, had to do with the pleasures of Aphrodite. The god agreed to the reward and promised to grant it, if he succeeded in returning from his journey, and he backed up his promise with an oath. Having been told the way, he set out. But when he returned he couldn’t find Prosymnus (who had died while he was away); determined to keep his promise to his lover, Dionysus went to his grave full of amorous desire. He cut a branch from a fig tree that happened to be there and, having fashioned it in the shape of the virile member, pushed it into himself, thus maintaining his promise to the dead man.”
Dionysus wasn’t the only god who’d had to ask a man the way to Hades. When Demeter was searching for Kore, she asked Celeus, king of Eleusis, where she might find her daughter. Celeus pointed her to Hades. As a “reward” [misthós], Demeter gave him the secret of bread, but she also allowed him to possess her body, “illicitly.” It’s not a Father of the Church who gives us the details this time but an obscure scholiast. Gregory of Nazianzus “is ashamed” even to mention “those certain things that Demeter does and submits to.” Gregory had good reason to be scandalized: Demeter is the goddess of the thesmoí, the strictest of laws, and here she is agreeing to give herself athésmōs, “lawlessly,” to a mortal. Then from that union a child would be born, “out of mortal necessity,” as the Orphic hymn later puts it. At this point order has been turned completely on its head. How can Ananke, Necessity, who is more divine than the gods, because she precedes them, become “mortal,” and as such subdue a goddess to herself? The goddess’s humiliation took place in Eleusis—and marked an irreversible turning point in the history of the Olympians. But what had pushed Dionysus and Demeter to that point?
The Eleusinian crisis came about when the Olympians developed a new fascination for death. Zeus gave his daughter Kore to Hades, Demeter gave herself to a mortal. To find out more about death, the gods had to turn to men, death being the one thing men knew rather more about than they did. And, to get help from men, both Dionysus and Demeter had to prostitute themselves. A god surrendering himself to a mortal is like a man surrendering himself to death: every dead man has to bring a coin with him, to pay his way to Hades. Gods don’t use money, so they give their bodies. After all, from the Olympians’ point of view, men are already dead, because death lurks within them.
Just as Persephone let herself be carried off by the king of the dead, so Dionysus ties a fig branch to a gravestone and lets it penetrate him, and Demeter gives herself to the mortal Celeus. The memory of this divine prostitution was buried deep in the mysteries. We would know nothing of it at all were it not for the vindictive zeal of a Father of the Church and the loquacity of a scholiast. But no sooner have those events been disinterred from the silence than all kinds of other authors come running to confirm a complicity between Dionysus and Demeter vis-à-vis their love affairs on the road to Hades.
In Lerna, near the lake where Dionysus was sucked down into the underworld, people worshiped Demeter Prosymna. And Polyhymnia, partner of Polymnus, the other form of the name Prosymnus, was mother to Phylammon, founder of the mysteries of Lerna. Another Polyhymnia is mentioned as being the mother of the young Triptolemus, who scattered Demeter’s corn seeds across the world from his winged chariot. And his father was supposed to be Celeus: meaning that Polyhymnia has taken Demeter’s place as Celeus’s mistress. One of the Nymphs who suckled Dionysus was called Polymnos. And polýymnos was an epithet for Dionysus before coming to mean simply “whore.” Plato throws some light on this last development. First and foremost Polyhymnia is one of the Muses, patron of intimate lyric song. But in the Symposium Plato tells us that Polyhymnia is a fearful Muse, not devoted to “fine love,” at all, “which is of the heavens, and the realm of the Muse Urania,” but to eros pándemos, the love that grants itself to all and sundry. Divine prostitution and lyric song are linked together in the shadows. One of the many who offered hospitality to Demeter during her wanderings was Phytalus, king of the land of the Cephisus, on the road to Eleusis. The procession that went from Athens to Eleusis always stopped to rest here, in a place known as the “Holy Fig,” where a tree Demeter had given to Phytalus still grew under a tiled roof that the Eleusinian priests took care to keep in good repair. The inscription on Phytalus’s tomb read: “Hero and king, here Phytalus received the majestic Demeter, when first she brought forth the first fruit of autumn, which mortal men called the sacred fig.”
Having gone down to the underworld to ransom his mother, Dionysus found himself face to face with Hades, as though looking in a mirror. The eyes staring at him were his own. Hades told him he would let Semele go, but only on condition that Dionysus gave up something very dear to him. Dionysus thought. Then he offered a twig of myrtle to the lord of the invisible. Hades accepted. How was it that that humble plant could settle such a portentous deal? Myrtle was the plant young spouses were crowned with on earth. And Hades couldn’t get enough of spouses and their nuptials. He wanted the kingdom of the dead to be mingled with the realm of eros. Not so as to conquer it or subdue it: in fact Hades agreed to let Zeus’s lover, the mortal Semele, ascend to the heavens, “having been granted permission by the Parcae.” No, what he really wanted was to mix the two kingdoms together. The myrtle was Aphrodite’s plant before it was Dionysus’s, and until this visit to the underworld it had been just the casual, fleeting fragrance of lovemaking. But from now on it would spread the fragrance of another world as well,
the unknown. Thus the myrtle became the plant of both eros and mourning.
Leading his mother by the hand, Dionysus returned to earth at a place that would later be the site of the town of Troezen. Years passed, and now a stadium had been built close to the spot where Dionysus and Semele had climbed up from the underworld. Every day Prince Hippolytus would train there. He was a disciple of Orphism and hence a vegetarian and a virgin. All he knew about sex was what he saw in plays or statues. The son of an Amazon, he didn’t care about becoming an important person in the town. He expressed amazement when people talked about the “sweetness of power.” He worshiped his books, and the intoxicating fumes of “majestic words.” He exercised, he improved himself, and that was all he cared about. His detractors said he practiced a “cult of self.” But in fact, sealed away in its integrity, his “virgin soul” adored only one being, at once outside himself and intimate: the virgin huntress, Artemis. He hunted for her in the forest, served her as a slave, protected her images.
Hippolytus assumed he was alone as he exercised naked in the stadium at dawn. His body was glistening, untouchable. But a woman’s eyes were following his every move. Hidden away in her observation post above the stadium, in the temple of Aphrodite Kataskopia, Aphrodite “who spies from above,” his stepmother, Phaedra, was familiar with every tensing of the young man’s muscles. Alone as Hippolytus was alone, she watched him and burned with desire. Her sweaty hands fidgeted with tender myrtle leaves. Then, when desire became unbearable, she took a brooch from her hair and, eyes following Hippolytus’s every move, pricked holes in the myrtle leaves with the pin of the brooch. As well as “myrtle berry,” mýrton means “clitoris.”
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony Page 21
