The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

by Roberto Calasso

  Plato’s attitude toward the myths is one that the more lucid of the moderns sometimes achieve. The more obtuse, on the other hand, still argue around the notion of belief, a fatal word when it comes to mythology, as if the credence the ancients lent to the myths had anything to do with the superstitious conviction with which philologists of the age of Wilamowitz believed in the lighting of an electric bulb on their desks. No, Socrates himself cleared up this point shortly before his death: we enter the mythical when we enter the realm of risk, and myth is the enchantment we generate in ourselves at such moments. More than a belief, it is a magical bond that tightens around us. It is a spell the soul casts on itself. “This risk is fine indeed, and what we must somehow do with these things is enchant [epádein] ourselves.” Epádein is the verb that designates the “enchanting song.” “These things,” as Socrates casually puts it, are the fables, the myths.

  In Greece, myth escapes from ritual like a genie from a bottle. Ritual is tied to gesture, and gestures are limited: what else can you do once you’ve burned your offerings, poured your libations, bowed, greased yourself, competed in races, eaten, copulated? But if the stories start to become independent, to develop names and relationships, then one day you realize that they have taken on a life of their own. The Greeks were unique among the peoples of the Mediterranean in not passing on their stories via a priestly authority. They were rambling stories, which is partly why they so easily got mixed up. And the Greeks became so used to hearing the same stories told with different plots that it got to be a perfectly normal thing for them. Nor was there any final authority to turn to for a correct version. Homer was the ultimate name one could evoke: but Homer hadn’t told all the stories.

  This flight of myth from ritual recalled Zeus’s constant adulterous adventures. Through those incursions, he who was father of Dike, and had her sit on the throne on his right hand as personification of Justice and Order, revealed himself to be “against justice” and to harbor “thoughts opposed to order.” The revelation that license was not perennially condemned but might be acceptable, at least if it came from above: that was the gift of the age of Zeus. Divine incursions were an unexpected overflowing of reality. Thus, in contrast to the harsh coercion of ritual, history was a constant overflowing, leaving, visible in its wake, those relics we call characters.

  Much was implicit in the Greek myths that has been lost to us today. When we look at the night sky, our first impression is one of amazement before a random profusion scattered across a dark background. Plato could still recognize “the friezes in the sky.” And he maintained that those friezes were the “most beautiful and exact” images in the visible order. But when we see a sash of fraying white, the Milky Way, girdle of some giantess, we are incapable of perceiving any order, let alone a movement within that order. No, we immediately start to think of distances, of the inconceivable light-years. We have lost the capacity, the optical capacity even, to place myths in the sky. Yet, despite being reduced to just their fragrant rind of stories, we still feel the Greek myths are cohesive and interconnected, right down to the humblest variant, as if we knew why they were so. And we don’t know. A trait of Hermes, or Artemis, or Aphrodite, or Athena forms a part of the figure, as though the pattern of the original material were emerging in the random scatter of the surviving rags.

  We shouldn’t be too concerned about having lost many of the secrets of the myths, although we must learn to sense their absence, the vastness of what remains undeciphered. To be nostalgic would be like wanting to see, on raising our eyes to the sky, seven Sirens, each intoning a different note around each of the seven heavens. Not only do we not see the Sirens but we can’t even make out the heavens anymore. And yet we can still draw that tattered cloth around us, still immerse ourselves in the mutilated stories of the gods. And in the world, as in our minds, the same cloth is still being woven.

  For centuries people have spoken of the Greek myths as of something to be rediscovered, reawoken. The truth is it is the myths that are still out there waiting to wake us and be seen by us, like a tree waiting to greet our newly opened eyes.

  Myths are made up of actions that include their opposites within themselves. The hero kills the monster, but even as he does so we perceive that the opposite is also true: the monster kills the hero. The hero carries off the princess, yet even as he does we perceive that the opposite is also true: the hero deserts the princess. How can we be sure? The variants tell us. They keep the mythical blood in circulation. But let’s imagine that all the variants of a certain myth have been lost, erased by some invisible hand. Would the myth still be the same? Here one arrives at the hairline distinction between myth and every other kind of narrative. Even without its variants, the myth includes its opposite. How do we know? The knowledge intrinsic in the novel tells us so. The novel, a narrative deprived of variants, attempts to recover them by making the single text to which it is entrusted more dense, more detailed. Thus the action of the novel tends, as though toward its paradise, to the inclusion of its opposite, something the myth possesses as of right.

  The mythographer lives in a permanent state of chronological vertigo, which he pretends to want to resolve. But while on the one table he puts generations and dynasties in order, like some old butler who knows the family history better than his masters, you can be sure that on another table the muddle is getting worse and the threads ever more entangled. No mythographer has ever managed to put his material together in a consistent sequence, yet all set out to impose order. In this, they have been faithful to the myth.

  The mythical gesture is a wave which, as it breaks, assumes a shape, the way dice form a number when we toss them. But, as the wave withdraws, the unvanquished complications swell in the undertow, and likewise the muddle and the disorder from which the next mythical gesture will be formed. So myth allows of no system. Indeed, when it first came into being, system itself was no more than a flap on a god’s cloak, a minor bequest of Apollo.

  The Greek myths were stories passed on with variants. The writer—whether it was Pindar or Ovid—rewrote them, in a different way each time, omitting here, adding there. But new variants had to be rare, and unobtrusive. So each writer would build up and thin out the body of the stories. So the myth lived on in literature.

  The sublime author of The Sublime traced literature back to megalophyía, a “greatness of nature,” which sometimes manages to light up a similar nature in the mind of the reader. But how can nature, which “loves to hide,” accept the cumbersome conspicuousness of the rhetorical machine? How escape the ostentatiousness of the téchnē? The chassé-croisé between Nature and Art, which was to generate comment for two millennia and would be condensed in seventeenth-century capitals, was executed in a single sentence way back at the height of classical decadence: “Only then is art perfect, when it looks like nature, while nature strikes home when it conceals art within itself.”

  Perfection, any kind of perfection, always demands some kind of concealment. Without something hiding itself, or remaining hidden, there is no perfection. But how can the writer conceal the obviousness of the word and its figures of speech? With the light. The anonymous author writes: “And how did the rhetorician conceal the trope he was using? It’s clear that he hid it with light itself.” To conceal with light: the Greek specialty. Zeus never stopped using the light to conceal. Which is why the light that comes after the Greek light is of another kind, and much less intense. That other light aims to winkle out what has been hidden. While the Greek light protects it. Allows it to show itself as hidden even in the light of day. And even manages to hide what is evident, made black by the light, the way the rhetorical trope becomes unrecognizable when inundated by splendor and submerged by a “greatness that pours forth from every side.” Such was the conclusion the anonymous author’s literary analysis brought him to. So he rightly claimed that “judgment about literature is the perfect result of great experience.”

  Old and blind, Homer spent the winter on Sa
mos. When May came he went from door to door followed by a swarm of children. They each carried an eiresine, an olive branch with strips of white and purple wool attached and the first fruits of the season. Homer made his rounds submerged in a buzz of nursery rhymes. They spoke of the eiresine, of dry figs and plump bread rolls swinging back and forth, honey and wine. They carried them around, they said, so that the eiresine could “fall asleep, drunk.”

  But why did they have to put this decorated branch to sleep? What kept it so obsessively awake? Followed by the children, Homer went to the houses of the rich Samians. He announced that their doors were about to open of their own accord, that where there was wealth, more wealth would enter, and with it “the blithe spirit and the gift of peace.” The bard sang, the wealthy owner appeared and gave something to the old man and his troop of children. And, even if he gave nothing, it didn’t matter. Homer would be back, like the swallows. But now it was time to leave the island, because he was a wanderer with no fixed home. One day he left and never returned, and on Apollo’s feast days the children of Samos went on acting out his beggar’s song outside the houses of the rich.

  Whenever the dullness of the profane was left behind, whenever life grew more intense in whatever way, through honor or death, victory or sacrifice, marriage or prayer, initiation or possession, purification or mourning, anything and everything that stirred a person and demanded a meaning, the Greeks would celebrate with fluttering strips of wool, white or red for the most part, which they tied around their heads, or arms, or to a branch, the prow of a ship, a statue, an ax, a stone, a cooking pot. The modern eye encounters these woolen strips everywhere in the fragments that have come down to us but doesn’t see them, removes them from the center of attention as mere decorative details, and hence insignificant. To the Greek eye, the opposite was the case: it was those light, fluttering strips of wool that generated meaning, gave it its boundaries, celebrated it. Everything that took place in the soft frame of those woolen strips was different and separate from the rest. What was it those woolen strips, those tassels represented? An excess, a flowing wake that attached itself to a being or thing. And at the same time a tether that bound that being or thing.

  Isidore of Seville could still write, “Vittae dictae sunt, quod vinciant”: “The woolen ties are so called because they bind.” But what was this bond? It was the momentary surfacing of a link in that invisible net which enfolds the world, which descends from heaven to earth, binding the two together and swaying in the breeze. Men wouldn’t be able to bear seeing that net in its entirety all the time: they would get caught in it at once and suffocate. But every time someone achieves or is subjected to—but every achievement is subjection, and every subjection achievement—something that uplifts him and generates intensity and meaning, then the woolen strips, the ties, come out. At one end they are bound tight to the body in a knot that may become a noose. At the other they flutter in the air, keeping us company, escorting us, protecting us. The victorious athlete has woolen strips tied to his arms, his torso, his thighs, and they follow him, waving in the air like a triumphant tangle of snakes. Nike, Victory, always carries a bunch of woolen ties to hand out to her chosen favorites. And the initiate keeps the strip of wool he wore on the day of his initiation and preserves it as a relic his whole life long. But woolen strips were also hung from the horns of sacrificial bulls. The girls tied them there carefully before the ceremony, the way the bride’s mother tied them around wedding torches of hawthorn wood, and relatives hung them from the dead man’s bed.

  All these woolen strips, these vain, winged tassels, were nerves of the nexus rerum, the connection of everything with everything else, which alone gives meaning to life. We live every moment of our lives swathed in those ties, white because white is the color the Olympians like, or red because blood ties us to death, or purple, yellow, and green. But we can’t always see them, indeed we mustn’t, because then we would be paralyzed, trapped. We feel them blowing about us the minute something happens to dispel our apathy, and we become aware of being carried along on a stream that flows toward something unknown. And just sometimes, but very rarely, those ties twist and turn and weave around us, until one loose end becomes knotted to another. Then, very softly, they encompass us, they form a circle, which is the crown, perfection.

  Heavy with nectar, Poros stretched out in Zeus’s garden. He slept, but in his mind thought was thinking: “What is a garden? The ornate splendor of wealth.” Then Aphrodite appeared among beings. She was the daughter of thought. Soon there would be many copies of Aphrodite everywhere. They were demons, each one accompanied by a different Eros, with his buzz of gadflies.

  IX

  (photo credit 9.1)

  ON ARRIVING AT THE PATRAS ACROPOLIS, Pausanias was told the story of the temple of Triklarian Artemis: “It is said that a long time ago there was a priestess of the goddess called Komaithò, a very beautiful girl indeed. It so happened that she fell in love with Melanippus, who excelled his peers in all things, and, above all, was extremely handsome. When Melanippus had conquered the girl’s heart, he asked her father for her hand in marriage. It is natural for the old to oppose the young in many things, and most particularly in matters of love. Thus it was with Melanippus: despite the fact that both he and Komaithò wanted to marry, all they got from both sets of parents was a determined refusal. The unhappy adventures of Melanippus, like those of many others, show how love tends to undermine the law of men and subvert their devotion toward the gods. For, unable to marry, Komaithò and Melanippus slaked the thirst of their passion in the temple of Artemis, then took to using the temple regularly as a nuptial chamber. As a result, Artemis began to wreak her anger on the local inhabitants. The earth ceased to bear fruit, and people contracted strange and fatal diseases. So they fled to consult the oracle at Delphi, where the Pythia laid the blame on Melanippus and Komaithò. The oracle ordered that the lovers be sacrificed to Artemis and that every year the most beautiful young girl and the most handsome young boy be sacrificed to the goddess. Because of this sacrifice, the people dubbed the river near the temple the Merciless. Previously it had had no name. For the young boys and girls who would perish without having committed any crime, and likewise for their families, this was a terrible destiny; but I do believe that for Melanippus and Komaithò it was not a misfortune; only one thing is worth as much as life itself to men: that a love should be successful.”

  This isn’t Romeo and Juliet (where the sacrifice to Triklarian Artemis is repeated once again). It isn’t Shakespeare who offers us this demonstration, at once so drastic and clear-cut, of a love capable of overturning and trampling on the law in obedience to the “so-called Aphrodite of disorder,” which Plato feared. And certainly we wouldn’t find the likes of this story in classical Greece, which always had its misgivings about the assaults of the demon. No, the story appears in the autumn of Greece, in the prose of Pausanias, a learned itinerant commentator of ruins that had already been turned over to pastureland. The plot of the story he tells here recalls an Alexandrian romance. But its meaning is a fugitive of the mysteries. It hints at the hidden tension between hierogamy and sacrifice.

  If being sacrificed was not, or not only, a “misfortune” for Komaithò and Melanippus, that is because they play a part in the ritual right from the beginning, the most hidden part, the part they have the impertinence to reveal. Eros brings into the open what the law must hide yet nevertheless contains within itself: the fact that the temple is a nuptial chamber. Once again we have to go to an Alexandrian, the disillusioned Lucian, to find in writing that the secret chamber of the “Syriac goddess” was called thálamos, the nuptial chamber. Yet that name originated long before Lucian, so long before that people saw no need to mention it in less reckless periods. If hierogamy is the secret of sacrifice, sacrifice will nevertheless serve to hide the fact. It will pile a wall of blood and corpses before the place where Komaithò and Melanippus abandoned themselves to their improbable, “successful love.”

/>   The external façade of the temple imposes the “law of men.” The nuptial interior subverts it. But if the interior becomes the exterior, the world is threatened by the adolescent diable au corps that then invades it. So the world strikes back and strikes to kill. Sacrifice and hierogamy are two forces that presuppose each other, are superimposed over each other and interlocked. They oppose each other, but they also support each other. Each is the aura of the other. The girl who is going to be sacrificed seems to be waiting for her spouse. While the background to erotic pleasure is dark and bloody. Everything that happens is a pendular motion between these two forces. Facing each other, each, in its gaze, reflects the other. Hierogamy tends toward the destruction of the law, whereas sacrifice reconstructs its bloody base. All it takes to upset this equilibrium is a “successful love.” But history makes sure the equilibrium survives.