“They chose some girls as water bearers: water was brought to sharpen the ax and the knife. When they had been sharpened, one of them handed over the ax, another struck the ox, and another cut its throat; then some others skinned it and they all tasted it. When all this had been done, they sewed up the ox’s hide, filled it with hay, and put the animal back on its feet in the same position it had been in when it was alive. They even yoked it to a plow as if it were working. Then they held a trial to judge the killing, and all those who had taken part were called upon to justify themselves. The girls who’d brought the water pointed to those who had sharpened the blades as being more guilty than themselves, while those who had sharpened the blades pointed to the person who had held the ax. He pointed to the one who had cut the ox’s throat, and he pointed to the knife. Because the knife had no voice to speak, it was accused of the killing. From that day to this, during the Dipolia held on the Athens Acropolis, an ox is sacrificed in the same way. Having placed bread and other cakes on the bronze table, they walk the chosen oxen around it, and the one that eats the offerings is killed. Those who perform these rites are now divided up into families. All the descendants of he who first struck the ox, Sopatrus, are called boutýpoi (those who strike the ox); the descendants of the person who led the oxen around the offering are called kentriádai (the ones with the goad); and the descendants of the man who cut the ox’s throat are called daitroí (those who celebrate), because of the celebrations that follow the distribution of the meat. Having stuffed the ox’s hide and appeared at the trial, they throw the knife into the sea.”
Those who first laid down the rules of sacrifice were too subtle as theologians to claim that guilt only manifested itself with the killing of a living being: that notion they left to future tribunals who would know only the limited order of men. If it were enough just to abstain from killing, life could indeed become innocent. But guilt resides in the veins—and can only move from one place to another, transform itself, reveal itself, celebrate itself.
The primordial crime is the action that makes something in existence disappear: the act of eating. Guilt is thus obligatory and inextinguishable. And, given that men cannot survive without eating, guilt is woven into their physiology and forever renews itself. But then who is at the origin of the guilt? The ox, the working ox, man’s companion, the ox who one day ate the bread and cakes offered to the gods. That gesture, obtuse and meek, was the first lesion in the realm of the existent, and every later lesion was implicit in it: it was the gesture that steals away something that exists, as Hades stole away Kore. From that gesture, bound together in a single chain, come all the other crimes. Guilt is so deeply embedded in existence that all it took to usher it into consciousness was for a farm animal to stretch out its snout toward a country pie.
But whom do we find at the other end of the chain of guilt? The knife that “has no voice” (áphonos). The only two things condemned, the ox and the knife, cannot speak. He who cannot speak is condemned at once. He who can speak—and is guilty just the same—lives under a perpetually suspended sentence. Between them, between one end of the chain and the other, the ox and the knife, are all the rest of us: the charming water bearers, who remind us of the fifty Danaids, spurts of lymph and death; the cold instigators who use their goads to point the ox to the cake so as to have it unknowingly make the guilty gesture that will single it out as the victim; then those who spend their lives absorbed in sharpening the sacrificial axes and knives; those who are happy just to offer the ax to whoever is going to strike the blow; he who brings down the ax, as the women break the silence with a shrill cry (ololug) of joy and horror; those who cut the animal’s throat after it is down, because if blood doesn’t flow the death is pointless, the animal can’t be eaten; those who use the same knife that slit the throat to divide the meat into portions for each and every citizen; and, last of all, those who watch the killing and eat the animal’s flesh: everybody.
The Delphic priests were guardians not only of the lógos but also of the doctrine of sacrifice. When the Athenians consulted the oracle after Sopatrus’s cruel gesture, the Pythia answered with the brutal words that would make it possible to found the city, to found any city, because cities can only be founded on guilt. Eat the victim’s flesh and don’t be squeamish: with these words civilization was born. All the rest is honey and acorns, the Orphic life, nostalgia for a pure beginning. But not even that life could ignore the fact that the world is waste and dissipation. On the bronze table lies the bread. Then it is gone. Absence, sudden and irreversible absence, the sign that dissipation is at work. And each person, every being—the dumb beast of burden and the man who kills and the metal blade likewise—all play their part in that work. Guilt pervades everything that acts. Everything will be judged. But not so that, after the judgment, the guilt can be put aside, dissolved. On the contrary, guilt was imposed on us by the gods, even before the law.
The Pythia offers the Athenians an enigma composed of five fragments: the Stranger must be called back from exile; the crime must be repeated, and hence exalted; the killer must be judged; the victim must be “put back on its feet, in the course of the same sacrifice in which it was killed”; the men must eat the victim’s flesh and not be squeamish about it. Only if all five of these conditions are simultaneously met, then “things might improve.” The Pythia’s answer bristles with contradictions. The Stranger is guilty but must be called back from exile; indeed, he is the essential element in any possible salvation. The ox is guilty, because it ate the offerings made to the gods, but it must reappear, set on its feet once more and stuffed with straw. (And for those moderns who tend to be overamenable to any possibility of resurrection, it should be said that the stuffed ox beneath the bloody hide is not a resurrected ox: it is merely the ox present, “in the same position it was in when it was alive,” brought back, that is, to remind us that the true offense, even before death, is disappearance.) Everybody must be committed to trial for the killing of the ox, but everybody must also, indeed immediately, eat its meat, and “without being squeamish.”
What is all this about? The gods aren’t content to foist guilt on man. That wouldn’t be enough, since guilt is part of life anyway. What the gods demand is an awareness of guilt. And this can only be achieved through sacrifice. On its own the law will serve to punish guilt but certainly not to make us aware of it, which is far more important. Sacrifice is the cosmic machine that raises our guilty lives to consciousness. After Sopatrus brought down the ax on the ox’s nape, he woke up from his rage as though from a dream and “became aware of [sunephrónēsen] what he had done.” He threw down the ax and fled far away. But Sopatrus was acting alone at this point; his was the action of one individual. And he was fainthearted. He buried the ox instead of eating it. His guilt took on no resonance; he didn’t go all the way.
The Pythia demanded that Sopatrus’s ax go on striking for all time and that everyone, the whole community, the pólis and every single member of it, participate in that act and be aware of committing it. Nor was that all: the community must also welcome Sopatrus into its midst—Sopatrus the Stranger—and welcome him precisely because he had committed that act, that furious slaying of a working ox that had gobbled up the bread so that it disappeared in its mouth.
Kore and Demeter are a dual being, even in name (Deó). In a dazzling transposition, every gesture made by one corresponds to a gesture of the other. When their stories approach a stasis that would prove fatal—Kore sitting on Hades’ throne in funereal immobility and Demeter sitting on “the stone that does not laugh”—something happens to dispel that rigidity: Kore, distracted by what Hades is saying, eats a pomegranate seed; Demeter, distracted by Baubo’s obscene dance, eats the initiates’ broth like a hungry traveler. It was from these two gestures that the mysteries arose. By accepting and assimilating foods that were neither nectar nor ambrosia, Demeter and Kore shared in that guilt peculiar to men, exposed themselves to that special weakness the gods had always mocked: th
at submission to time that causes living beings to disappear, and at the same time the complicity of those beings with their own destroyer, since man cannot live without himself making something else disappear. The mysteries are the wound that opens in the hitherto intact Olympic epidermis, a wound which then tries in vain to heal itself in ceremony after ceremony. That that wound may never heal is the hope of the initiates.
The palaiòn pénthos, the “ancient grief,” persists undiminished across time and demands that men take some liberating action. Isn’t that what the mysteries are? For we live surrounded, in the invisible air, by wandering avengers who never forget the “ancient contaminations.” It is an Olympian paradox that this oppressive vendetta affects gods as well as men. Thus, when Apollo committed his primordial crime by killing Python, we find this proudest and most distant of gods humbly imitating men, offering libations and going into exile, as would Oedipus one day and Orestes.
When the gods come into contact with guilt, they lower their gaze toward men and begin to copy their gestures so as to free themselves from it. A parallelism thus develops between the way men imitate gods and vice versa. Men, writes Strabo, “imitate the gods chiefly when they are doing good; or rather, when they are happy.” The gods, in contrast, imitate men when they do or suffer evil (and for the Greeks the two things were bound by the same knot: adikeîn, adikeîsthai) or, rather, when they are unhappy. We have evidence of such unhappiness on the part of the gods in “what we hear tell of the gods in the myths and hymns—their abductions, secret wanderings, exile, servitude.” It was precisely with these elements, these precious clues, indeed the only clues to the experiences of the gods on earth, that men composed the mysteries. Here every gesture achieves its maximum density and enjoins us to silence: in the mysteries men repeat the gestures the gods made as they imitated men in order to free themselves from divine guilt. Hence the vertigo of the mysteries. More even than in their happiness, men approach the gods in their celebration of the gestures the gods made when they were unhappy.
For those not initiated in the mysteries, they seem to have to do with the immortality of men; for the initiates, the mysteries are a moment when the gods become tangled with death. “Many things related to death and mourning are to be found mixed together in the initiation ceremonies,” says Plutarch. But that most dangerous turncoat of the pagan world, Clement of Alexandria, is even more precise, indeed brutal: “The mysteries can be summed up in just two words,” he says, “killings and burials.”
It is not the men who pass through the mysteries who are immortal but the mysteries themselves. When, in Smyrna, the public speaker Aelius Aristides hears that a raid by Costobocis has devastated Eleusis, he says: “The battles on sea and the battles on land and the laws and the constitutions and the arrogance and the tongues and all the rest have melted away: only the mysteries remain.”
Pelasgian: thus the Greeks designated the erratic block of their origins. There were Pelasgians on Samothrace: they celebrated mysteries with cranes and pygmies; they were the first to square stones from which young heads and erect phalluses would protrude. There were Pelasgians in Arcadia, Aeolis, Lemnos, Imbros, Argos, Athens. For thousands of years, from Ephorus right through to Klages, scholars have been obsessed by the quest to identify the Pelasgians. But Pelasgian man is elusive. You can never pin anything on him: he is always the mute “neighbor” (pélas), the thing language and history have split away from. Without dwelling on the point, Herodotus remarks that, “being Pelasgian, the Athenians changed their language when they were absorbed into the Greek family.” Thus the Athenians made two claims about themselves: that they were autochthonous, born from the soil, because they were Pelasgian; and at the same time that they had rejected the language of the soil, the lost Pelasgian language, which Herodotus himself already found incomprehensible.
What importance this might have had, Herodotus doesn’t say. But when, as a curious traveler, he arrived in Dodona, this is what the three priestesses of the sanctuary, Promeneia, Timarete, and Nicandra, told him. Long before, at a certain moment in the ancient history of the sanctuary, a group of Pelasgians arrived at Zeus’s oak (but did they call him Zeus? or was he just theós?). They had come to consult the oracle. Hitherto, the Pelasgians had “offered sacrifices of every kind to the gods and prayed to them, but without distinguishing between them with names and titles, because they didn’t know that any such things existed.” Now some sailor or other had come back from Egypt bringing the names of the gods with him. But was it right to use them? And were these unknown names the correct ones? The oak tree told them that the names were right and that it was right to use them. Zeus is the god who allows the other gods to be named. Zeus is the god who allows things to appear.
The story the three priestesses of Dodona told Herodotus is also the fable that ushers in the opposition and superimposition of nómos and phýsis, law (or convention) and nature, and hence the underlying structure of all thought from then on. Only that day, in Dodona, did the Greeks become Greek: if by Greek we mean nothing more than the coexistence of a dark, obscure background, like the rustling of a tree, dedicated to any and every power, with a sound that comes from a foreign land and forever superimposes on that background the sovereign caprice of a name. The Pelasgians went from a mute homage to the gods to an homage in which they evoked those gods with foreign names they knew nothing about. Thus did the Greeks tense their metaphysical bow; such was their style as they raised it to their shoulders.
Zeus was not to have a temple in Dodona, the most ancient of oracles, until the fifth century. The center of the sanctuary was an oak, protected by a circle of tripods. It looked out over a broad, flattish valley. At each side of the valley rose long, rolling hills, hills like so many others, their slopes mottled with green patches that grew thicker and thicker until they formed a solid green carpet at the bottom of the valley. Dodona was not a prominent, strategic, exposed place, like Delphi; nor was it a blissful place, like Olympia. Dodona had no profile, whereas Delphi was nothing but. But Delphi was Apollo. And everything that is not Apollo is an enemy of Apollo. By contrast, Zeus is flat, accepting and welcoming everything.
Zeus has no character, he is the support beneath every character. Just as his statue in Olympia was the support for all the shapes and parasites on it, his place admits of every other place. And his voice, the rustling of the oak, is the closest thing imaginable to undifferentiated sound, a voice that more than any other on earth recalls the sea. Only Zeus is able to transform the flat background of existence into something marvelous. All the other gods have their shapes, their signs, their profiles. Zeus has the background, and the background noise. Zeus is the commonplace supporting the unique. The unique cannot exist without that support. But the support can exist alone. The unique tends to be jealous, because there are things that don’t belong to it. The support tends to be indifferent, because everything rests upon it.
On the small lead plates people would use to consult the oracle at Dodona, we read: “Did Pistus steal the wool from the mattress?” “Eurydamus would like to know where he might find his lost cup.” But, alongside these trivial requests referring to everyday objects, we also find a quite different kind: “Which god should I ask to help me do what I have in mind?” “Peithione would like to know whether he would do well to pray and offer sacrifices to Asclepius.” “Hermone the Corinthian would like to know what god he should invoke to have good children by his wife Cratea.”
In Delphi, people consulted the Pythia to find out what Apollo thought about something. In Dodona, they consulted the oak to have Zeus guide them through the tangle of the gods. Those coming to the oracle weren’t anxious about whether they should make a sacrifice or not. They were anxious because they were afraid of making their sacrifice to the wrong god. And there is nothing as sad as a sacrifice made to the wrong god. So much of our lives is made up of them. It was precisely to avoid mistakes of that kind that people followed the footsteps of the Hyperboreans to Dodona. Like
some supreme post office, Zeus sorted their requests and sent off the supplicants to this or that Olympian or hero, suggesting into which vein of the invisible their offerings should be poured. No matter was too small, no question too big to be put to Zeus. Apollo wove conspiracies with those who came to him, greeted them in a temple crammed with spoils. Zeus resided in the trunk of an oak tree, and from there, with the neutrality of a guide, pointed the way to recovering the lost cup, the way to gaining the favor of the god most suitable for the occasion.
Among the many acacias and poplars, there is only one oak tree left in Dodona, and not a particularly big one at that. But such is Zeus: any old oak tree. Only Zeus can sustain the wonder of normality.
The hymn etched in the stele of Palaikastro describes Zeus as the mégistos koûros, “the greatest of the koûroi.” As though he had only just detached himself from his identical companions, and so become the sovereign, the unique Zeus; as though the god were born from a projection of the initiates’ gaze. They see themselves in the one koûros who steps forward from the ranks of the others. They are the Curetes who danced around the infant Zeus, clashing their shields. Now they are ready to follow him through the mountains, vagabonds and wizards and assayers of metals. On the stele of Palaikastro, Zeus is also invoked as pankrats gánous, “sovereign of the liquid splendor.” But gános is something no one can circumscribe. The Etymologicon Magnum attributes to it the following sequence of meanings: hýdōr chárma phs lípos aug leukótes lampedn: “water joy light fat brilliance whiteness flash.” And then adds these words, ignored for centuries, words that mark the point where, in the waters of the Mediterranean, the essences of Athens and Jerusalem meet: “Gános, to the Cypriots, means paradise (parádeisos).”
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony Page 31
