The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony Read online

  Attica was soon in the thrall of an extraordinary epidemic of suicides: as in Wedekind’s Germany, where the schoolchildren killed themselves with the coming of spring, in Athens young girls began to hang themselves for no apparent reason. Apollo’s oracle proposed a remedy: they must introduce a ceremony in honor of the peasant’s daughter to be found hanging from a branch of the big tree above the well. In the middle of the ceremony was a swing. Then dolls and masks were hung on trees, to sway back and forth in the wind.

  Meanwhile, Icarius’s murderers had escaped to the island of Ceos. These were the dog days of the year with Sirius ascendant; the island was suffering from a devastating heat wave. Everything had burned up and died. This time Apollo spoke through his son Aristaeus, who was king of the island. Icarius’s murderers must be punished. As soon as they had been killed, a cool northwesterly wind began to blow, the meltemi which makes life possible in Greece and which would reappear every year from then on, along with the dog days.

  From a rock, Ariadne watches Phaedra on her swing. Their mother, Pasiphaë, hangs herself. Ariadne hangs herself. Phaedra hangs herself. Erigone hangs herself. Erigone is not a princess, but it is she who ascends to the heavens as the hanged woman. Her celestial home is the constellation of Virgo. Ariadne is nearby, in the sky, but as Dionysus’s bride. With Erigone we come to the first of the hanged women. And we also come back to the swing. Behind the swing is the image of “the golden swing in the sky,” mentioned in the Rig Veda. Every time the sun approaches the solstices, it risks going out of control; the world trembles; its star may just go on along its trajectory, carried away by its momentum, rather than turning back. And it is precisely here, at the solstice, that we have that curve which forms the golden swing in the sky. Having reached the limit of its oscillation, the sun turns back, as does the Athenian girl on her swing, pushed by a satyr. But, for this to happen, people have to die. Some of the victims are guilty, like Icarius’s murderers. But, before them, we must have a perfectly innocent victim: Erigone. The swinging stops in the perpendicular jerk of the hanged woman.

  The tree where Erigone’s body was to remain hanging is not just large, it is immense: it covers the whole earth, and its branches stretch away among the constellations. In the sky, Erigone holds an ear of corn in her hand. She has rejected a bunch of those grapes that brought death to her father and herself. Icarius’s last words were “The sweet [Dionysus] is Erigone’s enemy.” That hanged orphan reminds us of the death that is not assimilated back into life, the death that wanders about continually in the air, with the spirits of the dead, the dolls and masks hung from a tree.

  Erigone is an Isis flung by the mystical law of inversion to a point exactly opposite that of the celestial queen: in terrestrial terms Erigone represents the total impotence of the poor and vagrant orphan girl. But Isis too had been a beggar in the world when looking for the body of Osiris. In the heavens, Isis and Erigone find themselves together in the same constellation: Virgo. In Sirius they see the dog that helped them: Anubis in the case of Isis, Maera in the case of Erigone. After Osiris’s death, Isis tore out a lock of her hair. Erigone too tore out a lock of her hair after Icarius’s death. Not far from Virgo and from the Dog, we find the locks placed on top of each other in Berenice’s Hair, also known as the Lock, and even Ariadne’s Lock. And Nonnus uses the same word, bótrys, to mean either a lock of hair or a bunch of grapes. Dionysus didn’t let Erigone escape him, even in the heavens. He is there in the gift of mourning.

  Dionysus would arrive in Athens for the Anthesteria with the spirits of the dead, then disappear with them. The big sealed jars were opened, the new wine flowed. They carried it in carts pulled by donkeys to Dionysus’s shrine in the Marshes, and there they worshiped the god. It was an enigmatic place: there were no marshes where the small shrine stood, nor had there ever been any. But the gods inhabit a different world from our own, and the marsh from which Dionysus was supposed to emerge belonged to that world. Farmers, slaves, and the laborers of large landowners all gathered together. They danced and waited for the feast. The shrine opened at sundown and would stay open only for that one day of the year. It was an unclean day. The fresh pitch on the doors of the houses reminded people of the spirits roaming about who would eventually be chased off. All the other shrines were closed, their doors tied tight with ropes. Paralysis seized the very heart of the city.

  In the evening, a trumpet blast marked the beginning of a drinking contest. “The King drinks, the Queen laughs.” But they drank without talking, without singing, without praying. There were hundreds of them, under many roofs, each with his big pitcher. Yet there was the same silence the herald commanded during sacrifices. Even the children had their own tables, their own pitchers, and sat silent. An invisible guest was among them: Orestes, the impure, who had once sought refuge in Athens. Nobody had dared take him into their homes, but nor had anyone dared send him away. Athens loves the guilty. Sitting alone at a table, a pitcher all to himself, the man who had killed his mother drank in silence. And that had been the first day of this feast, the Choes. Wine and blood ran together, as they had when Icarius was killed by the shepherds. In opening the big jugs, the worshipers had released not only the wine but also the dead, and now they stalked about disguised with masks. Often they were women: Nymphs or others of Dionysus’s creatures. They asked for food and wine, begging as Erigone had. None of them must be left unsatisfied. When it was over, everybody took their jugs and heather crowns back to Dionysus’s shrine like broken toys. They arrived, staggering in the evening torchlight, as the fourteen dames of honor chosen by the king took their secret oaths over the baskets. Then there was another procession, from the shrine to the house of the king-archon, in the agorá, the marketplace. And there, in the king’s very bed, Dionysus would take the man’s place and possess the queen, the Basilinna. This wasn’t a temple but the house of an important public official, and the Basilinna was not one of the god’s priestesses. For one night Dionysus imposed his presence in the bed of an important citizen. He had arrived in Piraeus that very day, a sailor from far away. His ship had been solemnly hauled as far as the city. Now he was demanding a night of passion, surrounded by secrecy. A still damp prow forced its way through the door of a bedroom in the city center.

  This is Dionysus. He arrives, unexpected, and possesses. There was a considerable scandal when on one occasion the Basilinna happened to be the daughter of a notorious hetaera, and not even an Athenian at that. The mother’s name was Neaera; she had sold her body time and again and all too soon had arranged to sell her daughter’s too, until her husband, a pander and sycophant, managed to marry the girl off to an Athenian from an old family, one of the Coroinids, who later became the king-archon. Thus the god found himself being welcomed by a girl already used to dealing with customers and pimps.

  Summoned by the women of Argos as a bull rising from the sea, Dionysus, of all the gods, is the one who feels most supremely at ease with women. His enemies “used to say that he revealed the religious mysteries and initiations so as to seduce other men’s women.” If the Charites make him a gift, it will be a peplos, a woman’s tunic. Dionysus doesn’t descend on women like a predator, clutch them to his chest, then suddenly let go and disappear. He is constantly in the process of seducing them, because their life forces come together in him. The juice of the vine is his, and likewise the many juices of life. “Sovereign of all that is moist,” Dionysus himself is liquid, a stream that surrounds us. “Mad for the women,” Nonnus, the last poet to celebrate the god, frequently calls him, “mad for the girls.” And with Christian malice Clement of Alexandria speaks of Dionysus as choiropsálēs, “the one who touches the vulva”: the one whose fingers could make it vibrate like the strings of a lyre. The Sicyonians worshiped him as “lord of the female sex.” Dionysus is the only god who doesn’t need to demonstrate his virility, not even in war. When his army sets out for India, it looks like a gaggle of noisy girls.

  Dionysus’s phallus is more hall
ucinogenic than coercive. It is close to a fungus, or a parasite in nature, or to the toxic grass stuffed in the cavity of the thyrsus. It has none of the faithfulness of the farmer’s crop, it won’t stretch out in the plowed furrow where Iasion made love to Demeter, nor does it push its way up amid flourishing harvest fields, but rather in the most intractable woodland. It is a metallic tip concealed beneath innocuous green leaves. It doesn’t intoxicate to promote growth; yet, growth sustains intoxication, as the stem of a goblet holds up the wine. Dionysus is not a useful god who helps weave or knot things together, but a god who loosens and unties. The weavers are his enemies. Yet there comes a moment when the weavers will abandon their looms to dash off after him into the mountains. Dionysus is the river we hear flowing by in the distance, an incessant booming from far away; then one day it rises and floods everything, as if the normal above-water state of things, the sober delimitation of our existence, were but a brief parenthesis overwhelmed in an instant.

  For centuries poets, philosophers, and mythographers recounted and expounded all the many variations of the scene where a goddess is seen while bathing: whether it be Artemis spied on by Actaeon, Athena watched by Tiresias, or Persephone under the all-seeing eyes of Zeus. But it is not until we arrive at the death knells of the pagan world, a century after Constantine, that the poet Nonnus at last reveals what happened before the goddess went off to bathe. For it wasn’t just the noon heat that sent those mythical bodies running to the water. In the case of Semele it was, more than anything else, the need to wash away blood, streams of blood.

  But how did it all begin? Princess Semele was leading her mules along the streets of Thebes, wielding a silver whip. Suddenly she remembered a strange dream from the night before. There was a huge tree and sticking out from among its leaves a big, as yet unripe piece of fruit, covered with a beading of dew. A flash of lightning from above burned up the tree trunk, but the piece of fruit remained untouched. She just glimpsed the wings of a bird snatching the fruit up into the sky. Then high above, tearing through the canvas backdrop of the heavens, a male thigh appeared, and a hand sewed the piece of fruit into the thigh, shutting it away under golden buckles. Then the swelling burst open, and a figure with a man’s body and a bull’s head appeared. Semele knew that she was the tree.

  She told her father about the dream. Cadmus sent for Tiresias. Semele guessed what his answer would be: a sacrifice. Whenever something strange and frightening came up, you killed an animal. But what animal? A bull, said Tiresias. And Semele would have to sacrifice it with her own hands. She lit the fire on the altar herself. She was standing very close to the animal, and when it was killed a jet of blood spurted across her stomach. Touching her plaited hair, she found it was sticky. And looking down she saw her whole tunic was sodden with blood. So she ran, through the cover of the high reeds, toward the river Asopus. A few moments later and the blood was forgotten. She had bathed in this water since earliest childhood and swam with her head up, against the stream, shaking off the night’s terror in the wind.

  Stung by love, Zeus watched Semele swimming from on high. He forgot the earth spread out beneath his feet to stare at that pool of water and the girl swimming. Patiently waiting for their mistress, her mules looked on, and likewise Zeus. The god’s eyes slithered over her wet skin, from toes to bare neck, refraining only from the mysteries of the groin. They lingered over her chest, glistening like armor. The tips of her breasts sent sharp javelins flying into the wound Eros had opened. For a moment Zeus thought he was seeing another princess, Europa, who he had carried off from Sidon. But no, it wasn’t Europa, though there was a blood relation, since Cadmus was Europa’s brother—and above all they shared the same splendor, the same resplendent sheen. In his mind Zeus left the heavens to swim at Semele’s side. He watched the sun impatiently. He wouldn’t be able to go to her bed till nightfall.

  The bars defending the palace of Thebes rose silently in the dark. Zeus stretched out on Semele’s bed in the form of a bull with human limbs. Then he was a panther. Then a young man with vine shoots in his curls. Finally he settled into that most perfect of shapes: the serpent. Zeus prolonged their union like some story without end, a rehearsal of the life of the god about to be generated. The snake slithered over Semele’s trembling body and gently licked her neck. Then, gripping her bust in one of his coils, wrapping her breasts in a scaly sash, he sprinkled her not with poison but with liquid honey. Now the snake was pressing his mouth against Semele’s mouth, a dribble of nectar trickling down onto her lips intoxicated her, and all the while vine leaves were sprouting up on the bed and there was a sound of drums beating in the darkness. The earth laughed. Dionysus was conceived just as Zeus shouted the name with which for centuries he was to be evoked: “Evoe!”

  III

  (photo credit 3.1)

  DELOS WAS A HUMP OF DESERTED ROCK, drifting about the sea like a stalk of asphodel. It was here that Apollo was born, in a place not even wretched slave girls would come to hide their shame. Before Leda, the only creatures to give birth on that godforsaken rock had been the seals. But there was a palm tree, and the mother clutched it, alone, bracing her knees in the thin grass. Then Apollo emerged, and everything turned to gold, from top to bottom. Even the water in the river turned to gold and the leaves on the olive tree likewise. And the gold must have stretched downward into the depths, because it anchored Delos to the seabed. From that day on, the island drifted no more.

  If Olympus differs from every other celestial home, it is thanks to the presence of three unnatural divinities: Apollo, Artemis, Athena. More than mere functions, these imperious custodians of the unique stripped away that thin, shrouding curtain which nature weaves about its forces. The bright enameled surface and the void, the sharp outline, the arrow. These, and not water or earth, are their elements. There is something autistic about Olympus’s unnatural gods. Apollo, Artemis, Athena march forward cloaked in their own auras. They look down at the world when they plan to strike it, but otherwise their eyes are elsewhere, as if gazing at an invisible mirror, where they find their own images detached from all else. When Apollo and Artemis draw their bows to kill, they are serene, abstracted, their eyes steady on the arrow. All around, Niobe’s children lie dying, slumped over rocks, or on the bare earth. The folds of Artemis’s tunic don’t so much as flutter: all her vitality is concentrated in the left arm holding the bow and the right arm reaching behind the shoulder as her fingers select another mortal arrow from her quiver.

  The infant Artemis sat on Zeus’s lap. She knew what she wanted for the future and told her father all her wishes one by one: to remain forever a virgin, to have many names, to rival her brother, to possess a bow and arrow, to carry a torch and wear a tunic with a fringe down to the knee, to hunt wild beasts, to have sixty Oceanides as an escort and twenty Amnisian Nymphs as maids to look after her sandals and dogs, to hold sway over all mountains; she could get by without the cities. As she spoke, she tried, but failed, to grab her father’s beard. Zeus laughed and agreed. He would give her everything she wanted. Artemis left him; she knew where she was headed: first to the dense forests of Crete, then to the ocean. There she chose her sixty Nymphs. They were all nine years old.

  The perennial virginity young Artemis demanded as a first gift from her father Zeus is the indomitable sign of detachment. Copulation, mîxis, means “mingling” with the world. Virgo, the virgin, is an isolated, sovereign sign. Its counterpart, when the divine reaches down to touch the world, is rape. The image of rape establishes the canonical relationship the divine now has with a world matured and softened by sacrifices: contact is still possible, but it is no longer the contact of a shared meal; rather it is the sudden, obsessive invasion that plucks away the flower of thought.

  Man’s relationship with the gods passed through two regimes: first conviviality, then rape. The third regime, the modern one, is that of indifference, but with the implication that the gods have already withdrawn, and, hence, if they are indifferent in our regard,
we can be indifferent as to their existence or otherwise. Such is the peculiar situation of the modern world. But returning to earlier times: there was an age when the gods would sit down alongside mortals, as they did at Cadmus and Harmony’s wedding feast in Thebes. At this point gods and men had no difficulty recognizing each other; sometimes they were even companions in adventure, as were Zeus and Cadmus, when the man proved of vital help to the god. Relative roles in the cosmos were not disputed, since they had already been assigned; hence gods and men met simply to share some feast before returning each to his own business. Then came another phase, during which a god might not be recognized. As a result the god had to assume the role he has never abandoned since, right down to our own times, that of the Unknown Guest, the Stranger. One day the sons of Lycaon, king of Arcadia, invited to their table an unknown laborer who was in fact Zeus. “Eager to know whether they were speaking to a real god, they sacrificed a child and mixed his flesh with that of the sacred victims, thinking that if the stranger was a god he would discover what they had done.” Furious, Zeus pushed over the table. That table was the ecliptic plane, which from that day on would be forever tilted. There followed the most tremendous flood.

  After that banquet, Zeus made only rare appearances as the Unknown Guest. The role passed, for the most part, to other gods. Now, when Zeus chose to tread the earth, his usual manifestation was through rape. This is the sign of the overwhelming power of the divine, of the residual capacity of distant gods to invade mortal minds and bodies. Rape is at once possessing and possession. With the old convivial familiarity between god and man lost, with ceremonial contact through sacrifice impoverished, man’s soul was left exposed to a gusting violence, an amorous persecution, an obsessional goad. Such are the stories of which mythology is woven: they tell how mortal mind and body are still subject to the divine, even when they are no longer seeking it out, even when the ritual approaches to the divine have become confused.