Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

Zeus nodded. These two hardly needed to speak to each other. When the three brothers — Zeus, Hades, and Poseidon — had first divided the spoils, Zeus had been lucky: he had drawn the lot of life within the light. Poseidon had retreated beneath the waves, Hades underground. But how long could such a sharp division last? Just as Zeus sometimes meddled among the dead and Poseidon sometimes forayed forth on earth, so one day — it was inevitable — Hades would come up to Olympus to ask Zeus for a living creature. Hades reminded Zeus that they were closely related, even if they never saw each other, and now the bond between them would be closer still. He wanted to carry off a woman too, the way he so often saw his brothers doing when he looked up from his home beneath the earth. Hadn’t they decided, before drawing lots for the world, that they should think of themselves as equals? Well, for the moment it was mostly Zeus and Poseidon rampaging over their playground, the earth. Hades never appeared: he just welcomed the shades of the dead into his immense and gloomy inn. Yet he did have the most impetuous horses in the world. What were they waiting for, drumming their hooves behind the palace gates, if not abduction? As far as earth was concerned, the brothers should have equal rights in at least one thing: this business of carrying off women. And, whereas Zeus and Poseidon always thought of women in the plural, Hades would be satisfied with a single abduction. For him, he added with that irony no one would ever equal, a single woman was quite enough. He paused. Then he explained: the girl he wanted must be the Girl: Kore. He wanted her to sit on the throne of the dead, forever.

Hades disappeared, leaving Zeus alone on Olympus. And now Zeus began to think of the past, of that part of the past that only he among the Twelve knew about, that part that always echoed in his mind whenever some event occurred that was pregnant with the future. Hades’ visit had been one of those events, perhaps the most momentous, although no one knew that as yet, and few would realize it for thousands of years.

Zeus had been born into a world already old, dangerous, and full of divine beings. In his life he had performed only one exploit truly worthy of the name of Living Being for every living being. He was still hidden in Night’s cave. Night was the wet nurse of the gods; her very substance was ambrosia. She advised Zeus to swallow up Phanes, the Protogonos, firstborn of the sovereigns of the world, and then to swallow the other gods and goddesses born from him, and the universe too. Thus gods, goddesses, earth and starry splendor, Ocean, rivers, and the deep cavern of the underworld all wound up in Zeus’s sacred belly, which now contained everything that had been and ever would be.

Everything grew together inside him, clutching his innards as a bat clutches to a tree or a bloodsucker to flesh. Then Zeus, who had been just another of the Titans’ children, became, alone, the beginning, the middle, and the end. He was male, but he was also an immortal Nymph. Then, in his overflowing solitude, he saw the life that had come before his birth as a child of Kronos, the father who had immediately threatened him and wanted to swallow him up. And he understood why his father had been so fierce. In the end, Kronos had only tried to do what Zeus alone had now succeeded in doing. But everything seemed luminous and clear to him now, because everything was in him. With amazement he realized he had become the only one. He lived in a state of perfect wakefulness. He went back to the times preceding his father, Kronos, further and further back, until he reached a point that was furthest, because it had been the first.

Space no longer existed. In its place was a convex surface clad with thousands upon thousands of scales. It extended beyond anything the eye could see. Looking downward along the scales, he realized that they were attached to other scales, the same color, interwoven with them in knot after knot, each one tighter than the one before. The eye became confused, could no longer tell which of the two coiling bodies the scales belonged to. As he looked up again, toward the heads of the two knotted snakes, the body of the first snake rose, and its scales merged into something that no longer partook of the nature of a snake: it was the face of a god, the first face to reveal what a god’s face was, and on either side of it were two other huge heads, one a lion and one a bull, while from the shoulders opened immense, airy wings. The white arm of a woman was twined to the arm of the god, just as below the tails of the two snakes were knotted together. The woman’s face gazed steadily at the god’s, while with her other arm, behind which trembled an immense wing, she stretched out toward the farthest extremity of everything: and where the tips of her fingernails reached, there Everything ended. They were a royal and motionless couple: they were Time-Without-Age and Ananke.

From the coitus hidden in the knot of their interwoven bodies, Ether, Chaos, and Night were born. A shadowy vapor lay over the two winged snakes. Time-Without-Age hardened this gloomy fog into a shell that gradually took on an oblong shape. And, as it did so, a light spread from the shell, fluttering in the void like a white tunic or a shred of mist. Then, breaking away from Ananke, the snake wrapped himself around this luminous egg. Did he mean to crush it?

Finally the shape split open. Out poured a radiant light. Appearance itself appeared. You couldn’t help but be invaded by light, but you couldn’t make out the figure it came from. Only Night saw him: four eyes and four horns, golden wings, the heads of a ram, a bull, and a lion, and a snake spread across a young and human body, a phallus and a vagina, hooves. Having broken the shell, the father snake wound himself around his son’s body. Above, the father’s head looked down on his son; beneath, a boy’s fine face looked into the light emanating from his own body. It was Phanes, the Protogonos, firstborn of the world of appearance, the “key to the mind.”

Phanes’ life was like no other life since. Alone in the light, “he grazed in his breast.” He didn’t need to look at anything but the light, because everything was in him. Copulating with himself, he impregnated his own sacred belly. He gave birth to another snake, Echidna, with a splendid woman’s face framed by a vast head of hair. From her sweet-smelling cheeks, from the incessant flashing of her eyes, she emanated violence. Speckled scales, like the waves of a swollen sea, stretched right up to her soft, white breasts. Then Phanes begot Night, who had already existed before him. But Phanes had to beget her just the same, because he was everything. He made Night his concubine. He was a guest in her cave. Other children were born: Uranus and Ge. Little by little, with the light constantly pouring from the top of his head, Phanes made the places where gods and men would live. Things were ushered into the world of appearance.

Time passed, and Phanes stayed in the cave, scepter in hand. The world’s first king, he didn’t want to reign. He handed the scepter to Night. Then went off alone. Now that the cosmos existed, Phanes rode his coach and horses up onto the back of the sky. And there he stayed for a long time, alone. Occasionally he would ride across the crest of the world. But no one could see him. Inside the heavens, the beings multiplied.

Ever since Phanes had withdrawn to the place farthest from life on earth — Zeus reflected — events had begun to resemble one another. Time and again there would be a king, children, enemies, women who helped and betrayed. He remembered the never-ending coitus of Uranus and Ge, their children chased back into their mother’s womb. And Ge, who, deep inside herself, felt she was suffocating and brooded on her bitterness. He remembered the serrated sickle, made of a white, unyielding metal, in the hands of their son Kronos, who would later become his father, and Uranus’s testicles sinking into the sea. Circles formed on the surface of the water, and one of them was edged with white foam. From the middle rose Aphrodite, together with her first serving maids, Apate and Zelos, Deceit and Rivalry. Uranus had been a cruel father, and Kronos, who took his place, was likewise cruel. But his mind was supple and powerful. Kronos possessed the measures of the cosmos.