Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

By this time many beings had spread out across space, both on high and below: the Titans, the Cyclopes, the Hecatoncheires. And Kronos went on generating children, coupling with Rhea. So Zeus was born, just one of many. And, like the others, he ought to have been swallowed up by his father. But Rhea hid him in a cave — and it was then that she took on the second name of Demeter. Of his early infancy, what Zeus remembered most clearly was a din of cymbals coming from the dazzling light at the entrance to the cave, the outline of a woman waving those cymbals about, and the shadows of young warriors dancing and shouting. Then Night, whose cave it was, explained to baby Zeus that he was to become the fifth sovereign of the gods. But Zeus didn’t know who the other four had been. All he knew was that his father was waiting within the light to devour him.

Just as Ge had given the white sickle to her son Kronos so that he could cut off Uranus’s testicles, so it was Night who thought up the trick that allowed Zeus to see off Kronos. It was the male, then, who acted. But only the female had the mêtis , the intelligence that preordains action in the silence of the mind. Night prepared a big feast for Kronos. Numerous serving men and women went back and forth, laden with ambrosia, nectar, and honey. Gratified and solitary, Kronos went on eating his honey, reveling in sensual pleasure. Then he got up, intoxicated, and went to lie down under an oak tree. His face still wore the rapture of a pleasure that knows no end. Zeus, meanwhile, had climbed up into the sky on the back of a goat. Now he approached his father, treading silently. He looked at him and wound a chain around his body. But that was only the beginning of Night’s plan. Zeus must now grab hold of everything wandering about in the world, bind it with a chain of gold, and swallow it. When the skies, the seas, the earth, and the divine beings had disappeared in his belly, it occurred to Zeus that one last exploit remained to be accomplished: he must swallow Phanes. So he climbed onto the world’s back, where Phanes lived alone with his horses. There was no need to hatch a trick this time, because Phanes was absorbed in self-contemplation, and unarmed.

Then, little by little, Zeus vomited everything that had settled in his belly out into the light. Back came the trees and the rivers, the stars and the subterranean fire, the divine beings and the beasts. Everything looked the same as before, yet everything was different. From the grain of dust right up to the immense bodies revolving in the heavens, everything was linked by an invisible chain. Everything appeared to be coated in light, as if born for the first time. But Zeus knew this wasn’t so: through him, on the contrary, everything had been born for the last time.

The sovereign gods suffer from a nostalgia for the state of their forerunner, Phanes. And they try to return to it. Zeus’s nostalgia for Phanes takes the form of the snake. Only Zeus could remember the image of the two intertwined snakes, before the world existed. And Phanes had appeared from among the coils of a snake. After Zeus had expelled the world from within him, he felt the desire to couple with his mother. That desire was prompted by a distant memory. His mother fled, and Zeus chased her tirelessly. In the end, Rhea Demeter turned herself into a snake. So then Zeus became a snake too. He closed on his mother and wrapped his scales around hers in a Heracleotic knot, the same knot two snakes would one day make on Hermes’ staff. It was a violent thing to do, so much so that one ancient commentator tried to demonstrate that the name Rhea Demeter (Deó) came from dēioûn , “to devastate.” But why did the god decide to make that particular knot to rape his mother? Zeus was remembering something and wanted to repeat it. Just as men would one day recall a divine precedent in everything they did, so Zeus recalled those gods before the gods whom he had been able to contemplate when he swallowed Phanes and all his powers.

Zeus repeated the most majestic image he knew, the oldest his memory went back to: the image of Time-Without-Age and Ananke intertwined in the Heracleotic knot before the world was born. So the rape of Rhea Demeter, the model for so many of Zeus’s later adventures, was not a prototype of his own invention but rather a gesture back toward a preexisting past that only Zeus could have known about. To repeat it was a pledge of fidelity. From snake to snake the world went on propagating itself in era after era. Every time Zeus transformed himself into a snake, time’s arrow flew backward, to bury itself in the origin of things. At which the world seemed to hold its breath, listening for that backward movement that marks the passage from one era to another. And so it was when, from the union of Zeus and Rhea Demeter in the form of snakes, Persephone was born, “the girl whose name cannot be uttered,” the unique girl to whom Zeus would transmit the secret of the snake.

At birth, Persephone would have been horrible to anybody, but not to her father, who was the only one able to look at her in her first form. She had two faces, four eyes, and horns that sprouted from her forehead. Neither men nor gods could have understood the glory of Persephone. But Zeus understood it. For, seeing her, he remembered how Phanes had risen to the light. And just as a snake had once wound itself around Phanes’ radiant flesh, so one day Zeus went to his daughter and wrapped her in his coils, once again assuming the form of a snake. It happened in Crete. Rhea Demeter had hidden her daughter in a cave, and there Persephone wove a garment strewn with flowers, working on a loom of stone. The entrance to the cave was guarded by snakes. But another snake, Zeus, put them to sleep by staring into their eyes as he slithered into the cave. And, before Persephone could defend herself, her white skin was tight against the scales of a snake, who licked and dribbled amorously. In the darkness of the cave, Persephone’s horrible body radiated light, just as Phanes’ once had. From that violent coupling Zagreus was born, the first Dionysus.

The Christian Fathers did not believe in the copulation of snake Zeus with Demeter. Their version of events was even more vicious. Clement is brusque and elliptic in his account. But the African Arnobius couldn’t resist the story. He bubbles over with the eloquence of a baroque preacher abandoning himself to delectatio morosa . In his version, Zeus copulates with Demeter not as a snake at all but as a bull. “ Fit ex deo taurus .” From the moment Zeus becomes a bull, Arnobius’s prose takes off: “ Cum in Cererem suam matrem libidinibus improbis atque inconcussis aestuaret … ” Aestuare: a flood spreading out, a fire raging: such is the lust of Zeus. He is a god who tricks his mother by transforming himself into a bull so he can rape her. And that’s when Demeter’s anger flares; that, and not when another son of Kronos carries off her daughter, is when the goddess gets the name Brimo.

So it was after that rape that Demeter first paralyzed both the gods and the world: “ adlegatur deorum universus ordo .” And it was then that Zeus, to placate her, resorted to a cheap trick, not unlike the one men would later use to placate the gods. He chose a ram with big testicles and cut them off. Then he went back to his mother with a sad, repentant look. Pretending they were his own, he tossed the ram’s testicles onto his mother’s lap. The sacrificial substitution, that powerful weapon men would one day use to defend themselves from the gods, was thus invented by Zeus. And Demeter was placated.

Persephone was born in the tenth month. Zeus watched her grow. When she was strong, flourishing, and “swollen with lymph,” he felt an overwhelming desire to do the same thing over again: “ redit ad priores actus .” This time he transforms himself into a snake, wraps his daughter in immense coils, and, gripping her in a ferocious lock, plays with her tenderly and whispers his adoration through their coitus, “ mollissimis ludit atque adulatur amplexibus .” Impregnated with the seed of a bull, Demeter had given birth to a girl. Filled with the seed of Zeus as snake, Persephone gave birth to a bull.