Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

If the pupil is kórè , it follows that the eye par excellence is Hades’. For it was in that eye, as he carried her off, that Kore saw herself reflected. It was then that this girl within the eye became the pupil for us all. As if the eye had only now stormed out on a raid from the kingdom of the dead. Vision was a prey. And the eye pounced from the shadows to capture a girl and shut her away in the underworld palace of the mind.

The meaning of Kore in Hades’ eye is twofold: on the one hand, insofar as Kore sees herself in her abductor’s eye, she discovers reflection, duplication, the moment in which consciousness observes itself: and paradoxically that duplicated gaze is also the ultimate of visions; it can’t be divided up anymore, for every further division would merely be a confirmation of the first. On the other hand, in meeting the pupil, the cavity of vision for the first time welcomes and draws into itself its great desire: the image. For a split second the extremes of the mind are copresent in the eye of an abductor.

What happened in Eleusis was the separation and reunion of the dual goddess Demeter-Kore (Deó), she who sometimes appears as two barely differentiated figures, cloaked in the same mantle. It was the drama of the reflection that detaches itself from the body, from every object, from the earth even — to then be reunited with its origin. But only in certain recurrent moments. Like the eclipses.

With the arrival of Kore, the marvelous passes from the object to the act of looking. At the beginning of her adventure, Kore looks at the narcissus, “that wondrous, radiant flower, awesome to the sight of gods and mortals alike.” At the end, when she returns from the underworld, Kore herself is “a great wonder for gods and mortals alike.” By repeating the same formula, the anonymous author of the Homeric Hymns intended to underline the completion of an irreversible process: the passage to the soul. And the formula alerts us to the fact that the event was a source of amazement not just in the history of men but in the history of the gods too.

When Hades asked his brother Zeus for a living woman, he upset the simple world order that had pertained hitherto: life abounded, was marked and scarred by raiding gods, then consigned to an empty, inert, incorporeal afterlife. Zeus wouldn’t have his mortal mistresses vanish. He would possess them, then abandon them. But Hades wanted Kore as his bride, wanted to have a living person sitting on the throne beside him. We could say that with this demand death aimed to inflict a further outrage on the earth above. But it is precisely now, in its insolence, that death deceives itself. With the abduction of Persephone, death acquires a body, acquires body: in the kingdom of the shades, there is now at least one body, and the body of a flourishing young girl at that.

In the past, few had had the privilege of being led by a god to the Elysian Fields with their bodies still intact. And Hades was defined as that place where there is no body. But now, along with Kore’s body, Eros penetrated the kingdom of the dead. The slender-ankled Persephone was the supple arrow Aphrodite ordered Eros to let fly at Hades when the goddess summoned her son to the black rock of Eryx. The world had reached a point at which the economy of metamorphosis that had sustained it for so long through the period of Zeus’s adventures was no longer enough. Things had lost their primordial fluidity, had hardened into profile, and the game that had once been played out between one shape and another was now reduced to the mere alternation of appearance and disappearance. From now on, it was a question not only of accepting life in a single immutable form but of accepting the certainty that that form would one day disappear without trace. Demeter’s anger is the revolt against this new regime of life. But the goddess didn’t know that at the same moment a new regime of death had also been inaugurated.

When Persephone took her place on Hades’ throne and her scented face peeped out from behind the spiky beard of her partner, when Persephone bit into the pomegranate that grew in the shadow gardens, death underwent a transformation every bit as radical as that which life had undergone when it had been deprived of the girl. The two kingdoms were thrown off balance, each opening up to the other. Hades imposed an absence on earth, imposed a situation where every presence was now enveloped in a far greater cloak of absence. Persephone imposed blood on the dead: not, as in the past, the dark blood of sacrifice, not the blood the dead used to drink so thirstily, but the invisible blood that went on pulsing in her white arms, the blood of someone who is still entirely alive, even in the palace of death.

Dionysus wandered about Greece looking for an entrance to Hades. He wanted to go down to the underworld to bring back his mother, Semele. One day he found himself on the shores of a lake whose water was uncannily still. This was near Lerna, and the lake was called Lake Alcyonius. The water was still as metal. In the silence all around, reeds and marshgrass bowed in the wind. Dionysus saw Prosymnus (or was he called Polymnus?) coming toward him. He asked him the way to Hades. Prosymnus said he would show him, on condition that Dionysus let himself be made love to like a woman. Dionysus promised he would, but only after he had returned from Hades. Together they approached the water. Nothing could have been calmer than that dense surface. But the small lake was bottomless. Try to swim in it and it would suck you down, endlessly. Prosymnus told Dionysus he must dive into that water if he was to get to Hades.

To a man, the ancients kept quiet about what happened at the end of Dionysus’s journey to the underworld. But one of the Fathers of the Church spoke out. With the brutal directness of those early Christians who had previously been initiated in the mysteries, Clement of Alexandria tells how Dionysus sodomized himself. “Dionysus yearned to go down into Hades but did not know the way. A certain Prosymnus promised to show him, but not without a reward [ misthós ] and the reward he wanted was not a good thing, though good enough for Dionysus; this favor, this reward Prosymnus asked of Dionysus, had to do with the pleasures of Aphrodite. The god agreed to the reward and promised to grant it, if he succeeded in returning from his journey, and he backed up his promise with an oath. Having been told the way, he set out. But when he returned he couldn’t find Prosymnus (who had died while he was away); determined to keep his promise to his lover, Dionysus went to his grave full of amorous desire. He cut a branch from a fig tree that happened to be there and, having fashioned it in the shape of the virile member, pushed it into himself, thus maintaining his promise to the dead man.”

Dionysus wasn’t the only god who’d had to ask a man the way to Hades. When Demeter was searching for Kore, she asked Celeus, king of Eleusis, where she might find her daughter. Celeus pointed her to Hades. As a “reward” [ misthós ], Demeter gave him the secret of bread, but she also allowed him to possess her body, “illicitly.” It’s not a Father of the Church who gives us the details this time but an obscure scholiast. Gregory of Nazianzus “is ashamed” even to mention “those certain things that Demeter does and submits to.” Gregory had good reason to be scandalized: Demeter is the goddess of the thesmoí , the strictest of laws, and here she is agreeing to give herself athésmōs , “lawlessly,” to a mortal. Then from that union a child would be born, “out of mortal necessity,” as the Orphic hymn later puts it. At this point order has been turned completely on its head. How can Ananke, Necessity, who is more divine than the gods, because she precedes them, become “mortal,” and as such subdue a goddess to herself? The goddess’s humiliation took place in Eleusis — and marked an irreversible turning point in the history of the Olympians. But what had pushed Dionysus and Demeter to that point?