Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

The Eleusinian crisis came about when the Olympians developed a new fascination for death. Zeus gave his daughter Kore to Hades, Demeter gave herself to a mortal. To find out more about death, the gods had to turn to men, death being the one thing men knew rather more about than they did. And, to get help from men, both Dionysus and Demeter had to prostitute themselves. A god surrendering himself to a mortal is like a man surrendering himself to death: every dead man has to bring a coin with him, to pay his way to Hades. Gods don’t use money, so they give their bodies. After all, from the Olympians’ point of view, men are already dead, because death lurks within them.

Just as Persephone let herself be carried off by the king of the dead, so Dionysus ties a fig branch to a gravestone and lets it penetrate him, and Demeter gives herself to the mortal Celeus. The memory of this divine prostitution was buried deep in the mysteries. We would know nothing of it at all were it not for the vindictive zeal of a Father of the Church and the loquacity of a scholiast. But no sooner have those events been disinterred from the silence than all kinds of other authors come running to confirm a complicity between Dionysus and Demeter vis-à-vis their love affairs on the road to Hades.

In Lerna, near the lake where Dionysus was sucked down into the underworld, people worshiped Demeter Prosymna. And Polyhymnia, partner of Polymnus, the other form of the name Prosymnus, was mother to Phylammon, founder of the mysteries of Lerna. Another Polyhymnia is mentioned as being the mother of the young Triptolemus, who scattered Demeter’s corn seeds across the world from his winged chariot. And his father was supposed to be Celeus: meaning that Polyhymnia has taken Demeter’s place as Celeus’s mistress. One of the Nymphs who suckled Dionysus was called Polymnos. And polýymnos was an epithet for Dionysus before coming to mean simply “whore.” Plato throws some light on this last development. First and foremost Polyhymnia is one of the Muses, patron of intimate lyric song. But in the Symposium Plato tells us that Polyhymnia is a fearful Muse, not devoted to “fine love,” at all, “which is of the heavens, and the realm of the Muse Urania,” but to eros pándemos , the love that grants itself to all and sundry. Divine prostitution and lyric song are linked together in the shadows. One of the many who offered hospitality to Demeter during her wanderings was Phytalus, king of the land of the Cephisus, on the road to Eleusis. The procession that went from Athens to Eleusis always stopped to rest here, in a place known as the “Holy Fig,” where a tree Demeter had given to Phytalus still grew under a tiled roof that the Eleusinian priests took care to keep in good repair. The inscription on Phytalus’s tomb read: “Hero and king, here Phytalus received the majestic Demeter, when first she brought forth the first fruit of autumn, which mortal men called the sacred fig.”

Having gone down to the underworld to ransom his mother, Dionysus found himself face to face with Hades, as though looking in a mirror. The eyes staring at him were his own. Hades told him he would let Semele go, but only on condition that Dionysus gave up something very dear to him. Dionysus thought. Then he offered a twig of myrtle to the lord of the invisible. Hades accepted. How was it that that humble plant could settle such a portentous deal? Myrtle was the plant young spouses were crowned with on earth. And Hades couldn’t get enough of spouses and their nuptials. He wanted the kingdom of the dead to be mingled with the realm of eros. Not so as to conquer it or subdue it: in fact Hades agreed to let Zeus’s lover, the mortal Semele, ascend to the heavens, “having been granted permission by the Parcae.” No, what he really wanted was to mix the two kingdoms together. The myrtle was Aphrodite’s plant before it was Dionysus’s, and until this visit to the underworld it had been just the casual, fleeting fragrance of lovemaking. But from now on it would spread the fragrance of another world as well, the unknown. Thus the myrtle became the plant of both eros and mourning.

Leading his mother by the hand, Dionysus returned to earth at a place that would later be the site of the town of Troezen. Years passed, and now a stadium had been built close to the spot where Dionysus and Semele had climbed up from the underworld. Every day Prince Hippolytus would train there. He was a disciple of Orphism and hence a vegetarian and a virgin. All he knew about sex was what he saw in plays or statues. The son of an Amazon, he didn’t care about becoming an important person in the town. He expressed amazement when people talked about the “sweetness of power.” He worshiped his books, and the intoxicating fumes of “majestic words.” He exercised, he improved himself, and that was all he cared about. His detractors said he practiced a “cult of self.” But in fact, sealed away in its integrity, his “virgin soul” adored only one being, at once outside himself and intimate: the virgin huntress, Artemis. He hunted for her in the forest, served her as a slave, protected her images.

Hippolytus assumed he was alone as he exercised naked in the stadium at dawn. His body was glistening, untouchable. But a woman’s eyes were following his every move. Hidden away in her observation post above the stadium, in the temple of Aphrodite Kataskopia, Aphrodite “who spies from above,” his stepmother, Phaedra, was familiar with every tensing of the young man’s muscles. Alone as Hippolytus was alone, she watched him and burned with desire. Her sweaty hands fidgeted with tender myrtle leaves. Then, when desire became unbearable, she took a brooch from her hair and, eyes following Hippolytus’s every move, pricked holes in the myrtle leaves with the pin of the brooch. As well as “myrtle berry,” mýrton means “clitoris.”

Detached though he was from the world, Hippolytus was not as yet beyond the world’s sorcery. He would meet his death when his young fillies fled terrified before Poseidon’s monstrous bull, risen from the waters of the Saronicus. Hippolytus tried desperately to control them and was flung to the ground, tangled in the reins. As the horses dragged his dusty, blood-bespattered body over the sharp rocks that tore it apart, as he felt “the approaching dissolution in his brain,” Hippolytus was also aware of being that same myrtle leaf, torn apart by the precious brooch of a lover who had known his body only through her eyes and had hung herself for him: Phaedra.

Hippolytus exuded the fragrance of death, which mingled in the air with another, purer fragrance, announcing the presence of Artemis. Dying, he spoke to her, and she to him, but toward the end the goddess deserted him, even though she did call Hippolytus “the dearest of mortals.” She deserted him because Artemis cannot “corrupt her eyes with a mortal’s death throes.”

When her abductor led her into the palace of the dead, Persephone noticed a young girl, “lying on Aidoneus’s bed.” It was Minthe, they told her, Nymph of the river Cocytus. So even in these still and silent woods, even in this freezing, marshy, corrosive river where the dead sailed toward their torments, there were Nymphs! And where there were Nymphs there was seduction, the invincible impulse. Just as Zeus, her father and celestial lover, came down to pluck them from the hills, so Hades, her partner, chary of word and gesture, coupled with them in his bed. Betrayal spanned the cosmos from end to end.

Persephone grabbed hold of Minthe and dragged her out into the light, on the sands of Pylos, gateway to the West. There she hurled herself on the Nymph and stamped on her with that fury she had inherited from her mother. She wanted to trample her to death, to tear her apart like a mortal woman. And as Minthe’s soft body was reduced to a pulp of flesh and blood, her lifeless limbs released an intense, balmy fragrance. It was the wild mint that would grow ever afterward on the slopes of Samikon, looking out to sea.