Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

Once you have a double on the scene, it’s like entering a hall of mirrors; everything is elusive, stretching away into a perspective where nothing is ever final. There was a place in Athens known as the Palladium: it was the courthouse where involuntary homicides were judged. The first defendant was Demophon himself, but behind him, and in the same guilty role, homage was being paid to Athena, who had killed Pallas without meaning to. That was the beginning, the first crack in the double, the danger that is Athena, the fact that her consciousness is hostile to the shadow — it brings forth the double but then ends up by wounding it. And the double takes its revenge by reproducing itself as an image, first in the one true Palladium, whose eyes would glow and wooden body exude a salty sweat whenever the goddess descended into it, but likewise in the endless other Palladiums to be found all over the world, all false.

The capacity for control ( sophrosýnē ), the ability to dominate oneself, to govern things, the sharpness of the eye, the sober choice of the means to achieve an end — all these things detach the mind from those powers that came before Athena, give us the impression of using them without being used by them. It is an effective illusion, and one that frequently finds confirmation. The eye becomes cold and clear-sighted toward all it sees, ready to take advantage of any opportunity that presents itself. But for all this 360-degree field of vision, there remains a black speck, a point that the eye cannot see: itself. The eye cannot see the eye. It does not appreciate that it is itself a power, like the powers it claims to dominate. The cold eye looking out on the world modifies that world no less than the fiery breath of Aegis, which shriveled up a vast expanse of earth from Phrygia to Libya.

Athena is the power that helps the eye to see itself. So intimate is she with those she protects that she installs herself in their minds and communicates with the very mind of the mind. Which is why Ajax’s father says to his son: “In battle, fight to win, but to win together with a god.” To which Ajax replies: “Father, with a god on his side, even a nobody can win; but I am sure I can achieve glory even without them.” So Athena intervenes and destroys the hero’s mind, like one of those cities she loves to sack. She is ruthless with those who use her tokens — the sharp eye, the quick mind, deftness of hand, the intelligence that snatches victory — only to forget where they came from. It is here that the difference between Odysseus and an ingenuous, insolent hero like Ajax becomes gapingly obvious. For Odysseus, Athena’s presence is that of a secret and incessant dialogue: he finds her in the cry of a heron, the bronzed timbre of a voice, the wings of a swallow perched on a beam, and any number of other manifestations, because, as he says to the goddess on one occasion, “you mimic all manner of people.” So the hero knows he can see her everywhere. He knows he need not always be waiting for the dazzling splendor of epiphany. Athena may be a beggar or an old friend. She is the protecting presence.

The relationship between Athena and “the male,” which the goddess loves “with all her heart,” is conditioned by an age-old misunderstanding. Athena gives men the weapons they need to escape the oppression of all kinds of sovereigns, and above all of the sky and earth, who had trembled that day they heard the shrill, high-pitched cry with which the goddess emerged from Zeus’s head — and trembled because they recognized that this young girl was their new enemy. But Athena does not give men the weapon they need to escape herself. Whenever man celebrates his autonomy with preposterous claims and fatal deeds, Athena is insulted. Her punishment is never long in coming, and it is extreme. Today, those who do not recognize her are not insolent heroes such as Ajax but the many numerous “nobodies” Ajax despised. It is they who advance, haughty and blind, polluting the earth they tread. While the heirs of Odysseus continue their silent dialogue with Athena.

The Olympians visited one another in their huge palaces. They’d get together for banquets of an evening. Or they might assemble like a group of curious onlookers to watch some unusual event: Athena emerging from Zeus’s head; Aphrodite and Ares caught in Hephaestus’s golden web.

But even Olympus had its forbidden room, its sealed, inviolable place where no one could go. The gods would pass by, knowing they could never cross the threshold. It was a square, empty, windowless room. On the floor, the darkness was pierced by a bar that was as if fringed with light, a light that simmered in the stillness: Zeus’s lightning bolt. For anyone daring to approach, the luminous fringes would take on the soft shape of lotus petals. In the lightning blossomed “the flower of fire.”

Zeus once asked Athena to lend him a powerful weapon she often flaunted: the flayed skin of a monster, the aegis. In return, and because he was irresistibly partial to his daughter, he offered her occasional access to his lightning. It was the privilege Athena was most proud of. Even in the presence of the Athenians, when called on to decide the fate of Orestes, Athena reminded the accused that “I alone among the gods have the keys to the room where the lightning is sealed.”

The Athenians claimed to have two main reasons for feeling proud of themselves: first, they were autochthonous, actually born, that is, of the earth of Attica, rather than immigrants from other lands; and, second, Athena was their protectress. But, even to be born of the earth, one needed a seed, and a womb — yet the Athenians always avoided mentioning this. Why?

Of all the styles of virginity on Olympus, none was so enigmatic and provocative as Athena’s. No woman was ever so profoundly intimate with men as she. None of Odysseus’s women ever felt the hero’s voice as close to them as she did. Yet Athena denied her body to gods and men, even to those men she helped with such impassioned intelligence. Though in punishing them, she wasn’t as ferocious as Artemis. When Tiresias spied her bathing, Athena blinded him, out of divine duty, but then chose to grant him the gift of clairvoyance.

One day Athena approached Hephaestus, the ugliest of the Olympians but also the one who would find Aphrodite in his bed every night. She asked him to make a piece of armor for her. And in her solemn way she added that she didn’t really know how to pay him for it. “I’ll do it for love,” Hephaestus said. Athena nodded. Athena was the only woman who could make Hephaestus forget Aphrodite. During her visit, she hadn’t noticed the glint in his eye, because that wasn’t the kind of thing she was in the habit of noticing. Time passed. When Athena came back to Hephaestus’s forge to pick up her armor, the divine craftsman began hobbling around her in the dark. The goddess felt long, sinewy fingers squeezing her and thin, muscled legs forcing her back against the wall. As the goddess was wriggling free from his clutches, Hephaestus’s sperm squirted out against her thigh, just above the knee. None of this prompted the slightest comment from the goddess. Athena was merely concerned to grab the first rag that came to hand in the forge. She cleaned her thigh and, never wanting to see it again, tossed away the wet cloth from on high. The rag fell on Attica. As it happened, Ge, mother earth, a figure not unused to acts of primordial generation, was passing by. Sodden with Hephaestus’s sperm, the cloth fell into her womb, and she conceived. When Ge gave birth and didn’t know what to do with the newborn child, Athena decided to adopt this creature nobody wanted, decided with the same swiftness and confidence with which she had wiped away Hephaestus’s sperm. She picked up this little child who ended in a coiled snake’s tail and called him Erichthonius.