Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

Even though they tend to avoid speaking of his birth, the Athenians are devoted to Erichthonius. They see themselves in him, fruit of a craftsman’s not-to-be-satisfied desire for a goddess. Neither peasants, warriors, or priests, they know they spring from the seed of a craftsman, whether it be the talkative artisan with his workshop in the agora or the solitary cosmic artificer. Their desire for Athena is greater than that of any other people. And this brings them closer than others to the unnatural gods of Olympus, the gods of detachment, the gods who cannot be satisfied with nature and its cycles but seek a form hard as crystal, as crystal closed in on itself, autonomous, autochthonous of the spirit.

Callimachus, who never spoke an unsound word, described the sperm Hephaestus spilt in his vain desire for Athena as “dew.” On penetrating the earth, Ge’s womb, that dew generated the snake-child. Athena lifted him up from the earth in her virgin arms. But she couldn’t embrace him as any other mother would. Athena was more than a mother. Her first gesture on the child’s behalf was to hang a golden chain around his neck with a locket containing two drops of Medusa’s blood: one was lethal, the other healing. Then she put Erichthonius in a wicker basket and tied the lid closed. She gave the basket to the three daughters of Cecrops, king of Athens, telling them not to open it for any reason whatsoever. The three girls didn’t know that Athena, in her love for Attica, wanted to make Erichthonius immortal without the other gods finding out.

But whenever a god, or someone who partakes of the divine, wants to make a child immortal, something always goes wrong. As when Thetis tried with Achilles, Demeter with Demophon, Medea with her children. There is always someone who turns up, disturbs the delicate process, and ruins everything. Whether because distracted or curious. Distraction and curiosity are the two ultimate sins, outward signs of that impatience which has always prevented man from rediscovering the gate of Paradise. Cecrops’s three daughters all had dewy names: Aglauros means “sparkling”; Pandrosos, “all dew”; and Herse, “dew.” With the same impatience with which Hephaestus had grabbed Athena, squirting his sperm over the goddess’s thigh, two of Cecrops’s daughters opened the basket and saw the snake-child come out, protected by two other snakes, his “bodyguards.” There was nothing shocking about this for Cecrops’s daughters. Indeed, they might well have seen Erichthonius as a baby brother: after all, their own father’s body also ended in a coiled snake’s tail. Yet they sensed an incipient terror, because they knew they had committed what for the Greeks was the worst of all crimes: they had opened the secret basket at the wrong moment.

Athena was on her way back from Pallene at the time. She had been there to look for a bulwark for her city and was walking along with an enormous rock in her arms. Her plan was to place it on the Acropolis, thus making Athens impregnable. A crow, bearer of ill tidings, came flying toward her and told her what had happened. In her rage Athena dropped the huge rock, which buried itself in the ground opposite the Acropolis, never to be moved again. It was the Lycabettus, and it still dominates Athens today, but without defending it. Then Athena appeared to the daughters of Cecrops, who fled terrified. They guessed a tough punishment was in store for them, and, even as the thought formulated in their minds, they were seized by a mad frenzy. They rushed to the steepest rocks of the Acropolis, stared into the void, and jumped. As they were dashed to pieces, their blood squirted out over the rocks.

Athena recovered the snake-child. Once again what she did was destined to remain shut away in herself. She bent the skin of the aegis to form a sort of marsupial pocket and slipped Erichthonius inside. Now the snake-child looked down on the world from on high, intrigued, his head peeping out from Athena’s breast beside Medusa’s face, which, with the passing years, had taken on an austere beauty, not unlike that of the goddess herself. You could see why she had wanted to vie with her in beauty. Erichthonius propped himself up on the abundance of Athena’s magnificent breasts. He looked down into their cleavage to see Medusa with her hair of snakes, and he felt the fringes of the aegis, which again were snakes, stirring round about him. The child immediately took a liking to Medusa. He didn’t realize as yet that she was his sister, born, like him, from Ge’s womb. Erichthonius felt happy, at home, a snake among snakes. Through the dried pelt of the aegis, he sensed the hidden warmth of his adoptive mother.

The more he looked at the world, the more he was convinced that the only person he bore any resemblance to was Athena, this strong, radiant woman, seething with snakes. She hadn’t born him in her womb, she had spurned the seed from which he was born, yet they were closer than any mother and son. No one else would ever lie on those perfect white breasts, no one else would ever see them, except perhaps in the heat of action, when a breast might sometimes slither out of the aegis. And wasn’t the aegis, Erichthonius’s home, almost part of Athena’s body? More than a weapon, it was a second skin. Erichthonius spent his youth dreading the moment when he would be separated from the body of his adoptive mother, separated from that little pouch inside the aegis, that warrior pregnancy, exposed to sun and wind. But one day Athena did set him down on the ground, inside the Acropolis compound. And there she raised him. The place was to become sacred. Then, sadly, they separated. For Erichthonius it marked the end of the divine period of his life. He became a king, one of the many kings of Athens. He married a Naiad, inaugurated the Panathenaea, invented the quadriga and money. At his death he wanted to return to his adoptive mother. He was buried in the compound where Athena had raised him, which was now the home of a snake.

The Athenians were aware of their original sin, what the daughters of Cecrops did. They worshiped Athena, despite knowing that the goddess had chosen not to make them invincible. The spirit of the city was a nameless snake, living in the Erechtheum. Every month they offered it a cake with honey, which the Greeks thought of as a type of dew. One day, when the Persians were marching on Athens, the snake for the first time left its cake untouched. Upon which the Athenians decided to flee the city, because the goddess had abandoned the Acropolis.

Seven centuries later, when Athens was no longer under threat, having already lost everything except its statues, the traveler Pausanias was amazed to come across a ceremony not many people knew much about. Every year two girls from seven to eleven years old were chosen by the king-archon from among the most ancient families of Athens and made to live for a certain period of time near the sanctuaries of Athena Polias and Pandrosos. Pandrosos was the only one of Cecrops’s daughters who had obeyed the goddess. The girls were given a small enclosure where they could play ball, and in the middle of the enclosure was a statue of a boy on a horse. They were called the Arrhephoroi or the Hersephoroi, the name being taken to mean “bearers of the unspeakable” ( árrēta ) or “bearers of the dew” ( hérsē ). In fact they were both. One night, the priestess of Athena comes to the girls: “They carry on their heads what the priestess of Athena gives them to carry; she who gives knows not what she gives, nor do those who carry know what they carry.” The two girls then walk along an underground tunnel that skirts the sanctuary of Aphrodite in the Gardens, going down the steep northern slope of the Acropolis. At the bottom of the passage, “they lay down what they have carried and pick up another thing, all wrapped up, which they bring back to where they began.”