Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

Coccona, in the meantime, was bitten by a viper while practicing his oracles in verse and died. So Alexander turned up on his own. His fake curls came down to his shoulders, and he wore a white and purple tunic with a cloak on top. A curved sword, like the one Perseus had used, hung at his hip, because he was a descendant of Perseus, he said, on his mother’s side. Of course the Paphlagonians knew Alexander and his modest parents very well: but when the oracles kept on telling them how, overwhelmed by a frenzy of passion, Podalirius, son of Asclepius, had traveled from as far off as Tricca to make love to Alexander’s mother, they gave in. The oracle got into gear. But the fact that Alexander would occasionally have paroxysms and foam at the mouth, with a little help from a root he chewed, wasn’t enough. For a proper oracle, snakes were a must. Alexander had brought ten of the Macedonian variety along with him.

One night he went to a spring near the new temple, where he managed to find a goose’s egg and a baby snake. He trapped the snake in the shell of the egg and buried it in the mud. The next morning he turned up in the marketplace and, after generally behaving like a maniac and screaming a few words in Hebrew and Phoenician, announced to the amazed citizenry that they were about to receive the god. After that, he ran off to the temple.

He waded into the water of the spring and invoked Apollo. He asked for a libation bowl and pushed it into the mud. The bowl came up with the goose’s egg, which he had put back together with wax. Everybody watched, astonished. Then Alexander broke the shell and let the baby snake wriggle around his fingers. The new Asclepius, he said. The people followed him, brimming with devotion. After which, Alexander took care not to be seen for a few days. Then he waited for the crowd. When they all came running, credulous as ever, Alexander was lying godlike on a bed in a small chamber, his Macedonian snake wrapped around his neck, stretching across his stomach, and then falling in coils to the floor. Beside his beard, Alexander let the onlookers glimpse a dummy head, half snake, half man, which he had stuffed with horsehair. The people thought it was the snake’s head. The light was poor, and anyway they were all fighting to get a look at this baby snake that in just a few days had amazingly metamorphosed into a dragon with a human head. People flocked from Bithynia, Thrace, and Galatia, and Alexander always appeared in the same pose. He decided to change his name to Glycon, for reasons metrical. “I am Glycon, grandson of Zeus, light of mankind.” At this point the oracle could start making money. People coming to consult it wrote down their wishes on sealed scrolls. Alexander opened the seals with a red-hot needle, then closed them again, exactly as they had been, and produced answers that amazed everybody. Two obols a consultation.

Lucian claims he was earning “between seventy and eighty thousand drachmas a year.” Some people were so thirsty for knowledge that they would ask the oracle ten or even more questions. One person who came was Rutilianus, Rome’s representative in the region, an experienced man but always ready to worship any old stone so long as it had been anointed and crowned. Alexander soon convinced Rutilianus that he should marry his daughter, telling him she was the offspring of his love for Selene. Yes, Endymion’s good fortune had been his too; it had happened one night when the moon had shone down on his white and sleeping body. Thus the sixty-year-old Rutilianus turned up as the groom, offering huge sacrifices to the moon, whom he imagined was his mother-in-law. Alexander loved faking religious mysteries in the sanctuary, his favorite being his own birth. On the third day of the wedding celebrations, he organized a show of his lovemaking with Selene. He pretended to be asleep in front of the crowd, while from the ceiling, as though from the sky, the attractive Rutilia, wife of one of his administrators, was lowered onto him. Alexander and Rutilia were lovers, and now they had the chance to fondle each other with impunity in front of an audience that included Rutilia’s husband. Every now and then, apparently by chance, Alexander would let the crowd get a glimpse of one of his thighs, which glittered with gold. So people began to whisper that the soul of Pythagoras must have transmigrated into him. By now he had scores of people working for him. Groups of young choirboys were drafted in from Paphlagonia for long periods of service in the sanctuary. He called them “the ones within the kiss.” But he made a point of not kissing any of them once they were over eighteen. Thanks to his good relations with the Emperor Verus, he was able to have coins minted with a design showing himself with Asclepius’s bands and the sword of Perseus, a tribute to his ancestors. On the other side of the coin was a snake with a human head.

Alexander had prophesied he would live to be a hundred and fifty and die only when struck by lightning. In the event, he died before he was seventy when a leg turned gangrenous and became infested by worms. To anoint his head with balsam, the doctors had to remove his wig. Who would inherit the sanctuary now? The ever faithful Rutilianus decided that no one should take the prophet’s place. Before his death, Alexander had managed to get the authorities in Rome to change the name of Abonuteichos. Now it was to be known as Ionopolis. People went on practicing Alexander’s cult there for about a century. Even today the city is called Inebolu. We shall never know if Alexander was really the sordid con man Lucian describes, or a wise man who in latter days chose to reenact the primordial scene. There where pagan self-parody and Christian inquisition rage, where the shameful and the ridiculous reign supreme, the most ancient secret will often lie concealed.

In the solitude of the primordial world, the affairs of the gods took place on an empty stage, with no watching eyes to mirror them. There was a rustling, but no clamor of voices. Then, from a certain point on (but at what point? and why?), the backdrop began to flicker, the air was invaded by a golden sprinkling of new beings, the shrill, high-pitched cry of scores of raised voices. Dactyls, Curetes, Corybants, Telchines, Silens, Cabiri, Satyrs, Maenads, Bacchants, Lenaeans, Thyiads, Bassarides, Mimallones, Naiads, Nymphs, Titires: who were all these beings? To evoke one of their names is to evoke them all. They are the helpers, ministers, guardians, nurses, tutors, and spectators of the gods. The metamorphic vortex is placated; once surrounded by this noisy and devoted crowd, the gods agree to settle down into their familiar forms. Sometimes that crowd will appear as a pack of murderers, sometimes as an assembly of craftsmen, sometimes as a dance troupe, sometimes as a herd of beasts.

That worshiping crowd was the first community, the first group, the first entity in which one name was used for everybody. We don’t even know whether they are gods, daímones , or human beings. But what is it that unites them, what makes them a single group, even when different and distant from one another? They are the initiated, the ones who have seen. They are those who let themselves be touched by the divine. Which of them came first? We don’t know, since for every god there is always a corresponding god or goddess — in Asia, or Thrace, or Crete — who predates them and who likewise surrounds himself with such beings. But of all of them we could say that they were honey thieves .

“People say there is a sacred cave in Crete, a cave inhabited by bees, where, as myth would have it, Rhea gave birth to Zeus. There is a sacred law that no one, whether man or god, may set foot there. Every year, at a certain time, a dazzling flame flashes from the cave. The myth says this happens when the blood Zeus spilled at birth periodically boils. The cave is inhabited by the sacred bees who fed Zeus as a baby. Laius, Celeus, Cerberus, and Egolius took the risk of going into the cave in the hope of stealing a big store of honey; they had protected themselves with bronze armor and began to take the honey; then they saw Zeus’s swaddling clothes and their armor began to split across their bodies. Zeus thundered and brandished his lightning bolt, but the Moirai and Themis held him back; the holiness of the place would have suffered had someone died there; so Zeus turned the intruders into birds; and they became the progenitors of those species which bear omens: the solitary sparrow, the green woodpecker, the cerberus, and the barn owl. When any of these birds appear, they offer truer and better omens than other birds, because they have seen the blood of Zeus.”