Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

Zeus’s birthplace, the Cretan cave, was thus out of bounds to both gods and men. And it was the place where one could not die. That cave held a secret beyond any other. When a rite is secret, it is so because in this way it “imitates the nature of the divine, which eludes our perception.” But here the divine wished to elude even the perception of the gods. What was it that Zeus had to conceal from the other gods at all costs? The four young Cretans stepped into a dark space dripping with sweetness. The rock was spread thick with honey. The honey stuck to the rock the way their bodies stuck to their bronze armor. In the shadows they noticed some bloody swaddling clothes. When he opened his eyes at birth, these same rocks had been the first thing Zeus saw. He was like any baby then: “stained with blood and with the waters of his mother’s womb, more like someone just killed than someone just born.” The four young Cretans were thinking about this, about those bloodstains in the honey — might there have been a murder? — when they felt their bronze armor splitting apart. Zeus thundered. There was a great light.

In Crete the secret had always been there for everybody to see. Up on a mountain they would show people Zeus’s tomb. They told the truth one must not tell. No one believed them. Ever after, people would say: Cretans, liars all.

What Zeus let us know about his life were the wars and the amorous adventures. But not much else. He divided his secrets between his two sons, Apollo and Dionysus, who would one day rise to sovereignty. Every era lives out, without knowing it, the dream of the era that came before. Just as Zeus had found himself thinking what his father, Kronos, dreamed, so Dionysus and Apollo would suffer what Zeus had already experienced, in secret. To Dionysus and Apollo the world would attribute deeds and passions that had their origin in the most hidden recesses of their father’s life.

But Zeus cannot have secrets. Zeus simply is. “You are always,” says a late poet. And in Dodona, the first women ever to chant poetry would say: “Zeus was, and is, and shall be, oh great Zeus.” And now the secret of Zeus was to go and reside in the dark, impenetrable area where the two flourishing young gods had to come to terms with and suffer death. The secret of Zeus was made up of two parts: his having killed Typhon; and his having been killed, as an infant, in the Cretan cave. Zeus transferred the first secret to Apollo: Apollo killed Python. And the second to Dionysus: the baby Zagreus was killed by the Titans. Dividing himself up into his two sons, Zeus reproduced wholeness in each of them. For Apollo and Dionysus include their opposites within themselves and swing back and forth between the two extremes. Just as Dionysus is the tearer apart and the torn apart, so Apollo is both the hunter and the quarry.

The Delphic youth who every eight years at the Stepteria festival fled from Delphi without looking back, while a hut he had just set alight burned behind him, was imitating the flight of Apollo from Delphi when he went to purify himself in Tempe after killing Python. But he was also recalling the hunting of Python, wounded by Apollo’s arrows. The god chased the snake along the same road, “which is now called the Sacred Way,” only to arrive too late, albeit “by very little,” to put him out of his agony. The son of Python, Aix, the Goat, had already buried his father, this huge snake who had dragged himself, dying, from Phocis to Thessaly.

Dactyls, Curetes— and then, at night, the Titans: they are the first koûroi , nimble dancing fingers, echoing bronze shields, sharp flute. The Curetes are the “instants, the herdsmen of time,” transfixing the continuum. They dance in a circle, waving spears and toys. Hidden in the center of that circle is a defenseless child: Zeus — or Zagreus. Are they protecting him? Are they about to kill him? They save him with the terrifying clamor of their weapons, and they trick him with toys, before burying their knives in his flesh. The initiated aren’t just those who know how to shake off guilt but those who more than others have reason to be guilty. The complicity between initiates has to do with a shared knowledge, but likewise with a crime. However much we try, we can never quite sever the bond that links the initiated with the gang of criminals.

Before the knife came down, the infant Zagreus saw those pale figures surrounding him, offering him toys, as his friends and guardians. Curetes? Titans? Such distinctions could only be of use to mythographers. In the dark, Zagreus saw that these strangers (or did he know them?), their faces smeared with chalk, were led by a more attractive figure, tall and white, with a whiteness that came not from chalk but from some natural luminosity. And Zagreus had seen that same being (a woman perhaps? but what was a woman?) leading his guardians, the Curetes, before. Silent and armed, Athena presided over the torture about to be performed on her brother Zagreus.

The boy touched his face and felt the soft chalk the Titans had daubed there. Now they went round and round him, as though moving to some nursery rhyme, and Zagreus knew perfectly well that they were waiting for the right moment to kill him. He looked at the toys all around him: a top, dolls with jointed limbs, golden apples, a pinecone, a mirror. He reached for the little mirror and looked at himself. He saw an “alien image,” another white face. And recognized the very person about to kill him.

As though it were a duty, the knife already sparkling in a Titan’s hand, Zagreus turned himself into a young Zeus, into the old Kronos, into a baby, into a youth, into a lion, into a horse, into a snake, into a tiger. And finally into a bull. At which, out of nothing, came the booming sound of Hera, lowing. Amazed, the bull froze in that form for a second too long. Long enough for the knife to plunge. The bull crashed down. Streams of blood spurted out onto the white faces of his killers as they passed the knife from hand to hand to strike and strike again.

When they had boiled up Zagreus, roasted him on spits, and devoured him, the Titans were themselves shriveled up by Zeus’s thunderbolts. Nothing was left but a black film of soot amid the grass and thorns of the Cretan mountains. Then Athena looked around in the sultry air and saw, on the ground, a pulsating piece of flesh that had been tossed away. It was Zagreus’s heart, and it seemed not to care about having been torn from his chest. It sucked from an invisible lymph and pumped it away again into the invisible. Athena was fascinated by that trembling red blob. Something in the shapeless shred of flesh was speaking to her, as she stood detached from all else, gray, blue, and sharply outlined in her armor. Something was announcing her name. Pállein means “to pulse”; Pallas, “pulsating”; such was Athena beneath the cold exterior of her weapons, where the hard surface met the indivisible mind, which she saw outside herself for the first time now in that dirty piece of red flesh tossed to the dogs. Delicately, she picked up the heart and laid it in a basket, closed the lid. Then she went off. She was going to give the “thinking heart” to her father, Zeus.

For a long time Zeus was overcome by grief. He recalled how Hera had mocked him for his inaction while his son was being torn to shreds. When Zeus saw his pain wasn’t getting any relief, he took some plaster and began to shape the statue of a koûros , like a shining white suit of armor. The era of metamorphoses having come to an end, the era of the statue had begun. And, once again, Zeus was the beginning: he erected the first statue for his dead son. As soon as he’d finished, the god slipped Zagreus’s heart through a hole in the plaster so that it was inside the statue. In the dark cavity of the artifact, the heart reawoke. It thought: white all around me again, like the waxy faces of my murderers, and the night too. But now the dance is over, the whiteness is still, like a sky, like the lid of a sarcophagus. Seen from outside, the statue looked like the funeral stone of a beautiful young man. Inside, Zagreus’s heart went on silently beating, and thinking.