Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

In the Etymologicon Magnum , the name Zagreus is explained as “the Great Hunter.” But there were other Great Hunters among the gods too. Zeus is the Great Hunter. And Hades is the Great Hunter. A plumb line comes down from the ether, passes through the earth, and reaches right to the very depths of the underworld: it is the Great Hunter. There is no part of his being where the divine will renounce the gesture of following a prey. At no height or depth, whether it be the glass-clear air of Olympus, the swirling air of earth, or the perennially gloomy air of Hades, does the sharp profile of the Great Hunter ever fade.

A Maenad had a fawn tattooed on her soft, bare right arm. She was breast-feeding a fawn, stroking and playing with it. Then she grabbed it, tore it to pieces, and sank her teeth into the still pulsing flesh. Why this sequence? And why must this sequence forever take the form of a sudden raptus, when really it was a ceremony? What went on inside the Maenad? Dionysus tormented her with pleasure in every vein. The Maenad ran, didn’t know how to respond. The sacrifice, that slow, solemn butchery, wasn’t enough to quell her frenzy. The only thing that would work was “the pleasure of eating live flesh.” Altarless, she wandered through the trees. Dismembering the fawn, the Maenad dismembered herself, possessed by the god. Hence, in devouring the fawn, she devoured the god, mixed in its blood. She who was possessed thus tried herself to possess a part of the god. But what happened afterward? A great silence. The sultry heat of the woods. Strips of bleeding flesh glimpsed through the leaves. The god wasn’t there. Life — incomprehensible, opaque.

For the shortest of times Zagreus, the boy king, sits on the throne Zeus has left vacant to go off on a journey (where to?). Then he will be the first prey. He will be torn to pieces. Then he will lead his own initiates off to tear others to pieces, others like him, his priests perhaps. He who has the shape of the bull leads the band that devours the bull, alive. Dionysus Zagreus: in him we have the most violent of identifications, that of the hunter with the prey.

The páthe of Osiris and of Christ are captured and stilled in the images of the victim torn to pieces or nailed to the cross. But with Dionysus Zagreus, the circle immediately begins to turn again. Driven by the god, the Maenads will repeat the very gestures that killed the god himself. And most of all they will kill whoever tries to stop the circle turning.

Orpheus broke away from the cult of Dionysus like the renouncer from the Brahminical cult. Before withdrawing into the forest to live among the wild beasts, he too had experienced “the pleasure of eating live flesh.” Now the new element in his thinking could be summed up in two words: phónōn apéchesthai , “refrain from killing.”

In every other respect, just as the renouncer still bowed down before the structure of Vedic metaphysics, so Orpheus still observed the Olympian theology. But he knew that this new precept of his was enough to undermine its order. He knew he had interrupted the back-and-forth of killing and being killed. The sun rose through a bright, unsullied air, and Orpheus, dressed in white, greeted it from a mountaintop in Thrace. Behind him, in the wood, he heard a roaring noise. The Bassarids, the women who had once been his companions, were approaching, coming to tear him to shreds. Of Orpheus’s body, only the head was left; it bobbed away on the swirling surface of the river that flowed down the valley, still singing.

In Aristophanes’ time, someone might refer to the feast of the Bouphonia as one speaks of a relic of times past, something vaguely incongruous, like the golden cicadas eminent Athenians had once worn in their hair as clasps. The texts that have come down to us about Athenian festivals, the admirable tradition that gave rhythm to the seasons and the key moments in people’s lives, are few and fragmented. But, by a stroke of luck, we do have a passage about the Bouphonia that Porphyry copied from Theophrastus, a passage that offers the noblest and clearest Mediterranean formulation of the metaphysics of sacrifice.

“In olden times, as I said before, men would sacrifice the fruits of the earth to the gods, but not the animals. Indeed, they didn’t even eat animals. The story goes that during a public sacrifice celebrated in Athens, a certain Sopatrus, who wasn’t originally from the area but was farming some land in Attica, had placed some bread and other cakes on the table to sacrifice them to the gods, when an ox on its way back from work came up to the table, ate part of the offering, and trod on the rest. Seized by rage at what had happened, and seeing somebody nearby sharpening an ax, Sopatrus grabbed it and struck the ox. When he had killed the animal, his rage subsided and he realized what he had done. Upon which he buried the ox, then fled to Crete, where he remained in voluntary exile, as if guilty of a wicked crime. A drought followed and there was a terrible scarcity of food. A delegation went off to consult the god, and the Pythia told them that the exiled man now in Crete would put an end to the drought: if they punished the killer and got the victim back on its feet in the course of the same sacrifice in which he was killed, and if they ate some of the victim themselves without being squeamish, then things would improve. So off they went to look for Sopatrus, who was the cause of the trouble. Sopatrus reckoned he might escape the dire straits his impurity had placed him in if he could get all the others to behave as he had. So when the delegation came for him, he told them that an ox from the city must be killed. Given that the others were nervous when it came to choosing which of them should actually kill the animal, he offered to do it himself, on the understanding that they would accept him as a citizen and agree that the killing was the responsibility of the group. They agreed and, on returning to the city, arranged matters in the following way, which has never changed to this day.

“They chose some girls as water bearers: water was brought to sharpen the ax and the knife. When they had been sharpened, one of them handed over the ax, another struck the ox, and another cut its throat; then some others skinned it and they all tasted it. When all this had been done, they sewed up the ox’s hide, filled it with hay, and put the animal back on its feet in the same position it had been in when it was alive. They even yoked it to a plow as if it were working. Then they held a trial to judge the killing, and all those who had taken part were called upon to justify themselves. The girls who’d brought the water pointed to those who had sharpened the blades as being more guilty than themselves, while those who had sharpened the blades pointed to the person who had held the ax. He pointed to the one who had cut the ox’s throat, and he pointed to the knife. Because the knife had no voice to speak, it was accused of the killing. From that day to this, during the Dipolia held on the Athens Acropolis, an ox is sacrificed in the same way. Having placed bread and other cakes on the bronze table, they walk the chosen oxen around it, and the one that eats the offerings is killed. Those who perform these rites are now divided up into families. All the descendants of he who first struck the ox, Sopatrus, are called boutýpoi (those who strike the ox); the descendants of the person who led the oxen around the offering are called kentriádai (the ones with the goad); and the descendants of the man who cut the ox’s throat are called daitroí (those who celebrate), because of the celebrations that follow the distribution of the meat. Having stuffed the ox’s hide and appeared at the trial, they throw the knife into the sea.”