Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

Those who first laid down the rules of sacrifice were too subtle as theologians to claim that guilt only manifested itself with the killing of a living being: that notion they left to future tribunals who would know only the limited order of men. If it were enough just to abstain from killing, life could indeed become innocent. But guilt resides in the veins — and can only move from one place to another, transform itself, reveal itself, celebrate itself.

The primordial crime is the action that makes something in existence disappear: the act of eating. Guilt is thus obligatory and inextinguishable. And, given that men cannot survive without eating, guilt is woven into their physiology and forever renews itself. But then who is at the origin of the guilt? The ox, the working ox, man’s companion, the ox who one day ate the bread and cakes offered to the gods. That gesture, obtuse and meek, was the first lesion in the realm of the existent, and every later lesion was implicit in it: it was the gesture that steals away something that exists, as Hades stole away Kore. From that gesture, bound together in a single chain, come all the other crimes. Guilt is so deeply embedded in existence that all it took to usher it into consciousness was for a farm animal to stretch out its snout toward a country pie.

But whom do we find at the other end of the chain of guilt? The knife that “has no voice” ( áphonos ). The only two things condemned, the ox and the knife, cannot speak. He who cannot speak is condemned at once. He who can speak — and is guilty just the same — lives under a perpetually suspended sentence. Between them, between one end of the chain and the other, the ox and the knife, are all the rest of us: the charming water bearers, who remind us of the fifty Danaids, spurts of lymph and death; the cold instigators who use their goads to point the ox to the cake so as to have it unknowingly make the guilty gesture that will single it out as the victim; then those who spend their lives absorbed in sharpening the sacrificial axes and knives; those who are happy just to offer the ax to whoever is going to strike the blow; he who brings down the ax, as the women break the silence with a shrill cry ( ololug ) of joy and horror; those who cut the animal’s throat after it is down, because if blood doesn’t flow the death is pointless, the animal can’t be eaten; those who use the same knife that slit the throat to divide the meat into portions for each and every citizen; and, last of all, those who watch the killing and eat the animal’s flesh: everybody.

The Delphic priests were guardians not only of the lógos but also of the doctrine of sacrifice. When the Athenians consulted the oracle after Sopatrus’s cruel gesture, the Pythia answered with the brutal words that would make it possible to found the city, to found any city, because cities can only be founded on guilt. Eat the victim’s flesh and don’t be squeamish: with these words civilization was born. All the rest is honey and acorns, the Orphic life, nostalgia for a pure beginning. But not even that life could ignore the fact that the world is waste and dissipation. On the bronze table lies the bread. Then it is gone. Absence, sudden and irreversible absence, the sign that dissipation is at work. And each person, every being — the dumb beast of burden and the man who kills and the metal blade likewise — all play their part in that work. Guilt pervades everything that acts. Everything will be judged. But not so that, after the judgment, the guilt can be put aside, dissolved. On the contrary, guilt was imposed on us by the gods, even before the law.

The Pythia offers the Athenians an enigma composed of five fragments: the Stranger must be called back from exile; the crime must be repeated, and hence exalted; the killer must be judged; the victim must be “put back on its feet, in the course of the same sacrifice in which it was killed”; the men must eat the victim’s flesh and not be squeamish about it. Only if all five of these conditions are simultaneously met, then “things might improve.” The Pythia’s answer bristles with contradictions. The Stranger is guilty but must be called back from exile; indeed, he is the essential element in any possible salvation. The ox is guilty, because it ate the offerings made to the gods, but it must reappear, set on its feet once more and stuffed with straw. (And for those moderns who tend to be overamenable to any possibility of resurrection, it should be said that the stuffed ox beneath the bloody hide is not a resurrected ox: it is merely the ox present , “in the same position it was in when it was alive,” brought back, that is, to remind us that the true offense, even before death, is disappearance.) Everybody must be committed to trial for the killing of the ox, but everybody must also, indeed immediately, eat its meat, and “without being squeamish.”

What is all this about? The gods aren’t content to foist guilt on man. That wouldn’t be enough, since guilt is part of life anyway. What the gods demand is an awareness of guilt. And this can only be achieved through sacrifice. On its own the law will serve to punish guilt but certainly not to make us aware of it, which is far more important. Sacrifice is the cosmic machine that raises our guilty lives to consciousness. After Sopatrus brought down the ax on the ox’s nape, he woke up from his rage as though from a dream and “became aware of [ sunephrónēsen ] what he had done.” He threw down the ax and fled far away. But Sopatrus was acting alone at this point; his was the action of one individual. And he was fainthearted. He buried the ox instead of eating it. His guilt took on no resonance; he didn’t go all the way.

The Pythia demanded that Sopatrus’s ax go on striking for all time and that everyone, the whole community, the pólis and every single member of it, participate in that act and be aware of committing it. Nor was that all: the community must also welcome Sopatrus into its midst — Sopatrus the Stranger — and welcome him precisely because he had committed that act, that furious slaying of a working ox that had gobbled up the bread so that it disappeared in its mouth.

Kore and Demeter are a dual being, even in name (Deó). In a dazzling transposition, every gesture made by one corresponds to a gesture of the other. When their stories approach a stasis that would prove fatal — Kore sitting on Hades’ throne in funereal immobility and Demeter sitting on “the stone that does not laugh”—something happens to dispel that rigidity: Kore, distracted by what Hades is saying, eats a pomegranate seed; Demeter, distracted by Baubo’s obscene dance, eats the initiates’ broth like a hungry traveler. It was from these two gestures that the mysteries arose. By accepting and assimilating foods that were neither nectar nor ambrosia, Demeter and Kore shared in that guilt peculiar to men, exposed themselves to that special weakness the gods had always mocked: that submission to time that causes living beings to disappear, and at the same time the complicity of those beings with their own destroyer, since man cannot live without himself making something else disappear. The mysteries are the wound that opens in the hitherto intact Olympic epidermis, a wound which then tries in vain to heal itself in ceremony after ceremony. That that wound may never heal is the hope of the initiates.

The palaiòn pénthos , the “ancient grief,” persists undiminished across time and demands that men take some liberating action. Isn’t that what the mysteries are? For we live surrounded, in the invisible air, by wandering avengers who never forget the “ancient contaminations.” It is an Olympian paradox that this oppressive vendetta affects gods as well as men. Thus, when Apollo committed his primordial crime by killing Python, we find this proudest and most distant of gods humbly imitating men, offering libations and going into exile, as would Oedipus one day and Orestes.