Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

When the gods come into contact with guilt, they lower their gaze toward men and begin to copy their gestures so as to free themselves from it. A parallelism thus develops between the way men imitate gods and vice versa. Men, writes Strabo, “imitate the gods chiefly when they are doing good; or rather, when they are happy.” The gods, in contrast, imitate men when they do or suffer evil (and for the Greeks the two things were bound by the same knot: adikeîn, adikeîsthai ) or, rather, when they are unhappy. We have evidence of such unhappiness on the part of the gods in “what we hear tell of the gods in the myths and hymns — their abductions, secret wanderings, exile, servitude.” It was precisely with these elements, these precious clues, indeed the only clues to the experiences of the gods on earth, that men composed the mysteries. Here every gesture achieves its maximum density and enjoins us to silence: in the mysteries men repeat the gestures the gods made as they imitated men in order to free themselves from divine guilt. Hence the vertigo of the mysteries. More even than in their happiness, men approach the gods in their celebration of the gestures the gods made when they were unhappy.

For those not initiated in the mysteries, they seem to have to do with the immortality of men; for the initiates, the mysteries are a moment when the gods become tangled with death. “Many things related to death and mourning are to be found mixed together in the initiation ceremonies,” says Plutarch. But that most dangerous turncoat of the pagan world, Clement of Alexandria, is even more precise, indeed brutal: “The mysteries can be summed up in just two words,” he says, “killings and burials.”

It is not the men who pass through the mysteries who are immortal but the mysteries themselves. When, in Smyrna, the public speaker Aelius Aristides hears that a raid by Costobocis has devastated Eleusis, he says: “The battles on sea and the battles on land and the laws and the constitutions and the arrogance and the tongues and all the rest have melted away: only the mysteries remain.”

Pelasgian: thus the Greeks designated the erratic block of their origins. There were Pelasgians on Samothrace: they celebrated mysteries with cranes and pygmies; they were the first to square stones from which young heads and erect phalluses would protrude. There were Pelasgians in Arcadia, Aeolis, Lemnos, Imbros, Argos, Athens. For thousands of years, from Ephorus right through to Klages, scholars have been obsessed by the quest to identify the Pelasgians. But Pelasgian man is elusive. You can never pin anything on him: he is always the mute “neighbor” ( pélas ), the thing language and history have split away from. Without dwelling on the point, Herodotus remarks that, “being Pelasgian, the Athenians changed their language when they were absorbed into the Greek family.” Thus the Athenians made two claims about themselves: that they were autochthonous, born from the soil, because they were Pelasgian; and at the same time that they had rejected the language of the soil, the lost Pelasgian language, which Herodotus himself already found incomprehensible.

What importance this might have had, Herodotus doesn’t say. But when, as a curious traveler, he arrived in Dodona, this is what the three priestesses of the sanctuary, Promeneia, Timarete, and Nicandra, told him. Long before, at a certain moment in the ancient history of the sanctuary, a group of Pelasgians arrived at Zeus’s oak (but did they call him Zeus? or was he just theós ?). They had come to consult the oracle. Hitherto, the Pelasgians had “offered sacrifices of every kind to the gods and prayed to them, but without distinguishing between them with names and titles, because they didn’t know that any such things existed.” Now some sailor or other had come back from Egypt bringing the names of the gods with him. But was it right to use them? And were these unknown names the correct ones? The oak tree told them that the names were right and that it was right to use them. Zeus is the god who allows the other gods to be named. Zeus is the god who allows things to appear.

The story the three priestesses of Dodona told Herodotus is also the fable that ushers in the opposition and superimposition of nómos and phýsis , law (or convention) and nature, and hence the underlying structure of all thought from then on. Only that day, in Dodona, did the Greeks become Greek: if by Greek we mean nothing more than the coexistence of a dark, obscure background, like the rustling of a tree, dedicated to any and every power, with a sound that comes from a foreign land and forever superimposes on that background the sovereign caprice of a name. The Pelasgians went from a mute homage to the gods to an homage in which they evoked those gods with foreign names they knew nothing about. Thus did the Greeks tense their metaphysical bow; such was their style as they raised it to their shoulders.

Zeus was not to have a temple in Dodona, the most ancient of oracles, until the fifth century. The center of the sanctuary was an oak, protected by a circle of tripods. It looked out over a broad, flattish valley. At each side of the valley rose long, rolling hills, hills like so many others, their slopes mottled with green patches that grew thicker and thicker until they formed a solid green carpet at the bottom of the valley. Dodona was not a prominent, strategic, exposed place, like Delphi; nor was it a blissful place, like Olympia. Dodona had no profile, whereas Delphi was nothing but. But Delphi was Apollo. And everything that is not Apollo is an enemy of Apollo. By contrast, Zeus is flat, accepting and welcoming everything.

Zeus has no character, he is the support beneath every character. Just as his statue in Olympia was the support for all the shapes and parasites on it, his place admits of every other place. And his voice, the rustling of the oak, is the closest thing imaginable to undifferentiated sound, a voice that more than any other on earth recalls the sea. Only Zeus is able to transform the flat background of existence into something marvelous. All the other gods have their shapes, their signs, their profiles. Zeus has the background, and the background noise. Zeus is the commonplace supporting the unique. The unique cannot exist without that support. But the support can exist alone. The unique tends to be jealous, because there are things that don’t belong to it. The support tends to be indifferent, because everything rests upon it.

On the small lead plates people would use to consult the oracle at Dodona, we read: “Did Pistus steal the wool from the mattress?” “Eurydamus would like to know where he might find his lost cup.” But, alongside these trivial requests referring to everyday objects, we also find a quite different kind: “Which god should I ask to help me do what I have in mind?” “Peithione would like to know whether he would do well to pray and offer sacrifices to Asclepius.” “Hermone the Corinthian would like to know what god he should invoke to have good children by his wife Cratea.”

In Delphi, people consulted the Pythia to find out what Apollo thought about something. In Dodona, they consulted the oak to have Zeus guide them through the tangle of the gods. Those coming to the oracle weren’t anxious about whether they should make a sacrifice or not. They were anxious because they were afraid of making their sacrifice to the wrong god. And there is nothing as sad as a sacrifice made to the wrong god. So much of our lives is made up of them. It was precisely to avoid mistakes of that kind that people followed the footsteps of the Hyperboreans to Dodona. Like some supreme post office, Zeus sorted their requests and sent off the supplicants to this or that Olympian or hero, suggesting into which vein of the invisible their offerings should be poured. No matter was too small, no question too big to be put to Zeus. Apollo wove conspiracies with those who came to him, greeted them in a temple crammed with spoils. Zeus resided in the trunk of an oak tree, and from there, with the neutrality of a guide, pointed the way to recovering the lost cup, the way to gaining the favor of the god most suitable for the occasion.