The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (29 page)

Then, little by little, Zeus vomited everything that had settled in his belly out into the light. Back came the trees and the rivers, the stars and the subterranean fire, the divine beings and the beasts. Everything looked the same as before, yet everything was different. From the grain of dust right up to the immense bodies revolving in the heavens, everything was linked by an invisible chain. Everything appeared to be coated in light, as if born for the first time. But Zeus knew this wasn’t so: through him, on the contrary, everything had been born for the last time.

The sovereign gods suffer from a nostalgia for the state of their forerunner, Phanes. And they try to return to it. Zeus’s nostalgia for Phanes takes the form of the snake. Only Zeus could remember the image of the two intertwined snakes, before the world existed. And Phanes had appeared from among the coils of a snake. After Zeus had expelled the world from within him, he felt the desire to couple with his mother. That desire was prompted by a distant memory. His mother fled, and Zeus chased her tirelessly. In the end, Rhea Demeter turned herself into a snake. So then Zeus became a snake too. He closed on his mother and wrapped his scales around hers in a Heracleotic knot, the same knot two snakes would one day make on Hermes’ staff. It was a violent thing to do, so much so that one ancient commentator tried to demonstrate that the name Rhea Demeter (Deó) came from
dēioûn
, “to devastate.” But why did the god decide to make that particular knot to rape his mother? Zeus was remembering something and wanted to repeat it. Just as men would one day recall a divine precedent in everything they did, so Zeus recalled those gods before the gods whom he had been able to contemplate when he swallowed Phanes and all his powers.

Zeus repeated the most majestic image he knew, the oldest his memory went back to: the image of Time-Without-Age and Ananke intertwined in the Heracleotic knot before the world was born. So the rape of Rhea Demeter, the model for so many of Zeus’s later adventures, was not a prototype of his own invention but rather a gesture back toward a preexisting past that only Zeus could have known about. To repeat it was a pledge of fidelity. From snake to snake the world went on propagating itself in era after era. Every time Zeus transformed himself into a snake, time’s arrow flew backward, to bury itself in the origin of things. At which the world seemed to hold its breath, listening for that backward movement that marks the passage from one era to another. And so it was when, from the union of Zeus and Rhea Demeter in the form of snakes, Persephone was born, “the girl whose name cannot be uttered,” the unique girl to whom Zeus would transmit the secret of the snake.

At birth, Persephone would have been horrible to anybody, but not to her father, who was the only one able to look at her in her first form. She had two faces, four eyes, and horns that sprouted from her forehead. Neither men nor gods could have understood the glory of Persephone. But Zeus understood it. For, seeing her, he remembered how Phanes had risen to the light. And just as a snake had once wound itself around Phanes’ radiant flesh, so one day Zeus went to his daughter and wrapped her in his coils, once again assuming the form of a snake. It happened in Crete. Rhea Demeter had hidden her daughter in a cave, and there Persephone wove a garment strewn with flowers, working on a loom of stone. The entrance to the cave was guarded by snakes. But another snake, Zeus, put them to sleep by staring into their eyes as he slithered into the cave. And, before Persephone could defend herself, her white skin was tight against the scales of a snake, who licked and dribbled amorously. In the darkness of the cave, Persephone’s horrible body radiated light, just as Phanes’ once had. From that violent coupling Zagreus was born, the first Dionysus.

The Christian Fathers did not believe in the copulation of snake Zeus with Demeter. Their version of events was even more vicious. Clement is brusque and elliptic in his account. But the African Arnobius couldn’t resist the story. He bubbles over with the eloquence of a baroque preacher abandoning himself to
delectatio morosa
. In his version, Zeus copulates with Demeter not as a snake at all but as a bull. “
Fit ex deo taurus
.” From the moment Zeus becomes a bull, Arnobius’s prose takes off: “
Cum in Cererem suam matrem libidinibus improbis atque inconcussis aestuaret …
”
Aestuare:
a flood spreading out, a fire raging: such is the lust of Zeus. He is a god who tricks his mother by transforming himself into a bull so he can rape her. And that’s when Demeter’s anger flares; that, and not when another son of Kronos carries off her daughter, is when the goddess gets the name Brimo.

So it was after that rape that Demeter first paralyzed both the gods and the world: “
adlegatur deorum universus ordo
.” And it was then that Zeus, to placate her, resorted to a cheap trick, not unlike the one men would later use to placate the gods. He chose a ram with big testicles and cut them off. Then he went back to his mother with a sad, repentant look. Pretending they were his own, he tossed the ram’s testicles onto his mother’s lap. The sacrificial substitution, that powerful weapon men would one day use to defend themselves from the gods, was thus invented by Zeus. And Demeter was placated.

Persephone was born in the tenth month. Zeus watched her grow. When she was strong, flourishing, and “swollen with lymph,” he felt an overwhelming desire to do the same thing over again: “
redit ad priores actus
.” This time he transforms himself into a snake, wraps his daughter in immense coils, and, gripping her in a ferocious lock, plays with her tenderly and whispers his adoration through their coitus, “
mollissimis ludit atque adulatur amplexibus
.” Impregnated with the seed of a bull, Demeter had given birth
to a girl. Filled with the seed of Zeus as snake, Persephone gave birth to a bull.

The cosmos pulses back and forth between snake and bull. An enormously long time would pass before the snake, Time-Without-Age, was followed by the drumming of the bull, who was Zeus. Then a much shorter time before the bull Zeus coupled with Demeter to generate a woman in whom the nature of the snake pulsed once again, Persephone. And hardly any time at all, the time it takes for desire to flare, before Zeus, realizing that the baby Persephone had become a girl, transformed himself into a snake, coupled with his daughter, and generated Zagreus, the bull, the first Dionysus.

The story of the world was all contained in this becoming a bull, then a snake once again, to generate another bull. Told by Zeus, it was a story that began with a bull and ended with a bull. Told by Time-Without-Age, it was a story that began with a snake and waited to coil itself up in a snake once more. Time-Without-Age has been waiting ever since for:

Theós
, the indeterminate divine, was an invasion, of body and mind. It was our becoming intimate with what is most alien. And nothing is more alien than the snake. A hand lifted the snake toward the neck. The hand slipped the snake under the tunic of the initiate. From the throat, down the cleavage between the breasts, if it was a girl, or across the taut chest, if it was a boy, the snake slithered into darkness, hidden beneath the cloth, toward the belly. Did it linger there? Did it wrap itself around the youth’s waist? It slid over the thighs and poked out down below, between the legs. “
Theòs dià kólpou
”: “god across the belly.”

The sea is the continuum, the perfection of the undifferentiated. Its emissary on earth is the snake. Where the snake is, there gushes water. Its eye is liquid. Beneath its coils flows the water of the underworld. Forever. Being sinuous, it has no need of joints. The same pattern covers its whole skin; its scales are uniform, its motion undulating and constantly self-renewing, like waves. The snake is to the bull as the sea to the land. The earth emerges from the sea, as the bull from the snake. To carry off Europa, the bull Zeus emerged from the sea and then plunged back into it again. Fending off the waves, Europa had one foot immersed in the sea, one hand gripping the animal’s back.

Where force reigns, the spirit is alien, detached from both earth and water. But Apollo and Athena were envious of force, that force which, by the time they were born, had already been pushed back to the ends of the earth. There, near the snaking coil of Oceanus, sleepless or lethargic creatures could still be found, lurking in caves or on mountains, creatures that still possessed an unextinguished force. Apollo and Athena knew they would have to flush out those creatures, kill them, and make that force their own.

Bearers of an opposite perfection, new and unimagined, Apollo and Athena were jealous of the perfection of the undifferentiated. But, in line with the division of the spoils between the sons of Kronos, they couldn’t intervene in the watery realm of Poseidon, nor in the subterranean kingdom of Hades. That left the earth as their playground. And meant they would have to play out their game with the snake. Athena killed Gorgon, who was crowned with snakes. Apollo killed Python, coiled around the spring of Castalia. Gorgon’s snakes stirred in the wind on Athena’s breast. They had become the fringe of the aegis. Python’s teeth and bones were kept in the bronze pot of the tripod, from which the Pythia chanted Apollo’s prophecies. Python’s scales were wrapped around the
omphalós
, the navel stone. The navel is the
point, the only and indispensable point, where the perfect links up with the perfection of the undifferentiated. It is Europa’s foot dipped in the sea.

Two sovereign lines descend from Zeus: that of Dionysus and that of Apollo. Dionysus’s line is more obscure than Apollo’s; only rarely does it emerge from the shadow. Since he is both snake and bull, all history before Zeus is recalled in him and begins again with him. Apollo’s line is the more visible, yet even more secret than Dionysus’s when it comes to Apollo’s transgression against his father. Apollo is neither snake nor bull, but he who kills snake and bull, either loosing off the arrows himself, as with Python at Delphi, or sending his emissary, Theseus, to bury his sword in the Minotaur in Crete or capture the bull in Marathon.

Dionysus and Apollo: one is the weapon, the other uses the weapon. Ever since they appeared, Psyche has been running back and forth into the arms of first one, then the other.

When Hades asked to carry off Kore, Zeus sensed the time had come for a new ring to be added to the knot of the snakes. But this time it wasn’t up to him to act. He would be a consenting witness. The invisible would now reassert its rights over the body of the visible more strictly than before: their dealings with each other, long diluted and mingled together in life on earth, would find a new center of gravity.

Hades was claiming the supremacy of a world that was
other
: isolated, separate, and silent. But this other world culminated in the flower of the visible, and that flower was Persephone. With her, the secret of the snake, a secret passed on from snake to snake right up to snake Zeus, would now go over to the invisible world, and Zeus himself would have to surrender it if it was to go on functioning. Hades’ visit was prelude to a moment of enormous imbalance, both on Olympus and on earth.