The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (39 page)

That immense void yawning beneath the surface of the earth was testimony to a blasphemous euphoria. It was a way of omitting, even obliterating the celestial machinery, the mathematical works of the Artificer. It was a first cataclysm wrought by poetry: the cosmos was made oblivious of itself. But with the Orphics, followers of the Book, and later with Plato, Chaldaean wisdom took its revenge on Homer. The roving islands of celestial bodies, the frayed progress of the Milky Way, the soft sounds of the spheres all regained their privileges. The wonderful flatness of the Homeric vision was lost in the ordered chasms that once again opened up between one heaven and the next. Hades was winkled out from his moldy underworld to be catapulted up into the atmosphere and settled in the cone of shadow between earth and moon, as if the lining of the planet had been turned inside out and shaken skyward, dispatching the multitude of souls it housed out into a turbulent dark. Such was the immense, windblown waiting room of the dead.

There is a radical and shocking divergence between Homer and all later theologians, Hesiod included. Homer, as Plutarch remarks, refuses to distinguish between gods and
daímones:
“he seems to use the two words as equivalents and speaks of the gods as
daímones
.” This makes it impossible to blame the
daímones
for the murkier activities of the gods and precludes any idea of a ladder of being, on which, through a series of purificatory acts, one might ascend toward the divine, or alternatively the divine might descend in orderly fashion toward man. This idea, which forms the point of departure for every form of Platonism, is already implicit in Hesiod’s division of beings into four categories: men, heroes,
daímones
, gods.

But Homer ignores such mediation. For him the word “hero” can be substituted more generically with “man,” nor did he see any need to introduce a separate class of
daímones
. He thus brought the extremes into immediate contact, leaving nothing to soften the violence of the collision. Yet, as one reads once again in Plutarch, “those who refuse
to admit the existence of a class of
daímones
alienate the things of men from the things of the gods, making it impossible for them to mix, and eliminating, as Plato said, ‘the interpretative and ministering role of nature,’ or alternatively they force us to make a general hotchpotch, introducing gods into our human passions and goings-on and dragging them down to our level whenever it suits us, the way the women of Thessaly are supposed to be able to pull down the moon.” Never perhaps as in this passage from the late and knowing Plutarch was the invincible scandal of Homer, the enemy of mediation, so clearly exposed. When the Christian Fathers railed against Homeric debasement, they were really doing no more than dusting off Plato’s sense of scandal, and likewise that of his followers, here so lucidly summed up by Plutarch. The course of Greek civilization thus reveals itself as a process in which its founding authority, Homer himself, becomes ever more unacceptable.

Timarchus was a young disciple of Socrates who wanted to “know the power of his master’s demon.” He was “courageous and had only recently had his first taste of philosophy.” So he decided to put himself to a fearful test: he would climb down into Trophonius’s cave in Lebadeia, where Kore had once gone to play with the Nymph Hercynia, who kept a goose. When the Nymph was distracted for a moment, the goose disappeared into a cave hidden behind a stone. So Kore went into the cave to look for the bird, caught it, and lifted the stone, upon which a flood of water came rushing from the darkness. Of all the variations of Kore’s adventures, this was the most remote and secret, so secret that no one knew about it: the only remaining record of the affair was the statue of a young girl with a goose in her arm in Hercynia’s temple.

Having reached Lebadeia, Timarchus spent a few days purifying himself in the house of Good Fortune and Good Spirit. He bathed in the freezing waters of the river Hercynia. He ate the meat of the animals offered up as sacrifices.
And every time the priests sacrificed another victim, a seer would read the entrails to see if Trophonius was well-disposed toward the visitor and would receive him kindly. One night Timarchus was taken from the house and led to the river. Two youths washed him with the deference of slaves. Then they led him to some priests, near where the water rose. They told him to drink from two springs. The first they called the water of Forgetfulness. The other was the water of Memory. Then Timarchus set off toward the oracle, dressed in a linen tunic with ribbons. On his feet he wore the heavy local boots. Two bronze poles linked by a chain stood in front of the oracle. Behind was the cave: a narrow, artificial opening, like an oven for baking bread.

Timarchus was carrying a light ladder and some honey cakes for the snakes. He slipped into the opening feet first and immediately felt himself being sucked into the darkness—where the snakes were waiting for him. For a long time he lay in the dark. Then he realized that the plates of his skull were slowly coming apart. His spirit slipped out, breathing freely as though after long compression, and began to rise. It swelled and spread. It was a sail in the sky. The sea it plowed was dotted with “islands sparkling with delicate fire,” large islands, though of different sizes, and all round. High above, he saw the face of the moon approaching. Persephone was rushing across the sky with her dogs, the planets, behind her. From beneath, where the earth was, rose a murmur of groans, as though of a never-ending but remote tumult.

On climbing down into Trophonius’s cave, Timarchus had imagined he was going toward Hades. But now he realized that Hades had been turned inside out into the sky, become the shadowy cone between the moon and the earth, and the earth was nothing more than the continuation of Hades into the abyss. But then why should the two worlds be so different from each other after all, given that both were places of exile? As the spirit of Timarchus thus reflected, he saw the place, near the moon, where the cone of shadow narrowed to a point, and saw that it was here that
the drifting souls were gathering. They were trying to land on that woman’s face, the moon, despite the fact that it grew more and more terrifying the nearer they got. The face seemed to be made up with an extremely fine powder, which the dead recognized as the substance of other souls. The moment they tried to grab hold of some wrinkle on the lunar surface, blinded by the white light, many would find themselves dragged back by an irresistible undertow, until they were falling through space again. Yet it was there that salvation lay, and they had come so close. Had they managed to set foot on this outpost of Persephone, they would one day have undergone a second death, more gradual and more delicate than the first. One day Persephone would have separated their minds,
noûs
, from their souls, the way Apollo could prize the armor from a warrior’s shoulders. Then, when the substance of their souls had been left behind on the white dust, and keeping only “husks and dreams of life,” they would have emerged on the other side of the moon, where the Elysian Fields stretch across a land terrestrial beings have never seen. When Timarchus came back, feet first, from the oracular oven, his body was glowing with light. Three months later he died in Athens.

Plato’s attitude toward the myths is one that the more lucid of the moderns sometimes achieve. The more obtuse, on the other hand, still argue around the notion of
belief
, a fatal word when it comes to mythology, as if the credence the ancients lent to the myths had anything to do with the superstitious conviction with which philologists of the age of Wilamowitz believed in the lighting of an electric bulb on their desks. No, Socrates himself cleared up this point shortly before his death: we enter the mythical when we enter the realm of risk, and myth is the enchantment we generate in ourselves at such moments. More than a belief, it is a magical bond that tightens around us. It is a spell the soul casts on itself. “This risk is fine indeed, and what we must somehow do with these things is enchant [
epádein
]
ourselves.”
Epádein
is the verb that designates the “enchanting song.” “These things,” as Socrates casually puts it, are the fables, the myths.

In Greece, myth escapes from ritual like a genie from a bottle. Ritual is tied to gesture, and gestures are limited: what else can you do once you’ve burned your offerings, poured your libations, bowed, greased yourself, competed in races, eaten, copulated? But if the stories start to become independent, to develop names and relationships, then one day you realize that they have taken on a life of their own. The Greeks were unique among the peoples of the Mediterranean in not passing on their stories via a priestly authority. They were rambling stories, which is partly why they so easily got mixed up. And the Greeks became so used to hearing the same stories told with different plots that it got to be a perfectly normal thing for them. Nor was there any final authority to turn to for a correct version. Homer was the ultimate name one could evoke: but Homer hadn’t told all the stories.

This flight of myth from ritual recalled Zeus’s constant adulterous adventures. Through those incursions, he who was father of Dike, and had her sit on the throne on his right hand as personification of Justice and Order, revealed himself to be “against justice” and to harbor “thoughts opposed to order.” The revelation that license was not perennially condemned but might be acceptable, at least if it came from above: that was the gift of the age of Zeus. Divine incursions were an unexpected overflowing of reality. Thus, in contrast to the harsh coercion of ritual, history was a constant overflowing, leaving, visible in its wake, those relics we call characters.

Much was implicit in the Greek myths that has been lost to us today. When we look at the night sky, our first impression is one of amazement before a random profusion scattered
across a dark background. Plato could still recognize “the friezes in the sky.” And he maintained that those friezes were the “most beautiful and exact” images in the visible order. But when we see a sash of fraying white, the Milky Way, girdle of some giantess, we are incapable of perceiving any order, let alone a movement within that order. No, we immediately start to think of distances, of the inconceivable light-years. We have lost the capacity, the optical capacity even, to place myths in the sky. Yet, despite being reduced to just their fragrant rind of stories, we still feel the Greek myths are cohesive and interconnected, right down to the humblest variant, as if we knew why they were so. And we don’t know. A trait of Hermes, or Artemis, or Aphrodite, or Athena forms a part of the figure, as though the pattern of the original material were emerging in the random scatter of the surviving rags.

We shouldn’t be too concerned about having lost many of the secrets of the myths, although we must learn to sense their absence, the vastness of what remains undeciphered. To be nostalgic would be like wanting to see, on raising our eyes to the sky, seven Sirens, each intoning a different note around each of the seven heavens. Not only do we not see the Sirens but we can’t even make out the heavens anymore. And yet we can still draw that tattered cloth around us, still immerse ourselves in the mutilated stories of the gods. And in the world, as in our minds, the same cloth is still being woven.

For centuries people have spoken of the Greek myths as of something to be rediscovered, reawoken. The truth is it is the myths that are still out there waiting to wake us and be seen by us, like a tree waiting to greet our newly opened eyes.

Myths are made up of actions that include their opposites within themselves. The hero kills the monster, but even as he does so we perceive that the opposite is also true: the
monster kills the hero. The hero carries off the princess, yet even as he does we perceive that the opposite is also true: the hero deserts the princess. How can we be sure? The variants tell us. They keep the mythical blood in circulation. But let’s imagine that all the variants of a certain myth have been lost, erased by some invisible hand. Would the myth still be the same? Here one arrives at the hairline distinction between myth and every other kind of narrative. Even without its variants, the myth includes its opposite. How do we know? The knowledge intrinsic in the novel tells us so. The novel, a narrative deprived of variants, attempts to recover them by making the single text to which it is entrusted more dense, more detailed. Thus the action of the novel tends, as though toward its paradise, to the inclusion of its opposite, something the myth possesses as of right.

The mythographer lives in a permanent state of chronological vertigo, which he pretends to want to resolve. But while on the one table he puts generations and dynasties in order, like some old butler who knows the family history better than his masters, you can be sure that on another table the muddle is getting worse and the threads ever more entangled. No mythographer has ever managed to put his material together in a consistent sequence, yet all set out to impose order. In this, they have been faithful to the myth.

The mythical gesture is a wave which, as it breaks, assumes a shape, the way dice form a number when we toss them. But, as the wave withdraws, the unvanquished complications swell in the undertow, and likewise the muddle and the disorder from which the next mythical gesture will be formed. So myth allows of no system. Indeed, when it first came into being, system itself was no more than a flap on a god’s cloak, a minor bequest of Apollo.

The Greek myths were stories passed on with variants. The writer—whether it was Pindar or Ovid—rewrote them, in a different way each time, omitting here, adding there. But
new variants had to be rare, and unobtrusive. So each writer would build up and thin out the body of the stories. So the myth lived on in literature.

The sublime author of
The Sublime
traced literature back to
megalophyía
, a “greatness of nature,” which sometimes manages to light up a similar nature in the mind of the reader. But how can nature, which “loves to hide,” accept the cumbersome conspicuousness of the rhetorical machine? How escape the ostentatiousness of the
téchnē
? The
chassé-croisé
between Nature and Art, which was to generate comment for two millennia and would be condensed in seventeenth-century capitals, was executed in a single sentence way back at the height of classical decadence: “Only then is art perfect, when it looks like nature, while nature strikes home when it conceals art within itself.”