The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

by Roberto Calasso

  Zeus nodded. These two hardly needed to speak to each other. When the three brothers—Zeus, Hades, and Poseidon—had first divided the spoils, Zeus had been lucky: he had drawn the lot of life within the light. Poseidon had retreated beneath the waves, Hades underground. But how long could such a sharp division last? Just as Zeus sometimes meddled among the dead and Poseidon sometimes forayed forth on earth, so one day—it was inevitable—Hades would come up to Olympus to ask Zeus for a living creature. Hades reminded Zeus that they were closely related, even if they never saw each other, and now the bond between them would be closer still. He wanted to carry off a woman too, the way he so often saw his brothers doing when he looked up from his home beneath the earth. Hadn’t they decided, before drawing lots for the world, that they should think of themselves as equals? Well, for the moment it was mostly Zeus and Poseidon rampaging over their playground, the earth. Hades never appeared: he just welcomed the shades of the dead into his immense and gloomy inn. Yet he did have the most impetuous horses in the world. What were they waiting for, drumming their hooves behind the palace gates, if not abduction? As far as earth was concerned, the brothers should have equal rights in at least one thing: this business of carrying off women. And, whereas Zeus and Poseidon always thought of women in the plural, Hades would be satisfied with a single abduction. For him, he added with that irony no one would ever equal, a single woman was quite enough. He paused. Then he explained: the girl he wanted must be the Girl: Kore. He wanted her to sit on the throne of the dead, forever.

  Hades disappeared, leaving Zeus alone on Olympus. And now Zeus began to think of the past, of that part of the past that only he among the Twelve knew about, that part that always echoed in his mind whenever some event occurred that was pregnant with the future. Hades’ visit had been one of those events, perhaps the most momentous, although no one knew that as yet, and few would realize it for thousands of years.

  Zeus had been born into a world already old, dangerous, and full of divine beings. In his life he had performed only one exploit truly worthy of the name of Living Being for every living being. He was still hidden in Night’s cave. Night was the wet nurse of the gods; her very substance was ambrosia. She advised Zeus to swallow up Phanes, the Protogonos, firstborn of the sovereigns of the world, and then to swallow the other gods and goddesses born from him, and the universe too. Thus gods, goddesses, earth and starry splendor, Ocean, rivers, and the deep cavern of the underworld all wound up in Zeus’s sacred belly, which now contained everything that had been and ever would be.

  Everything grew together inside him, clutching his innards as a bat clutches to a tree or a bloodsucker to flesh. Then Zeus, who had been just another of the Titans’ children, became, alone, the beginning, the middle, and the end. He was male, but he was also an immortal Nymph. Then, in his overflowing solitude, he saw the life that had come before his birth as a child of Kronos, the father who had immediately threatened him and wanted to swallow him up. And he understood why his father had been so fierce. In the end, Kronos had only tried to do what Zeus alone had now succeeded in doing. But everything seemed luminous and clear to him now, because everything was in him. With amazement he realized he had become the only one. He lived in a state of perfect wakefulness. He went back to the times preceding his father, Kronos, further and further back, until he reached a point that was furthest, because it had been the first.

  Space no longer existed. In its place was a convex surface clad with thousands upon thousands of scales. It extended beyond anything the eye could see. Looking downward along the scales, he realized that they were attached to other scales, the same color, interwoven with them in knot after knot, each one tighter than the one before. The eye became confused, could no longer tell which of the two coiling bodies the scales belonged to. As he looked up again, toward the heads of the two knotted snakes, the body of the first snake rose, and its scales merged into something that no longer partook of the nature of a snake: it was the face of a god, the first face to reveal what a god’s face was, and on either side of it were two other huge heads, one a lion and one a bull, while from the shoulders opened immense, airy wings. The white arm of a woman was twined to the arm of the god, just as below the tails of the two snakes were knotted together. The woman’s face gazed steadily at the god’s, while with her other arm, behind which trembled an immense wing, she stretched out toward the farthest extremity of everything: and where the tips of her fingernails reached, there Everything ended. They were a royal and motionless couple: they were Time-Without-Age and Ananke.

  From the coitus hidden in the knot of their interwoven bodies, Ether, Chaos, and Night were born. A shadowy vapor lay over the two winged snakes. Time-Without-Age hardened this gloomy fog into a shell that gradually took on an oblong shape. And, as it did so, a light spread from the shell, fluttering in the void like a white tunic or a shred of mist. Then, breaking away from Ananke, the snake wrapped himself around this luminous egg. Did he mean to crush it?

  Finally the shape split open. Out poured a radiant light. Appearance itself appeared. You couldn’t help but be invaded by light, but you couldn’t make out the figure it came from. Only Night saw him: four eyes and four horns, golden wings, the heads of a ram, a bull, and a lion, and a snake spread across a young and human body, a phallus and a vagina, hooves. Having broken the shell, the father snake wound himself around his son’s body. Above, the father’s head looked down on his son; beneath, a boy’s fine face looked into the light emanating from his own body. It was Phanes, the Protogonos, firstborn of the world of appearance, the “key to the mind.”

  Phanes’ life was like no other life since. Alone in the light, “he grazed in his breast.” He didn’t need to look at anything but the light, because everything was in him. Copulating with himself, he impregnated his own sacred belly. He gave birth to another snake, Echidna, with a splendid woman’s face framed by a vast head of hair. From her sweet-smelling cheeks, from the incessant flashing of her eyes, she emanated violence. Speckled scales, like the waves of a swollen sea, stretched right up to her soft, white breasts. Then Phanes begot Night, who had already existed before him. But Phanes had to beget her just the same, because he was everything. He made Night his concubine. He was a guest in her cave. Other children were born: Uranus and Ge. Little by little, with the light constantly pouring from the top of his head, Phanes made the places where gods and men would live. Things were ushered into the world of appearance.

  Time passed, and Phanes stayed in the cave, scepter in hand. The world’s first king, he didn’t want to reign. He handed the scepter to Night. Then went off alone. Now that the cosmos existed, Phanes rode his coach and horses up onto the back of the sky. And there he stayed for a long time, alone. Occasionally he would ride across the crest of the world. But no one could see him. Inside the heavens, the beings multiplied.

  Ever since Phanes had withdrawn to the place farthest from life on earth—Zeus reflected—events had begun to resemble one another. Time and again there would be a king, children, enemies, women who helped and betrayed. He remembered the never-ending coitus of Uranus and Ge, their children chased back into their mother’s womb. And Ge, who, deep inside herself, felt she was suffocating and brooded on her bitterness. He remembered the serrated sickle, made of a white, unyielding metal, in the hands of their son Kronos, who would later become his father, and Uranus’s testicles sinking into the sea. Circles formed on the surface of the water, and one of them was edged with white foam. From the middle rose Aphrodite, together with her first serving maids, Apate and Zelos, Deceit and Rivalry. Uranus had been a cruel father, and Kronos, who took his place, was likewise cruel. But his mind was supple and powerful. Kronos possessed the measures of the cosmos.

  By this time many beings had spread out across space, both on high and below: the Titans, the Cyclopes, the Hecatoncheires. And Kronos went on generating children, coupling with Rhea. So Zeus was born, just one of many. And, like the others, he ought to have been swallow
ed up by his father. But Rhea hid him in a cave—and it was then that she took on the second name of Demeter. Of his early infancy, what Zeus remembered most clearly was a din of cymbals coming from the dazzling light at the entrance to the cave, the outline of a woman waving those cymbals about, and the shadows of young warriors dancing and shouting. Then Night, whose cave it was, explained to baby Zeus that he was to become the fifth sovereign of the gods. But Zeus didn’t know who the other four had been. All he knew was that his father was waiting within the light to devour him.

  Just as Ge had given the white sickle to her son Kronos so that he could cut off Uranus’s testicles, so it was Night who thought up the trick that allowed Zeus to see off Kronos. It was the male, then, who acted. But only the female had the mêtis, the intelligence that preordains action in the silence of the mind. Night prepared a big feast for Kronos. Numerous serving men and women went back and forth, laden with ambrosia, nectar, and honey. Gratified and solitary, Kronos went on eating his honey, reveling in sensual pleasure. Then he got up, intoxicated, and went to lie down under an oak tree. His face still wore the rapture of a pleasure that knows no end. Zeus, meanwhile, had climbed up into the sky on the back of a goat. Now he approached his father, treading silently. He looked at him and wound a chain around his body. But that was only the beginning of Night’s plan. Zeus must now grab hold of everything wandering about in the world, bind it with a chain of gold, and swallow it. When the skies, the seas, the earth, and the divine beings had disappeared in his belly, it occurred to Zeus that one last exploit remained to be accomplished: he must swallow Phanes. So he climbed onto the world’s back, where Phanes lived alone with his horses. There was no need to hatch a trick this time, because Phanes was absorbed in self-contemplation, and unarmed.

  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 bega
n 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:

  … bull

  father of snake and father of snake bull,

  in the mountain the hidden one, oh herdsman, the goad.

  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.