Lucian claims he was earning “between seventy and eighty thousand drachmas a year.” Some people were so thirsty for knowledge that they would ask the oracle ten or even more questions. One person who came was Rutilianus, Rome’s representative in the region, an experienced man but always ready to worship any old stone so long as it had been anointed and crowned. Alexander soon convinced Rutilianus that he should marry his daughter, telling him she was the offspring of his love for Selene. Yes, Endymion’s good fortune had been his too; it had happened one night when the moon had shone down on his white and sleeping body. Thus the sixty-year-old Rutilianus turned up as the groom, offering huge sacrifices to the moon, whom he imagined was his mother-in-law. Alexander loved faking religious mysteries in the sanctuary, his favorite being his own birth. On the third day of the wedding celebrations, he organized a show of his lovemaking with Selene. He pretended to be asleep in front of the crowd, while from the ceiling, as though from the sky, the attractive Rutilia, wife of one of his administrators, was lowered onto him. Alexander and Rutilia were lovers, and now they had the chance to fondle each other with impunity in front of an audience that included Rutilia’s husband. Every now and then, apparently by chance, Alexander would let the crowd get a glimpse of one of his thighs, which glittered with gold. So people began to whisper that the soul of Pythagoras must have transmigrated into him. By now he had scores of people working for him. Groups of young choirboys were drafted in from Paphlagonia for long periods of service in the sanctuary. He called them “the ones within the kiss.” But he made a point of not kissing any of them once they were over eighteen. Thanks to his good relations with the Emperor Verus, he was able to have coins minted with a design showing himself with Asclepius’s bands and the sword of Perseus, a tribute to his ancestors. On the other side of the coin was a snake with a human head.
Alexander had prophesied he would live to be a hundred and fifty and die only when struck by lightning. In the event, he died before he was seventy when a leg turned gangrenous and became infested by worms. To anoint his head with balsam, the doctors had to remove his wig. Who would inherit the sanctuary now? The ever faithful Rutilianus decided that no one should take the prophet’s place. Before his death, Alexander had managed to get the authorities in Rome to change the name of Abonuteichos. Now it was to be known as Ionopolis. People went on practicing Alexander’s cult there for about a century. Even today the city is called Inebolu. We shall never know if Alexander was really the sordid con man Lucian describes, or a wise man who in latter days chose to reenact the primordial scene. There where pagan self-parody and Christian inquisition rage, where the shameful and the ridiculous reign supreme, the most ancient secret will often lie concealed.
In the solitude of the primordial world, the affairs of the gods took place on an empty stage, with no watching eyes to mirror them. There was a rustling, but no clamor of voices. Then, from a certain point on (but at what point? and why?), the backdrop began to flicker, the air was invaded by a golden sprinkling of new beings, the shrill, high-pitched cry of scores of raised voices. Dactyls, Curetes, Corybants, Telchines, Silens, Cabiri, Satyrs, Maenads, Bacchants, Lenaeans, Thyiads, Bassarides, Mimallones, Naiads, Nymphs, Titires: who were all these beings? To evoke one of their names is to evoke them all. They are the helpers, ministers, guardians, nurses, tutors, and spectators of the gods. The metamorphic vortex is placated; once surrounded by this noisy and devoted crowd, the gods agree to settle down into their familiar forms. Sometimes that crowd will appear as a pack of murderers, sometimes as an assembly of craftsmen, sometimes as a dance troupe, sometimes as a herd of beasts.
That worshiping crowd was the first community, the first group, the first entity in which one name was used for everybody. We don’t even know whether they are gods, daímones, or human beings. But what is it that unites them, what makes them a single group, even when different and distant from one another? They are the initiated, the ones who have seen. They are those who let themselves be touched by the divine. Which of them came first? We don’t know, since for every god there is always a corresponding god or goddess—in Asia, or Thrace, or Crete—who predates them and who likewise surrounds himself with such beings. But of all of them we could say that they were honey thieves.
“People say there is a sacred cave in Crete, a cave inhabited by bees, where, as myth would have it, Rhea gave birth to Zeus. There is a sacred law that no one, whether man or god, may set foot there. Every year, at a certain time, a dazzling flame flashes from the cave. The myth says this happens when the blood Zeus spilled at birth periodically boils. The cave is inhabited by the sacred bees who fed Zeus as a baby. Laius, Celeus, Cerberus, and Egolius took the risk of going into the cave in the hope of stealing a big store of honey; they had protected themselves with bronze armor and began to take the honey; then they saw Zeus’s swaddling clothes and their armor began to split across their bodies. Zeus thundered and brandished his lightning bolt, but the Moirai and Themis held him back; the holiness of the place would have suffered had someone died there; so Zeus turned the intruders into birds; and they became the progenitors of those species which bear omens: the solitary sparrow, the green woodpecker, the cerberus, and the barn owl. When any of these birds appear, they offer truer and better omens than other birds, because they have seen the blood of Zeus.”
Zeus’s birthplace, the Cretan cave, was thus out of bounds to both gods and men. And it was the place where one could not die. That cave held a secret beyond any other. When a rite is secret, it is so because in this way it “imitates the nature of the divine, which eludes our perception.” But here the divine wished to elude even the perception of the gods. What was it that Zeus had to conceal from the other gods at all costs? The four young Cretans stepped into a dark space dripping with sweetness. The rock was spread thick with honey. The honey stuck to the rock the way their bodies stuck to their bronze armor. In the shadows they noticed some bloody swaddling clothes. When he opened his eyes at birth, these same rocks had been the first thing Zeus saw. He was like any baby then: “stained with blood and with the waters of his mother’s womb, more like someone just killed than someone just born.” The four young Cretans were thinking about this, about those bloodstains in the honey—might there have been a murder?—when they felt their bronze armor splitting apart. Zeus thundered. There was a great light.
In Crete the secret had always been there for everybody to see. Up on a mountain they would show people Zeus’s tomb. They told the truth one must not tell. No one believed them. Ever after, people would say: Cretans, liars all.
What Zeus let us know about his life were the wars and the amorous adventures. But not much else. He divided his secrets between his two sons, Apollo and Dionysus, who would one day rise to sovereignty. Every era lives out, without knowing it, the dream of the era that came before. Just as Zeus had found himself thinking what his father, Kronos, dreamed, so Dionysus and Apollo would suffer what Zeus had already experienced, in secret. To Dionysus and Apollo the world would attribute deeds and passions that had their origin in the most hidden recesses of their father’s life.
But Zeus cannot have secrets. Zeus simply is. “You are always,” says a late poet. And in Dodona, the first women ever to chant poetry would say: “Zeus was, and is, and shall be, oh great Zeus.” And now the secret of Zeus was to go and reside in the dark, impenetrable area where the two flourishing young gods had to come to terms with and suffer death. The secret of Zeus was made up of two parts: his having killed Typhon; and his having been killed, as an infant, in the Cretan cave. Zeus transferred the first secret to Apollo: Apollo killed Python. And the second to Dionysus: the baby Zagreus was killed by the Titans. Dividing himself up into his two sons, Zeus reproduced wholeness in each of them. For Apollo and Dionysus include their opposites within themselves and swing back and forth between the two extremes. Just as Dionysus is the tearer apart and the torn apart, so Apollo is both the hunter and the quarry.
The Delphic youth wh
o every eight years at the Stepteria festival fled from Delphi without looking back, while a hut he had just set alight burned behind him, was imitating the flight of Apollo from Delphi when he went to purify himself in Tempe after killing Python. But he was also recalling the hunting of Python, wounded by Apollo’s arrows. The god chased the snake along the same road, “which is now called the Sacred Way,” only to arrive too late, albeit “by very little,” to put him out of his agony. The son of Python, Aix, the Goat, had already buried his father, this huge snake who had dragged himself, dying, from Phocis to Thessaly.
Dactyls, Curetes— and then, at night, the Titans: they are the first koûroi, nimble dancing fingers, echoing bronze shields, sharp flute. The Curetes are the “instants, the herdsmen of time,” transfixing the continuum. They dance in a circle, waving spears and toys. Hidden in the center of that circle is a defenseless child: Zeus—or Zagreus. Are they protecting him? Are they about to kill him? They save him with the terrifying clamor of their weapons, and they trick him with toys, before burying their knives in his flesh. The initiated aren’t just those who know how to shake off guilt but those who more than others have reason to be guilty. The complicity between initiates has to do with a shared knowledge, but likewise with a crime. However much we try, we can never quite sever the bond that links the initiated with the gang of criminals.
Before the knife came down, the infant Zagreus saw those pale figures surrounding him, offering him toys, as his friends and guardians. Curetes? Titans? Such distinctions could only be of use to mythographers. In the dark, Zagreus saw that these strangers (or did he know them?), their faces smeared with chalk, were led by a more attractive figure, tall and white, with a whiteness that came not from chalk but from some natural luminosity. And Zagreus had seen that same being (a woman perhaps? but what was a woman?) leading his guardians, the Curetes, before. Silent and armed, Athena presided over the torture about to be performed on her brother Zagreus.
The boy touched his face and felt the soft chalk the Titans had daubed there. Now they went round and round him, as though moving to some nursery rhyme, and Zagreus knew perfectly well that they were waiting for the right moment to kill him. He looked at the toys all around him: a top, dolls with jointed limbs, golden apples, a pinecone, a mirror. He reached for the little mirror and looked at himself. He saw an “alien image,” another white face. And recognized the very person about to kill him.
As though it were a duty, the knife already sparkling in a Titan’s hand, Zagreus turned himself into a young Zeus, into the old Kronos, into a baby, into a youth, into a lion, into a horse, into a snake, into a tiger. And finally into a bull. At which, out of nothing, came the booming sound of Hera, lowing. Amazed, the bull froze in that form for a second too long. Long enough for the knife to plunge. The bull crashed down. Streams of blood spurted out onto the white faces of his killers as they passed the knife from hand to hand to strike and strike again.
When they had boiled up Zagreus, roasted him on spits, and devoured him, the Titans were themselves shriveled up by Zeus’s thunderbolts. Nothing was left but a black film of soot amid the grass and thorns of the Cretan mountains. Then Athena looked around in the sultry air and saw, on the ground, a pulsating piece of flesh that had been tossed away. It was Zagreus’s heart, and it seemed not to care about having been torn from his chest. It sucked from an invisible lymph and pumped it away again into the invisible. Athena was fascinated by that trembling red blob. Something in the shapeless shred of flesh was speaking to her, as she stood detached from all else, gray, blue, and sharply outlined in her armor. Something was announcing her name. Pállein means “to pulse”; Pallas, “pulsating”; such was Athena beneath the cold exterior of her weapons, where the hard surface met the indivisible mind, which she saw outside herself for the first time now in that dirty piece of red flesh tossed to the dogs. Delicately, she picked up the heart and laid it in a basket, closed the lid. Then she went off. She was going to give the “thinking heart” to her father, Zeus.
For a long time Zeus was overcome by grief. He recalled how Hera had mocked him for his inaction while his son was being torn to shreds. When Zeus saw his pain wasn’t getting any relief, he took some plaster and began to shape the statue of a koûros, like a shining white suit of armor. The era of metamorphoses having come to an end, the era of the statue had begun. And, once again, Zeus was the beginning: he erected the first statue for his dead son. As soon as he’d finished, the god slipped Zagreus’s heart through a hole in the plaster so that it was inside the statue. In the dark cavity of the artifact, the heart reawoke. It thought: white all around me again, like the waxy faces of my murderers, and the night too. But now the dance is over, the whiteness is still, like a sky, like the lid of a sarcophagus. Seen from outside, the statue looked like the funeral stone of a beautiful young man. Inside, Zagreus’s heart went on silently beating, and thinking.
In the Etymologicon Magnum, the name Zagreus is explained as “the Great Hunter.” But there were other Great Hunters among the gods too. Zeus is the Great Hunter. And Hades is the Great Hunter. A plumb line comes down from the ether, passes through the earth, and reaches right to the very depths of the underworld: it is the Great Hunter. There is no part of his being where the divine will renounce the gesture of following a prey. At no height or depth, whether it be the glass-clear air of Olympus, the swirling air of earth, or the perennially gloomy air of Hades, does the sharp profile of the Great Hunter ever fade.
A Maenad had a fawn tattooed on her soft, bare right arm. She was breast-feeding a fawn, stroking and playing with it. Then she grabbed it, tore it to pieces, and sank her teeth into the still pulsing flesh. Why this sequence? And why must this sequence forever take the form of a sudden raptus, when really it was a ceremony? What went on inside the Maenad? Dionysus tormented her with pleasure in every vein. The Maenad ran, didn’t know how to respond. The sacrifice, that slow, solemn butchery, wasn’t enough to quell her frenzy. The only thing that would work was “the pleasure of eating live flesh.” Altarless, she wandered through the trees. Dismembering the fawn, the Maenad dismembered herself, possessed by the god. Hence, in devouring the fawn, she devoured the god, mixed in its blood. She who was possessed thus tried herself to possess a part of the god. But what happened afterward? A great silence. The sultry heat of the woods. Strips of bleeding flesh glimpsed through the leaves. The god wasn’t there. Life—incomprehensible, opaque.
For the shortest of times Zagreus, the boy king, sits on the throne Zeus has left vacant to go off on a journey (where to?). Then he will be the first prey. He will be torn to pieces. Then he will lead his own initiates off to tear others to pieces, others like him, his priests perhaps. He who has the shape of the bull leads the band that devours the bull, alive. Dionysus Zagreus: in him we have the most violent of identifications, that of the hunter with the prey.
The páthe of Osiris and of Christ are captured and stilled in the images of the victim torn to pieces or nailed to the cross. But with Dionysus Zagreus, the circle immediately begins to turn again. Driven by the god, the Maenads will repeat the very gestures that killed the god himself. And most of all they will kill whoever tries to stop the circle turning.
Orpheus broke away from the cult of Dionysus like the renouncer from the Brahminical cult. Before withdrawing into the forest to live among the wild beasts, he too had experienced “the pleasure of eating live flesh.” Now the new element in his thinking could be summed up in two words: phónōn apéchesthai, “refrain from killing.”
In every other respect, just as the renouncer still bowed down before the structure of Vedic metaphysics, so Orpheus still observed the Olympian theology. But he knew that this new precept of his was enough to undermine its order. He knew he had interrupted the back-and-forth of killing and being killed. The sun rose through a bright, unsullied air, and Orpheus, dressed in white, greeted it from a mountaintop in Thrace. Behind him, in the wood, he heard a roaring noise. The Bassarids, the women who had o
nce been his companions, were approaching, coming to tear him to shreds. Of Orpheus’s body, only the head was left; it bobbed away on the swirling surface of the river that flowed down the valley, still singing.
In Aristophanes’ time, someone might refer to the feast of the Bouphonia as one speaks of a relic of times past, something vaguely incongruous, like the golden cicadas eminent Athenians had once worn in their hair as clasps. The texts that have come down to us about Athenian festivals, the admirable tradition that gave rhythm to the seasons and the key moments in people’s lives, are few and fragmented. But, by a stroke of luck, we do have a passage about the Bouphonia that Porphyry copied from Theophrastus, a passage that offers the noblest and clearest Mediterranean formulation of the metaphysics of sacrifice.
“In olden times, as I said before, men would sacrifice the fruits of the earth to the gods, but not the animals. Indeed, they didn’t even eat animals. The story goes that during a public sacrifice celebrated in Athens, a certain Sopatrus, who wasn’t originally from the area but was farming some land in Attica, had placed some bread and other cakes on the table to sacrifice them to the gods, when an ox on its way back from work came up to the table, ate part of the offering, and trod on the rest. Seized by rage at what had happened, and seeing somebody nearby sharpening an ax, Sopatrus grabbed it and struck the ox. When he had killed the animal, his rage subsided and he realized what he had done. Upon which he buried the ox, then fled to Crete, where he remained in voluntary exile, as if guilty of a wicked crime. A drought followed and there was a terrible scarcity of food. A delegation went off to consult the god, and the Pythia told them that the exiled man now in Crete would put an end to the drought: if they punished the killer and got the victim back on its feet in the course of the same sacrifice in which he was killed, and if they ate some of the victim themselves without being squeamish, then things would improve. So off they went to look for Sopatrus, who was the cause of the trouble. Sopatrus reckoned he might escape the dire straits his impurity had placed him in if he could get all the others to behave as he had. So when the delegation came for him, he told them that an ox from the city must be killed. Given that the others were nervous when it came to choosing which of them should actually kill the animal, he offered to do it himself, on the understanding that they would accept him as a citizen and agree that the killing was the responsibility of the group. They agreed and, on returning to the city, arranged matters in the following way, which has never changed to this day.
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony Page 30