The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (2 page)
But how did it all begin? A group of girls were playing by the river, picking flowers. Again and again such scenes were to prove irresistible to the gods. Persephone was carried off “while playing with the girls with the deep cleavages.” She too had been gathering flowers: roses, crocuses, violets, irises, hyacinths, narcissi. But mainly narcissi, “that wondrous, radiant flower, awesome to the sight of gods and mortals alike.” Thalia was playing ball in a field of flowers on the mountainside when she was clutched by an eagle’s claws: Zeus again. Creusa felt Apollo’s hands lock around her wrists as she bent to pick saffron on the slopes of the Athens Acropolis. Europa and her friends were likewise gathering narcissi, hyacinths, violets, roses, thyme.
All of a sudden they find themselves surrounded by a herd of bulls. And one of those bulls is dazzling white, his small horns flashing like jewels. There’s nothing in the least threatening about him. So much so that, though shy at first, Europa now brings her flowers to his white muzzle. The bull whines with pleasure, like a puppy, slumps down on the grass, and offers his little horns to the garlands. The princess makes so bold as to climb, like an Amazon, on his back. At which, the herd moves discreetly away from the dry riverbed and off toward the beach. With a show of nervousness, the bull approaches the water. And then it’s too late: the white beast is already breasting the waves with Europa up on top. She turns to look back, right hand hanging on to a horn, left leaning on the animal’s hide. As they move, the breeze flutters her clothes.
But how did it all begin? Shortly before dawn, asleep in her room on the first floor of the royal palace, Europa had had a strange dream: she was caught between two women; one was Asia, the other was the land facing her, and she had no name. The two women were fighting over her, violently. Each wanted her for herself. Asia looked like a woman from Europa’s own country, whereas the other was a total stranger. And in the end it was the stranger whose powerful
hands dragged her off. It was the will of Zeus, she said: Europa was to be an Asian girl carried off by a stranger. The dream was extremely vivid, as though happening in broad daylight, and on waking Europa was afraid and sat silent on her bed for a long time. Then she went out, the way she always did, with her friends. They walked down to the mouth of the river, and Europa wandered about between the roses and the breaking waves, her golden basket in one hand.
A blondish bull appeared in the meadow, a white circle on his forehead. The animal had a sweet scent, which drowned the smell of the flowers. He came up to Europa and licked her neck. She stroked him, at the same time drying the saliva that dribbled freely from the animal’s mouth. The bull knelt down in front of her, offering her his back. And the moment she climbed up, he made a dash for the sea. Terrified, Europa looked back toward the beach, shouted to her friends, one arm waving in the air. Then, already out in the waves, she hung on to a big horn with one hand and held the hem of her tunic up tight against her breast with the other. Behind her, the tunic billowed out in a purple sail.
But how did it all begin? Europa was out walking with her friends, a shining gold basket in her hand. Hephaestus had made it two generations before to give to Libye. And Libye had given it to her daughter Telephassa, who had given it to her daughter Europa. It was the family talisman. On the side, embossed in gold, was a stray heifer apparently swimming in an enamel sea. Two mysterious men were standing on the shore watching. And there was a golden Zeus too, his hand just skimming the bronze-colored animal. In the background, a silver Nile. The heifer was Io, Europe’s great-great-grandmother.
Her story too was one of abduction and metamorphosis. Tormented by a gadfly, she crossed and recrossed sea after sea in a state of constant mental anguish. She even gave her name to the sea that led to Italy. Zeus’s love for her had
brought her to madness and disaster. It all began with some strange dreams, when Io was priestess in the Heraion near Argos, the oldest of all shrines and the place that gave the Greeks their way of measuring time; for centuries they numbered their years with reference to the succession of priestesses in the Heraion. Io’s dreams whispered of Zeus’s passionate love for her and told her to go to the fields of Lerna, where her father’s sheep and oxen grazed. From now on she would no longer be a priestess consecrated to the goddess but an animal consecrated to the god, like the ones that wandered freely about the sanctuary grounds. Thus her dreams insisted. And so it was.
But one day the sanctuary grounds would expand to become the whole world, with its boundless seas, which she was to ford one after the other without respite, forever goaded by that relentless gadfly. And the vaster the landscape about her, the more intense her suffering became. By the time she came across another victim, Prometheus, what she wanted most of all was to die, not realizing that she had found another sufferer like herself who could not hope to die. But for Io, as for Prometheus, release from obsession did come at last. One day, after she had crossed to Egypt, Zeus skimmed his hand lightly over her. At which the crazed young cow became a girl again and was united with the god. In memory of that moment she called her son Epaphus, which means “a hand’s light touch.” Epaphus later became king of Egypt, and rumor had it he was also the ox called Apis.
As she walked down toward the flowery meadows near the sea, what Europa was carrying, embossed in precious metals, was her destiny. As in a piece of music, her own tune was the melodic inversion of her ancestor, Io’s. A bull would carry her off from Asia toward the continent that was to be called Europe, just as years before the desperate sea wandering of a young cow who had first grazed in Greek pastures was to end in Egypt with the light touch of Zeus’s hand. And one day the gift of the golden basket would be handed down to Europa. She carried it along, without thinking.
But how did it all begin? If it is history we want, then it is a history of conflict. And the conflict begins with the abduction of a girl, or with the sacrifice of a girl. And the one is continually becoming the other. It was the “merchant wolves,” arriving by ship from Phoenicia, who carried off the
tauropárthenos
from Argos.
Tauropárthenos
means “the virgin dedicated to the bull.” Her name was Io. Like a beacon signaling from mountain to mountain, this rape lit the bonfire of hatred between the two continents. From that moment on, Europe and Asia never stopped fighting each other, blow answering blow. Thus the Cretans, “the boars of Ida,” carried off Europa from Asia. They sailed back to their home country in a ship shaped like a bull, offering Europa as a bride to their king, Asterius. One of Europa’s grandchildren was to have the same celestial name. He was a young man with a bull’s head, and he lived in the middle of a labyrinth, awaiting his victims. What they usually called him, though, was the Minotaur.
But how did it all begin? When they arrived in Argos, the Phoenician merchants spent five or six days selling the wares they’d brought from the Red Sea, Egypt, and Assyria. Their ship lay at anchor while on the shore the local people gazed at, touched, and bargained over those objects from so far away. There were still some last things to be sold when a group of women arrived. One of them was Io, the king’s daughter. The bargaining and buying went on. Until all of a sudden, the seafaring merchants leaped on the women. Some of them managed to escape. But Io and a number of others were carried off. This was the abduction the Cretans were revenging when they carried off the Phoenician king’s daughter, Europa. But the Phoenicians have a different version: Io was in fact in love with the captain of the foreign ship. She was already pregnant and ashamed, and so left with the Phoenicians of her own free will.
Out of these events history itself was born: the abduction
of Helen, the Trojan War, and, before that, the Argonauts’ expedition and the abduction of Medea—all are links in the same chain. A call to arms goes back and forth between Asia and Europe, and every back and forth is a woman, a woman and a swarm of predators, going from one shore to the other. Nevertheless, Herodotus did note a difference between the two sides in the dispute: “To abduct women,” he writes, “is considered the action of scoundrels, but to worry about abducted women is the reaction of fools. The wise man does not give a moment’s thought to the women who have been abducted, because it is clear that, had they not wanted to be abducted, they would not have been.” The Greeks did not behave wisely: “For one Spartan woman they gathered together a great army and, arriving in Asia, laid low the power of Priam.” Since then, the war between Europe and Asia has never ceased.
They landed on a large island but didn’t stop. Instead they pushed on into the hills. Only when they’d reached Gortyn, under a huge, shady plane tree, did Zeus and Europa make love. Zeus was an eagle. Afterward he disappeared. But left his loved one with a guardian. In the silent heat, Europa heard the clopping of bronze hooves coming from far away. Someone was riding flat out. It must be a machine, or a being from another age, a child of the ash nymphs. It was both: Talos, another bull, the guardian bull, sentry of the island; or alternatively, as some said, a mechanical giant put together by Hephaestus. A long vein stood out on his body, running from neck to hooves—or perhaps feet. And there a bronze nail stopped the gush of blood and sent it bubbling back inside. That nail was the secret of the creature’s life, and likewise of the art of casting. Talos would gallop about and hurl stones all over the place: at nothing mostly, or at approaching strangers. Back in the Palace of Sidon, Europa had been used to waking to the sound of friendly voices, the companions she went down to the sea with; here she woke to silence, and in the depth of that silence a distant sound,
which would gradually become deafening. But she saw no one. She knew that Talos went on running up and down the coasts of the large island: Crete, Europe.
Io, Telephassa, Europa, Argiope, Pasiphaë, Ariadne, Phaedra: the names evoke a broad, pure, shining face that lights things up at a distance, that lights up all of us, like the moon. “Huge, pale figures, tremendous, lonely, dark and desolate, fatal, mysterious lovers condemned to titanic infamies. What will become of you? What will your destiny be? Where can you hide your fearful passions? What terrors, what compassion you inspire, what immense and awesome sadness you arouse in those mortals called to contemplate so much shame and horror, so many crimes, such great misfortune.” So said Gustave Moreau.
Diodorus Siculus: “They also say that the honors given to the gods and the sacrifices and rites of the mysteries originally came down to other men from Crete, and in making this claim they offer what they believe is an extremely strong argument. The initiation rite that the Athenians celebrate in Eleusis, the most illustrious, one might say, of all rites, and again the Samothracians’ rite and the rite begun by Orpheus in Thrace among the Cicones, all these rites are passed on from one initiate to another in secret. But in Cnossos, Crete, it has always been the custom to practice such initiation rites in broad daylight and to let everybody know about them. What is considered unnameable among other peoples is available for all who want to hear in Crete.”
Mystery, in Crete, was made plain to all, no one tried to hide it. The “unnameable things” that abounded in Attica were laid open to everybody. But there was no sense of challenge about this. Crete, with its hundred cities and not a single defensive wall around them, looked like a huge plaything.
Only a tidal wave, or dark raiders striking from the sea, could have been its doom, not the recklessness of the sort of civilization that seeks self-knowledge, and in so doing destroys itself.
A few thousand years later, a famous morphologist of civilization was to be baffled by Crete, for, having studied the whole multitude of Cretan remains, he could find not a single indication of any historical, political, or even biographical consciousness, such as had always dominated Egyptian thought. For a man who hungered after the signs of great civilizations, Crete had something childish about it, something elusive, something below par.
The Linear B Tablets include many names of gods: about half were to go on living as Olympian gods, the other half were lost. We know nothing about them: they are mere names that appear alongside those of Zeus, Poseidon, Hera. As if the Olympian gods had once been far more numerous and now carried around with them the shadows of their lost brothers and sisters.
Crete: pots of grain numbered in the storehouses, seals showing beasts half one thing half another, delicate frescoes, ivory knots, lists of offerings, honey, inscribed poppy pods, ox skulls, double-edged axes. Columns of cypress wood, palaces with stairways and shafts of light, nameless tombstones. Tiny idols heaped in piles, not statues, not doubles made of stone. Nothing of the verticality of the divine, no sign of the hallucinatory presence of upright stone.
Stories never live alone: they are the branches of a family that we have to trace back, and forward. In the rapture of her sea crossing on the back of a white bull, Europa conceals within herself, like still undiscovered powers, the destinies of her love-crazed granddaughters Phaedra and Ariadne,
who would one day hang themselves out of shame and desperation. And down among the celestial roots of this story tree we come across the wanderings of the mad heifer, the ancestral Io, who again holds within herself the image of another mad heifer, mother of Phaedra and Ariadne: Pasiphaë. And she too hanged herself in shame.