The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (28 page)
Whether by inheritance or conquest, Orestes was now ruler over a large kingdom stretching from Laconia to Arcadia. Yet he had a feeling that the whole thing must end with him—or would have to begin again far away as a totally different story. An oracle said he should set up a colony on Lesbos. Lesbos? The name meant nothing to him; it was one of the few places he had never set foot. Only one small detail linked him to Lesbos: it was said that the cruel king Oenomaus, who in the end was his great-grandfather, had lived there before coming to Olympia. Perhaps Lesbos meant a return, a buckle closing, beneath the water. But it was not to be Orestes who colonized Lesbos. Penthilus went there, taking the blood of the Pelopids over the sea, locked away in his body as though in a casket. What came next were years of provincial goings-on, of which little would be known. And finally silence. For the first time Orestes felt easier in his mind. He was nearly seventy now, and something prompted him to go back to the places where he had been most afflicted by his madness. He withdrew to Arcadia. For all his large kingdom, he wasn’t cut out to be a powerful sovereign. He would always be the one who drinks alone.
One day, not far from the place where he had bitten off a finger to make the Erinyes turn white, Orestes was bitten on the heel by a snake and died of poison, just as it was by poison, his only companion apart from Pylades, that he had always lived. And years later people came to look for his bones, for much the same reasons that had prompted other people to look for the bones of his grandfather Pelops. They were supposed to help bring down a city. Nothing as grandiose as Troy this time, but an important town all the same: Tegea. The Spartans had been trying and failing to take it for generations. The oracle said that Orestes’ bones would be found “there where blow follows blow, wrong lies over wrong.” Blow on blow, wrong on wrong: buried in a blacksmith’s shop, Orestes’ bones were still trembling at the blows of iron beating on iron.
A
NECESSARY PREMISE OF THE GREEK mysteries was the following scene, which took place between the two divine brothers Zeus and Hades. One day Zeus saw his powerful brother coming to meet him on Olympus. There was only one reason for Hades’ coming here: to ask for something. And Zeus knew perfectly well what. So the time when Zeus would see men and women appear and disappear down on earth without asking themselves why, hard and bright, but still close to the realm of metamorphosis, ready to live a brief span as bodies and a far longer time as exhausted shades in Hades—that time was coming to an end. The division between life and death had been a clean cut, sharp as the bronze blade that cut the throats of the sacrificial animals. And nothing could have pleased Zeus more. Zeus liked everything that existed without justification. But now Hades was coming to ask for a hostage. He wanted a woman in the palace of death. And the only woman who would do was a daughter of Zeus, a niece whom Uncle Hades had had his eye on for some long time: Persephone, or Persephatta, obscure names, in whose letters we find echoes of murder (
phónos
) and pillage (
pérsis
), superimposed on a beauty whose only name is Girl: Kore.
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 swallowed 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.