The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (41 page)

The external façade of the temple imposes the “law of men.” The nuptial interior subverts it. But if the interior becomes the exterior, the world is threatened by the adolescent
diable au corps
that then invades it. So the world strikes back and strikes to kill. Sacrifice and hierogamy are two forces that presuppose each other, are superimposed over each other and interlocked. They oppose each other, but they also support each other. Each is the aura of the other. The girl who is going to be sacrificed seems to be waiting for her spouse. While the background to erotic pleasure is dark and bloody. Everything that happens is a pendular motion between these two forces. Facing each other, each, in its gaze, reflects the other. Hierogamy tends toward the destruction of the law, whereas sacrifice reconstructs its bloody base. All it takes to upset this equilibrium is a “successful love.” But history makes sure the equilibrium survives.

Hierogamy: it was the first way the gods chose to communicate with men. The approach was an invasion, of body and mind, which were thus impregnated with the superabundance of the divine. But that same superabundance was already emanating from the eros of the Olympians. When Zeus and Hera made love on Ida, they were cloaked in a golden cloud that rained sparkling drops upon the earth.

Why weren’t men able to go on with hierogamy? Because of a crime, Prometheus’s crime. They had to respond to that invasion, and in so doing they chose their own way of communicating with the gods: they would share the same victim, eating its blood and guts and leaving the smoke to the gods. That was the basis of the “Olympian sacrifice.” That is why
thýein
, “to sacrifice,” actually means “to fumigate”: it was a slightly hypocritical homage to the divine. The crime of Prometheus is the nature of men, which obliges them to eat, and thus to kill. Hence for men assimilation is forever bound up with killing.

For all the variegated multiplicity of its forms, the practice of sacrifice can be reduced to just two gestures: expulsion
(purification) and assimilation (communion). These two gestures have only one element in common: destruction. In each case the victim is killed or devoured, or abandoned to a certain death. We kill to eat, to assimilate; and we kill to separate, to expel. In every other respect the two gestures are different.

The most extreme form of expulsion is stoning, since here those carrying out the sacrifice do not expose themselves to the risk of contact with the victim; the most extreme form of assimilation involves eating the victim’s flesh still warm and palpitating. But is it perhaps a mistaken convention, an ancient misnomer, to define both these rituals as
sacrifice
? So it might seem, at least until awareness of another phenomenon behind the two gestures brings them right back together again: hierogamy. Yet hierogamy does not involve any element of destruction, the one thing that kept the two extreme gestures of sacrifice together. How can we explain this? Hierogamy is the premise of sacrifice, but on the part of the gods. It is that first mixing of the two worlds, divine and human, to which sacrifice attempts to respond, but with a response that is merely human, the response of creatures living in the realm of the irreversible, creatures who cannot assimilate (or expel) without killing. To the erotic invasion of our bodies, we reply with the knife that slashes the throat, the hand that hurls the stone.

With time, men and gods would develop a common language made up of hierogamy and sacrifice. The endless ways these two phenomena split apart, opposed each other, and mixed together corresponded to the expressions of that language. And, when it became a dead language, people started talking about mythology.

Hierogamy and sacrifice have in common taking possession of a body, by either invading it or eating it. But, as Prometheus would have it, to assimilate a body men had to kill it and eat its dead flesh. In the meantime the smoke would envelop the gods. And, in reply, the gods would envelop the bodies like a cloud and suck out their juices drenched in
eros. Saliva becomes the sacrificial element par excellence, the only one in which the two sides of sacrifice—expulsion and communion—converge. We expel saliva, as something impure, but we also mix it with other like substances and assimilate them, in eros.

For men, hierogamy and sacrifice are superimposed only in the invisible, in the sacrifice of self to the Self, the
coniunctio
between self and the Self. The invisible for man is the visible for the gods. The appearance of the world came about with the copulation of a god with that which was not god, with the laceration and dispersion of a god’s body; it was the expulsion into space of a cloud of infected matter, infested by the sacred.

The most discreet and delicate way of having the gods understand the irreversible, scourge of all mortals, was the libation: you poured a noble liquid onto the ground and lost it forever. It was an act of homage, of course: the recognition of the presence and rights of an invisible power. But it was something else as well: an attempt to make conversation. As if men were saying to the gods, Whatever we do, we are this liquid poured away.

The gods too will sometimes appear holding the cup of libation. But who are they pouring their offering to? to themselves? to life? And what is it they’re offering? themselves? And how can they pour something away on purpose to lose it, they who can lose nothing, they for whom everything remains forever intact? That gesture of the gods has never been explained. Perhaps it was their way of picking up the conversation, an admiring allusion to the beauty of that gesture that men made so often under the gaze of the gods, and that now the gods chose to imitate.

“Just as their bodies resemble those of men, so too do the lives of the gods.” Concise as ever, Aristotle points to that
anomalous aspect of the Greek gods, their total anthropomorphism. Total? In every respect but one: food. The food of the gods is different from the food of men, and likewise different is the liquid in their veins. Homer could already explain with perfect clarity that this was because the gods “have no blood and are called immortal.” The gods are immortal because they don’t eat our food. They don’t have blood because blood gets its nourishment from the food men eat. So food carries death within it, our dependence on death, which forces us to kill for more food, so as to keep death at bay. Though never for long.

It was precisely because the Greeks had reduced the difference between gods and men to a minimum that they measured the distance still separating them with such cruel precision: an infinite, unbridgeable distance. And never has that distance been so sharply defined as by the Greeks themselves. No mist hovered about the approaches to death. It was an abyss with razor edges, never crossed. Hence the Greeks were well aware of the powerlessness of their sacrifices. Every ceremony in which a living being was killed was a way of recalling the mortality of all the participants. And the smoke they dedicated to the gods was certainly no use to the divinities as food. The only things the gods ever ate were nectar and ambrosia. No, that smell of blood and smoke was a message from earth, a pointless gift, reminding the Olympians of the consciously precarious existence of all those distant inhabitants of earth, who in every other way were equal to the gods. And what the gods loved about men was precisely this difference, this precariousness, which they themselves could relish only through men. It was a flavor they could never get from their ambrosia or nectar. That was why they would sometimes abandon themselves to inhaling the smoke of sacrifice, breath of that other life which enjoyed the precious privilege of stirring the air of Olympus.

From Iphigenia to the daughters of Erechtheus and the Coronides, it is always a splendid virgin who has to be sacrificed.
And the sacrifice is always a pendulum swinging back and forth between suicide and the wedding ceremony. During the year, by which we mean nature in its totality, there are “gloomy and ill-omened days,” when young girls will get their throats cut. For this is the way, the only way men know, to have those girls cross the frontier of the invisible and so meet the divine avengers waiting for them on the other side.

These avengers harbor “frenzied, tyrannical desires” for the girls’ bodies and pester them continuously, but they cannot operate in the visible world to the point of being able “to couple with those bodies and penetrate them.” As a result, we men have to find a way of satisfying this angry impotence of the
daímones
, and we do it by abandoning the lifeless corpses of the girls along that borderline that passes through the altar. Here lies the origin of every dark eros.

Zeus and Hera had been arguing since time immemorial. Hera decided to hide in Euboea. When a great goddess withdraws and hides, the world soon falls apart. “Destitute and lost,” Zeus looked for her. He wandered all over Boeotia. What could he do? How could he get the goddess out of her hiding place and into the open?

It was a man, Alalcomeneus, who suggested the trick. Zeus must pretend to marry someone else. The other woman must be a block of oak carved in the shape of a girl and draped in veils. Then this rigid bride must be set up on a chariot and taken to her wedding. They called her Daedala, which is as much as to say Artifact, because she was the first creature who embodied art in herself. When the celebrations had begun and the chariot with Zeus’s bashful new bride was already winding through the streets of Plataea, Hera could bear it no longer. She jumped up on the chariot in a rage, looked at her motionless rival, and tore off her wedding veils, meaning to scratch her face to shreds. But then she realized she was looking at a
xóanon
, one of those endless blocks of wood kept in temples all over Greece. And the
goddess laughed. It was a cruel, ringing laugh, a little girl’s laugh. And we owe it to that laugh that the world, at least so far, has not fallen to pieces. But this didn’t occur to the women of Plataea at the time. They saw the goddess set herself at the head of the procession, and they strung along after her. First they helped Hera to bathe the statue like a bride in the river Asopus. Then they followed the chariot as far as a clearing topped by oaks on the summit of Mount Cithaeron. The goddess ordered them to build a big bonfire. She placed the statue with its torn veils in the middle. And all around, on the trunks forming the bonfire, the faithful heaped up their animals. The richest even offered cows and bulls. They poured on wine and incense. Then the goddess set it alight.

The statue was reduced to ashes while the shrieks of the animals being burned alive drowned out the crackling of the flames. Many years later, in the same place, the ceremony was still being performed. Pausanias saw the pyre and said: “I know of no fire so high, nor visible from so far off.”

In what Plutarch called “ancient physiology” and defined as a “discourse on nature entwined in myths,” hierogamy and sacrifice become the two extremes of the respiratory process: air breathed in reaches the blood and nourishes it, becoming unrecognizable in the resulting mix (hierogamy); air breathed out is expelled forever (sacrifice) and mixes with the air of the world. But, even at the point of greatest distance and tension, these extremes were superimposed over each other.

A tall, destructive fire; the penetration of the god in the body of the goddess. Between these two events there turns a hinge: a wooden statue. Hera laughed as she tore the veils from Zeus’s inanimate spouse. But that didn’t mean she gave up the idea of killing her, of burning the statue to bits like a dangerous rival. As for Zeus, if he wants to lure the goddess out of the darkness, he has to add a copy, an image, to the world. Nothing less than that will suffice to create the
hinge that will bring the sovereign couple back together again. A tiny wooden fake is brought into the world, draped in veils, and saves it. But then has to be burned. And the image must be draped in veils because it is itself a veil, a surplus, that hides something else. The bride is draped in veils, as discourse is draped in myth. When the veil is torn away, there is nothing but laughter and flames. First for salvation, then for destruction: but the truth is that the two things are simultaneous. It was all part of those “unspoken things” that are scattered throughout every myth and liturgy and that have always seemed “more suspect than the things one speaks about.”

The pagan world was destroyed less by the Christians than by itself. None of the poisoned attacks of the Fathers of the Church had the same destructive power as
Alexander or the False Prophet
, a pamphlet written by a perfect pagan, Lucian of Samosata. It is an unparalleled portrait of a great impostor, model for a civilization that was to produce impostors in plenty. Did Alexander of Abonuteichos ever really exist? Some jewelry, coins, and inscriptions confirm that he did. Yet, apart from those silent witnesses, the only trace of his life that remains is Lucian’s violent pamphlet attacking him. Should we believe what Lucian says there? It’s hard to say, but the sheer power of literature brushes a question like this aside.

Scornful of anything and everything, Lucian saw in Alexander of Abonuteichos a malignant repeat, an ignominious shadow of that other Alexander, first emperor of the West. Hadn’t Alexander the Great set off to conquer the East like a new Dionysus (the fourth, mythographers would say)? Hadn’t he been the first to insinuate that a sovereign could also be a god? Well, Alexander of Abonuteichos likewise lived and behaved as if he were a god.

Like Alexander the Great, Alexander of Abonuteichos had grown up in the provinces, in Paphlagonia—but then anywhere that wasn’t Athens was the provinces. By the time he
died, he was renowned throughout the Roman Empire. As a boy, Alexander of Abonuteichos was extremely handsome, with a clear complexion, a soft beard, and long hair—and if the last wasn’t all his own, nobody noticed. “His eyes shone with a divine and compelling enthusiasm.” His voice was clear and gentle. He was an amazingly fast thinker. It seemed there was no quality he didn’t have. “In fact, on first meeting, all without exception would go away with the impression that they had spoken to the worthiest and most upright man in all the world, and the simplest too, and the least affected. But above all, he had something grandiose about him, as if he would never stoop to worrying about the small things in life, but directed his spirit only to the most weighty of matters.”