The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

IX

(photo credit 9.1)

ON ARRIVING AT THE PATRAS ACROPOLIS, Pausanias was told the story of the temple of Triklarian Artemis: “It is said that a long time ago there was a priestess of the goddess called Komaithò, a very beautiful girl indeed. It so happened that she fell in love with Melanippus, who excelled his peers in all things, and, above all, was extremely handsome. When Melanippus had conquered the girl’s heart, he asked her father for her hand in marriage. It is natural for the old to oppose the young in many things, and most particularly in matters of love. Thus it was with Melanippus: despite the fact that both he and Komaithò wanted to marry, all they got from both sets of parents was a determined refusal. The unhappy adventures of Melanippus, like those of many others, show how love tends to undermine the law of men and subvert their devotion toward the gods. For, unable to marry, Komaithò and Melanippus slaked the thirst of their passion in the temple of Artemis, then took to using the temple regularly as a nuptial chamber. As a result, Artemis began to wreak her anger on the local inhabitants. The earth ceased to bear fruit, and people contracted strange and fatal diseases. So they fled to consult the oracle at Delphi, where the Pythia laid the blame on Melanippus and Komaithò. The oracle ordered that the lovers be sacrificed to Artemis and that every year the most beautiful young girl and the most handsome young boy be sacrificed to the goddess. Because of this sacrifice, the people dubbed the river near the temple the Merciless. Previously it had had no name. For the young boys and girls who would perish without having committed any crime, and likewise for their families, this was a terrible destiny; but I do believe that for Melanippus and Komaithò it was not a misfortune; only one thing is worth as much as life itself to men: that a love should be successful.”

This isn’t Romeo and Juliet (where the sacrifice to Triklarian Artemis is repeated once again). It isn’t Shakespeare who offers us this demonstration, at once so drastic and clear-cut, of a love capable of overturning and trampling on the law in obedience to the “so-called Aphrodite of disorder,” which Plato feared. And certainly we wouldn’t find the likes of this story in classical Greece, which always had its misgivings about the assaults of the demon. No, the story appears in the autumn of Greece, in the prose of Pausanias, a learned itinerant commentator of ruins that had already been turned over to pastureland. The plot of the story he tells here recalls an Alexandrian romance. But its meaning is a fugitive of the mysteries. It hints at the hidden tension between hierogamy and sacrifice.

If being sacrificed was not, or not only, a “misfortune” for Komaithò and Melanippus, that is because they play a part in the ritual right from the beginning, the most hidden part, the part they have the impertinence to reveal. Eros brings into the open what the law must hide yet nevertheless contains within itself: the fact that the temple is a nuptial chamber. Once again we have to go to an Alexandrian, the disillusioned Lucian, to find in writing that the secret chamber of the “Syriac goddess” was called thálamos, the nuptial chamber. Yet that name originated long before Lucian, so long before that people saw no need to mention it in less reckless periods. If hierogamy is the secret of sacrifice, sacrifice will nevertheless serve to hide the fact. It will pile a wall of blood and corpses before the place where Komaithò and Melanippus abandoned themselves to their improbable, “successful love.”

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.”

He immediately began to prostitute his body, which was extremely attractive. And one of his clients was a charlatan, the kind who sold amulets, evil spells, and maps for finding buried treasure. Alexander picked up the trade from him, and just as the charlatan had fallen in love with his body, so Alexander fell in love with the man’s tricks. He learned all of them. But his friend soon died, and Alexander’s body was now past the point where he could make the best earnings out of prostitution. He decided to change profession and become a charlatan himself. He traveled around selling charms. And on his travels he met a rich Macedonian woman, a bit past it herself but still greedy for sex, so he stayed with her, because she paid well.

The woman came from the once glorious town of Pella, now little more than a handful of dilapidated houses. Here Alexander found a species of snake that were at once very big and extremely tame. They would sleep with children and wouldn’t bite you even if you trod on them. Apparently the area was full of them, and Lucian imagined that one of these snakes must have coupled with Olympias to generate Alexander the Great. Now those same snakes would come in useful to another Alexander. He bought some for next to nothing and set off again well contented. With his friend Coccona, a poet who went along with him on his travels (because a con is always better when you have someone to share it with), Alexander came to the conclusion that there was no better way of making money than starting up an oracle. But for an oracle you needed a suitable location. They looked around for the place where people would be most willing to believe absolutely anything. After a lot of discussion, they settled on Abonuteichos. But they must stage-manage their arrival with care: so they buried some bronze tablets in the temple of Asclepius in Chalcedon. Then they dug them out again and read the oracular words inscribed on them: Apollo, father of Asclepius, was about to take up residence at Abonuteichos. The news traveled swiftly to its destination. And the people of Abonuteichos agreed to start building a temple. The god wasn’t going to catch them unprepared.

Coccona, in the meantime, was bitten by a viper while practicing his oracles in verse and died. So Alexander turned up on his own. His fake curls came down to his shoulders, and he wore a white and purple tunic with a cloak on top. A curved sword, like the one Perseus had used, hung at his hip, because he was a descendant of Perseus, he said, on his mother’s side. Of course the Paphlagonians knew Alexander and his modest parents very well: but when the oracles kept on telling them how, overwhelmed by a frenzy of passion, Podalirius, son of Asclepius, had traveled from as far off as Tricca to make love to Alexander’s mother, they gave in. The oracle got into gear. But the fact that Alexander would occasionally have paroxysms and foam at the mouth, with a little help from a root he chewed, wasn’t enough. For a proper oracle, snakes were a must. Alexander had brought ten of the Macedonian variety along with him.

One night he went to a spring near the new temple, where he managed to find a goose’s egg and a baby snake. He trapped the snake in the shell of the egg and buried it in the mud. The next morning he turned up in the marketplace and, after generally behaving like a maniac and screaming a few words in Hebrew and Phoenician, announced to the amazed citizenry that they were about to receive the god. After that, he ran off to the temple.

He waded into the water of the spring and invoked Apollo. He asked for a libation bowl and pushed it into the mud. The bowl came up with the goose’s egg, which he had put back together with wax. Everybody watched, astonished. Then Alexander broke the shell and let the baby snake wriggle around his fingers. The new Asclepius, he said. The people followed him, brimming with devotion. After which, Alexander took care not to be seen for a few days. Then he waited for the crowd. When they all came running, credulous as ever, Alexander was lying godlike on a bed in a small chamber, his Macedonian snake wrapped around his neck, stretching across his stomach, and then falling in coils to the floor. Beside his beard, Alexander let the onlookers glimpse a dummy head, half snake, half man, which he had stuffed with horsehair. The people thought it was the snake’s head. The light was poor, and anyway they were all fighting to get a look at this baby snake that in just a few days had amazingly metamorphosed into a dragon with a human head. People flocked from Bithynia, Thrace, and Galatia, and Alexander always appeared in the same pose. He decided to change his name to Glycon, for reasons metrical. “I am Glycon, grandson of Zeus, light of mankind.” At this point the oracle could start making money. People coming to consult it wrote down their wishes on sealed scrolls. Alexander opened the seals with a red-hot needle, then closed them again, exactly as they had been, and produced answers that amazed everybody. Two obols a consultation.

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 who 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 once 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.

“They chose some girls as water bearers: water was brought to sharpen the ax and the knife. When they had been sharpened, one of them handed over the ax, another struck the ox, and another cut its throat; then some others skinned it and they all tasted it. When all this had been done, they sewed up the ox’s hide, filled it with hay, and put the animal back on its feet in the same position it had been in when it was alive. They even yoked it to a plow as if it were working. Then they held a trial to judge the killing, and all those who had taken part were called upon to justify themselves. The girls who’d brought the water pointed to those who had sharpened the blades as being more guilty than themselves, while those who had sharpened the blades pointed to the person who had held the ax. He pointed to the one who had cut the ox’s throat, and he pointed to the knife. Because the knife had no voice to speak, it was accused of the killing. From that day to this, during the Dipolia held on the Athens Acropolis, an ox is sacrificed in the same way. Having placed bread and other cakes on the bronze table, they walk the chosen oxen around it, and the one that eats the offerings is killed. Those who perform these rites are now divided up into families. All the descendants of he who first struck the ox, Sopatrus, are called boutýpoi (those who strike the ox); the descendants of the person who led the oxen around the offering are called kentriádai (the ones with the goad); and the descendants of the man who cut the ox’s throat are called daitroí (those who celebrate), because of the celebrations that follow the distribution of the meat. Having stuffed the ox’s hide and appeared at the trial, they throw the knife into the sea.”

Those who first laid down the rules of sacrifice were too subtle as theologians to claim that guilt only manifested itself with the killing of a living being: that notion they left to future tribunals who would know only the limited order of men. If it were enough just to abstain from killing, life could indeed become innocent. But guilt resides in the veins — and can only move from one place to another, transform itself, reveal itself, celebrate itself.

The primordial crime is the action that makes something in existence disappear: the act of eating. Guilt is thus obligatory and inextinguishable. And, given that men cannot survive without eating, guilt is woven into their physiology and forever renews itself. But then who is at the origin of the guilt? The ox, the working ox, man’s companion, the ox who one day ate the bread and cakes offered to the gods. That gesture, obtuse and meek, was the first lesion in the realm of the existent, and every later lesion was implicit in it: it was the gesture that steals away something that exists, as Hades stole away Kore. From that gesture, bound together in a single chain, come all the other crimes. Guilt is so deeply embedded in existence that all it took to usher it into consciousness was for a farm animal to stretch out its snout toward a country pie.

But whom do we find at the other end of the chain of guilt? The knife that “has no voice” (áphonos). The only two things condemned, the ox and the knife, cannot speak. He who cannot speak is condemned at once. He who can speak — and is guilty just the same — lives under a perpetually suspended sentence. Between them, between one end of the chain and the other, the ox and the knife, are all the rest of us: the charming water bearers, who remind us of the fifty Danaids, spurts of lymph and death; the cold instigators who use their goads to point the ox to the cake so as to have it unknowingly make the guilty gesture that will single it out as the victim; then those who spend their lives absorbed in sharpening the sacrificial axes and knives; those who are happy just to offer the ax to whoever is going to strike the blow; he who brings down the ax, as the women break the silence with a shrill cry (ololug) of joy and horror; those who cut the animal’s throat after it is down, because if blood doesn’t flow the death is pointless, the animal can’t be eaten; those who use the same knife that slit the throat to divide the meat into portions for each and every citizen; and, last of all, those who watch the killing and eat the animal’s flesh: everybody.

The Delphic priests were guardians not only of the lógos but also of the doctrine of sacrifice. When the Athenians consulted the oracle after Sopatrus’s cruel gesture, the Pythia answered with the brutal words that would make it possible to found the city, to found any city, because cities can only be founded on guilt. Eat the victim’s flesh and don’t be squeamish: with these words civilization was born. All the rest is honey and acorns, the Orphic life, nostalgia for a pure beginning. But not even that life could ignore the fact that the world is waste and dissipation. On the bronze table lies the bread. Then it is gone. Absence, sudden and irreversible absence, the sign that dissipation is at work. And each person, every being — the dumb beast of burden and the man who kills and the metal blade likewise — all play their part in that work. Guilt pervades everything that acts. Everything will be judged. But not so that, after the judgment, the guilt can be put aside, dissolved. On the contrary, guilt was imposed on us by the gods, even before the law.

The Pythia offers the Athenians an enigma composed of five fragments: the Stranger must be called back from exile; the crime must be repeated, and hence exalted; the killer must be judged; the victim must be “put back on its feet, in the course of the same sacrifice in which it was killed”; the men must eat the victim’s flesh and not be squeamish about it. Only if all five of these conditions are simultaneously met, then “things might improve.” The Pythia’s answer bristles with contradictions. The Stranger is guilty but must be called back from exile; indeed, he is the essential element in any possible salvation. The ox is guilty, because it ate the offerings made to the gods, but it must reappear, set on its feet once more and stuffed with straw. (And for those moderns who tend to be overamenable to any possibility of resurrection, it should be said that the stuffed ox beneath the bloody hide is not a resurrected ox: it is merely the ox present, “in the same position it was in when it was alive,” brought back, that is, to remind us that the true offense, even before death, is disappearance.) Everybody must be committed to trial for the killing of the ox, but everybody must also, indeed immediately, eat its meat, and “without being squeamish.”

What is all this about? The gods aren’t content to foist guilt on man. That wouldn’t be enough, since guilt is part of life anyway. What the gods demand is an awareness of guilt. And this can only be achieved through sacrifice. On its own the law will serve to punish guilt but certainly not to make us aware of it, which is far more important. Sacrifice is the cosmic machine that raises our guilty lives to consciousness. After Sopatrus brought down the ax on the ox’s nape, he woke up from his rage as though from a dream and “became aware of [sunephrónēsen] what he had done.” He threw down the ax and fled far away. But Sopatrus was acting alone at this point; his was the action of one individual. And he was fainthearted. He buried the ox instead of eating it. His guilt took on no resonance; he didn’t go all the way.

The Pythia demanded that Sopatrus’s ax go on striking for all time and that everyone, the whole community, the pólis and every single member of it, participate in that act and be aware of committing it. Nor was that all: the community must also welcome Sopatrus into its midst — Sopatrus the Stranger — and welcome him precisely because he had committed that act, that furious slaying of a working ox that had gobbled up the bread so that it disappeared in its mouth.

Kore and Demeter are a dual being, even in name (Deó). In a dazzling transposition, every gesture made by one corresponds to a gesture of the other. When their stories approach a stasis that would prove fatal — Kore sitting on Hades’ throne in funereal immobility and Demeter sitting on “the stone that does not laugh”—something happens to dispel that rigidity: Kore, distracted by what Hades is saying, eats a pomegranate seed; Demeter, distracted by Baubo’s obscene dance, eats the initiates’ broth like a hungry traveler. It was from these two gestures that the mysteries arose. By accepting and assimilating foods that were neither nectar nor ambrosia, Demeter and Kore shared in that guilt peculiar to men, exposed themselves to that special weakness the gods had always mocked: that submission to time that causes living beings to disappear, and at the same time the complicity of those beings with their own destroyer, since man cannot live without himself making something else disappear. The mysteries are the wound that opens in the hitherto intact Olympic epidermis, a wound which then tries in vain to heal itself in ceremony after ceremony. That that wound may never heal is the hope of the initiates.

The palaiòn pénthos, the “ancient grief,” persists undiminished across time and demands that men take some liberating action. Isn’t that what the mysteries are? For we live surrounded, in the invisible air, by wandering avengers who never forget the “ancient contaminations.” It is an Olympian paradox that this oppressive vendetta affects gods as well as men. Thus, when Apollo committed his primordial crime by killing Python, we find this proudest and most distant of gods humbly imitating men, offering libations and going into exile, as would Oedipus one day and Orestes.

When the gods come into contact with guilt, they lower their gaze toward men and begin to copy their gestures so as to free themselves from it. A parallelism thus develops between the way men imitate gods and vice versa. Men, writes Strabo, “imitate the gods chiefly when they are doing good; or rather, when they are happy.” The gods, in contrast, imitate men when they do or suffer evil (and for the Greeks the two things were bound by the same knot: adikeîn, adikeîsthai) or, rather, when they are unhappy. We have evidence of such unhappiness on the part of the gods in “what we hear tell of the gods in the myths and hymns — their abductions, secret wanderings, exile, servitude.” It was precisely with these elements, these precious clues, indeed the only clues to the experiences of the gods on earth, that men composed the mysteries. Here every gesture achieves its maximum density and enjoins us to silence: in the mysteries men repeat the gestures the gods made as they imitated men in order to free themselves from divine guilt. Hence the vertigo of the mysteries. More even than in their happiness, men approach the gods in their celebration of the gestures the gods made when they were unhappy.

For those not initiated in the mysteries, they seem to have to do with the immortality of men; for the initiates, the mysteries are a moment when the gods become tangled with death. “Many things related to death and mourning are to be found mixed together in the initiation ceremonies,” says Plutarch. But that most dangerous turncoat of the pagan world, Clement of Alexandria, is even more precise, indeed brutal: “The mysteries can be summed up in just two words,” he says, “killings and burials.”

It is not the men who pass through the mysteries who are immortal but the mysteries themselves. When, in Smyrna, the public speaker Aelius Aristides hears that a raid by Costobocis has devastated Eleusis, he says: “The battles on sea and the battles on land and the laws and the constitutions and the arrogance and the tongues and all the rest have melted away: only the mysteries remain.”

Pelasgian: thus the Greeks designated the erratic block of their origins. There were Pelasgians on Samothrace: they celebrated mysteries with cranes and pygmies; they were the first to square stones from which young heads and erect phalluses would protrude. There were Pelasgians in Arcadia, Aeolis, Lemnos, Imbros, Argos, Athens. For thousands of years, from Ephorus right through to Klages, scholars have been obsessed by the quest to identify the Pelasgians. But Pelasgian man is elusive. You can never pin anything on him: he is always the mute “neighbor” (pélas), the thing language and history have split away from. Without dwelling on the point, Herodotus remarks that, “being Pelasgian, the Athenians changed their language when they were absorbed into the Greek family.” Thus the Athenians made two claims about themselves: that they were autochthonous, born from the soil, because they were Pelasgian; and at the same time that they had rejected the language of the soil, the lost Pelasgian language, which Herodotus himself already found incomprehensible.

What importance this might have had, Herodotus doesn’t say. But when, as a curious traveler, he arrived in Dodona, this is what the three priestesses of the sanctuary, Promeneia, Timarete, and Nicandra, told him. Long before, at a certain moment in the ancient history of the sanctuary, a group of Pelasgians arrived at Zeus’s oak (but did they call him Zeus? or was he just theós?). They had come to consult the oracle. Hitherto, the Pelasgians had “offered sacrifices of every kind to the gods and prayed to them, but without distinguishing between them with names and titles, because they didn’t know that any such things existed.” Now some sailor or other had come back from Egypt bringing the names of the gods with him. But was it right to use them? And were these unknown names the correct ones? The oak tree told them that the names were right and that it was right to use them. Zeus is the god who allows the other gods to be named. Zeus is the god who allows things to appear.

The story the three priestesses of Dodona told Herodotus is also the fable that ushers in the opposition and superimposition of nómos and phýsis, law (or convention) and nature, and hence the underlying structure of all thought from then on. Only that day, in Dodona, did the Greeks become Greek: if by Greek we mean nothing more than the coexistence of a dark, obscure background, like the rustling of a tree, dedicated to any and every power, with a sound that comes from a foreign land and forever superimposes on that background the sovereign caprice of a name. The Pelasgians went from a mute homage to the gods to an homage in which they evoked those gods with foreign names they knew nothing about. Thus did the Greeks tense their metaphysical bow; such was their style as they raised it to their shoulders.

Zeus was not to have a temple in Dodona, the most ancient of oracles, until the fifth century. The center of the sanctuary was an oak, protected by a circle of tripods. It looked out over a broad, flattish valley. At each side of the valley rose long, rolling hills, hills like so many others, their slopes mottled with green patches that grew thicker and thicker until they formed a solid green carpet at the bottom of the valley. Dodona was not a prominent, strategic, exposed place, like Delphi; nor was it a blissful place, like Olympia. Dodona had no profile, whereas Delphi was nothing but. But Delphi was Apollo. And everything that is not Apollo is an enemy of Apollo. By contrast, Zeus is flat, accepting and welcoming everything.

Zeus has no character, he is the support beneath every character. Just as his statue in Olympia was the support for all the shapes and parasites on it, his place admits of every other place. And his voice, the rustling of the oak, is the closest thing imaginable to undifferentiated sound, a voice that more than any other on earth recalls the sea. Only Zeus is able to transform the flat background of existence into something marvelous. All the other gods have their shapes, their signs, their profiles. Zeus has the background, and the background noise. Zeus is the commonplace supporting the unique. The unique cannot exist without that support. But the support can exist alone. The unique tends to be jealous, because there are things that don’t belong to it. The support tends to be indifferent, because everything rests upon it.

On the small lead plates people would use to consult the oracle at Dodona, we read: “Did Pistus steal the wool from the mattress?” “Eurydamus would like to know where he might find his lost cup.” But, alongside these trivial requests referring to everyday objects, we also find a quite different kind: “Which god should I ask to help me do what I have in mind?” “Peithione would like to know whether he would do well to pray and offer sacrifices to Asclepius.” “Hermone the Corinthian would like to know what god he should invoke to have good children by his wife Cratea.”

In Delphi, people consulted the Pythia to find out what Apollo thought about something. In Dodona, they consulted the oak to have Zeus guide them through the tangle of the gods. Those coming to the oracle weren’t anxious about whether they should make a sacrifice or not. They were anxious because they were afraid of making their sacrifice to the wrong god. And there is nothing as sad as a sacrifice made to the wrong god. So much of our lives is made up of them. It was precisely to avoid mistakes of that kind that people followed the footsteps of the Hyperboreans to Dodona. Like some supreme post office, Zeus sorted their requests and sent off the supplicants to this or that Olympian or hero, suggesting into which vein of the invisible their offerings should be poured. No matter was too small, no question too big to be put to Zeus. Apollo wove conspiracies with those who came to him, greeted them in a temple crammed with spoils. Zeus resided in the trunk of an oak tree, and from there, with the neutrality of a guide, pointed the way to recovering the lost cup, the way to gaining the favor of the god most suitable for the occasion.

Among the many acacias and poplars, there is only one oak tree left in Dodona, and not a particularly big one at that. But such is Zeus: any old oak tree. Only Zeus can sustain the wonder of normality.

The hymn etched in the stele of Palaikastro describes Zeus as the mégistos koûros, “the greatest of the koûroi.” As though he had only just detached himself from his identical companions, and so become the sovereign, the unique Zeus; as though the god were born from a projection of the initiates’ gaze. They see themselves in the one koûros who steps forward from the ranks of the others. They are the Curetes who danced around the infant Zeus, clashing their shields. Now they are ready to follow him through the mountains, vagabonds and wizards and assayers of metals. On the stele of Palaikastro, Zeus is also invoked as pankrats gánous, “sovereign of the liquid splendor.” But gános is something no one can circumscribe. The Etymologicon Magnum attributes to it the following sequence of meanings: hýdōr chárma phs lípos aug leukótes lampedn: “water joy light fat brilliance whiteness flash.” And then adds these words, ignored for centuries, words that mark the point where, in the waters of the Mediterranean, the essences of Athens and Jerusalem meet: “Gános, to the Cypriots, means paradise (parádeisos).”

Gános is a substance, a feeling, a radiance. Zeus is made of gános; the Twelve Olympians are made of gános. Zeus is sovereign of the radiant material with which he shapes himself and with which the circle of the Twelve is shaped round about him. A reflection of that substance shone in the statue that Zeus fashioned to hide the heart of Zagreus.