The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

VII

(photo credit 7.1)

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.

Then, little by little, Zeus vomited everything that had settled in his belly out into the light. Back came the trees and the rivers, the stars and the subterranean fire, the divine beings and the beasts. Everything looked the same as before, yet everything was different. From the grain of dust right up to the immense bodies revolving in the heavens, everything was linked by an invisible chain. Everything appeared to be coated in light, as if born for the first time. But Zeus knew this wasn’t so: through him, on the contrary, everything had been born for the last time.

The sovereign gods suffer from a nostalgia for the state of their forerunner, Phanes. And they try to return to it. Zeus’s nostalgia for Phanes takes the form of the snake. Only Zeus could remember the image of the two intertwined snakes, before the world existed. And Phanes had appeared from among the coils of a snake. After Zeus had expelled the world from within him, he felt the desire to couple with his mother. That desire was prompted by a distant memory. His mother fled, and Zeus chased her tirelessly. In the end, Rhea Demeter turned herself into a snake. So then Zeus became a snake too. He closed on his mother and wrapped his scales around hers in a Heracleotic knot, the same knot two snakes would one day make on Hermes’ staff. It was a violent thing to do, so much so that one ancient commentator tried to demonstrate that the name Rhea Demeter (Deó) came from dēioûn, “to devastate.” But why did the god decide to make that particular knot to rape his mother? Zeus was remembering something and wanted to repeat it. Just as men would one day recall a divine precedent in everything they did, so Zeus recalled those gods before the gods whom he had been able to contemplate when he swallowed Phanes and all his powers.

Zeus repeated the most majestic image he knew, the oldest his memory went back to: the image of Time-Without-Age and Ananke intertwined in the Heracleotic knot before the world was born. So the rape of Rhea Demeter, the model for so many of Zeus’s later adventures, was not a prototype of his own invention but rather a gesture back toward a preexisting past that only Zeus could have known about. To repeat it was a pledge of fidelity. From snake to snake the world went on propagating itself in era after era. Every time Zeus transformed himself into a snake, time’s arrow flew backward, to bury itself in the origin of things. At which the world seemed to hold its breath, listening for that backward movement that marks the passage from one era to another. And so it was when, from the union of Zeus and Rhea Demeter in the form of snakes, Persephone was born, “the girl whose name cannot be uttered,” the unique girl to whom Zeus would transmit the secret of the snake.

At birth, Persephone would have been horrible to anybody, but not to her father, who was the only one able to look at her in her first form. She had two faces, four eyes, and horns that sprouted from her forehead. Neither men nor gods could have understood the glory of Persephone. But Zeus understood it. For, seeing her, he remembered how Phanes had risen to the light. And just as a snake had once wound itself around Phanes’ radiant flesh, so one day Zeus went to his daughter and wrapped her in his coils, once again assuming the form of a snake. It happened in Crete. Rhea Demeter had hidden her daughter in a cave, and there Persephone wove a garment strewn with flowers, working on a loom of stone. The entrance to the cave was guarded by snakes. But another snake, Zeus, put them to sleep by staring into their eyes as he slithered into the cave. And, before Persephone could defend herself, her white skin was tight against the scales of a snake, who licked and dribbled amorously. In the darkness of the cave, Persephone’s horrible body radiated light, just as Phanes’ once had. From that violent coupling Zagreus was born, the first Dionysus.

The Christian Fathers did not believe in the copulation of snake Zeus with Demeter. Their version of events was even more vicious. Clement is brusque and elliptic in his account. But the African Arnobius couldn’t resist the story. He bubbles over with the eloquence of a baroque preacher abandoning himself to delectatio morosa. In his version, Zeus copulates with Demeter not as a snake at all but as a bull. “Fit ex deo taurus.” From the moment Zeus becomes a bull, Arnobius’s prose takes off: “Cum in Cererem suam matrem libidinibus improbis atque inconcussis aestuaret …” Aestuare: a flood spreading out, a fire raging: such is the lust of Zeus. He is a god who tricks his mother by transforming himself into a bull so he can rape her. And that’s when Demeter’s anger flares; that, and not when another son of Kronos carries off her daughter, is when the goddess gets the name Brimo.

So it was after that rape that Demeter first paralyzed both the gods and the world: “adlegatur deorum universus ordo.” And it was then that Zeus, to placate her, resorted to a cheap trick, not unlike the one men would later use to placate the gods. He chose a ram with big testicles and cut them off. Then he went back to his mother with a sad, repentant look. Pretending they were his own, he tossed the ram’s testicles onto his mother’s lap. The sacrificial substitution, that powerful weapon men would one day use to defend themselves from the gods, was thus invented by Zeus. And Demeter was placated.

Persephone was born in the tenth month. Zeus watched her grow. When she was strong, flourishing, and “swollen with lymph,” he felt an overwhelming desire to do the same thing over again: “redit ad priores actus.” This time he transforms himself into a snake, wraps his daughter in immense coils, and, gripping her in a ferocious lock, plays with her tenderly and whispers his adoration through their coitus, “mollissimis ludit atque adulatur amplexibus.” Impregnated with the seed of a bull, Demeter had given birth to a girl. Filled with the seed of Zeus as snake, Persephone gave birth to a bull.

The cosmos pulses back and forth between snake and bull. An enormously long time would pass before the snake, Time-Without-Age, was followed by the drumming of the bull, who was Zeus. Then a much shorter time before the bull Zeus coupled with Demeter to generate a woman in whom the nature of the snake pulsed once again, Persephone. And hardly any time at all, the time it takes for desire to flare, before Zeus, realizing that the baby Persephone had become a girl, transformed himself into a snake, coupled with his daughter, and generated Zagreus, the bull, the first Dionysus.

The story of the world was all contained in this becoming a bull, then a snake once again, to generate another bull. Told by Zeus, it was a story that began with a bull and ended with a bull. Told by Time-Without-Age, it was a story that began with a snake and waited to coil itself up in a snake once more. Time-Without-Age has been waiting ever since for:

… bull

father of snake and father of snake bull,

in the mountain the hidden one, oh herdsman, the goad.

Theós, the indeterminate divine, was an invasion, of body and mind. It was our becoming intimate with what is most alien. And nothing is more alien than the snake. A hand lifted the snake toward the neck. The hand slipped the snake under the tunic of the initiate. From the throat, down the cleavage between the breasts, if it was a girl, or across the taut chest, if it was a boy, the snake slithered into darkness, hidden beneath the cloth, toward the belly. Did it linger there? Did it wrap itself around the youth’s waist? It slid over the thighs and poked out down below, between the legs. “Theòs dià kólpou”: “god across the belly.”

The sea is the continuum, the perfection of the undifferentiated. Its emissary on earth is the snake. Where the snake is, there gushes water. Its eye is liquid. Beneath its coils flows the water of the underworld. Forever. Being sinuous, it has no need of joints. The same pattern covers its whole skin; its scales are uniform, its motion undulating and constantly self-renewing, like waves. The snake is to the bull as the sea to the land. The earth emerges from the sea, as the bull from the snake. To carry off Europa, the bull Zeus emerged from the sea and then plunged back into it again. Fending off the waves, Europa had one foot immersed in the sea, one hand gripping the animal’s back.

Where force reigns, the spirit is alien, detached from both earth and water. But Apollo and Athena were envious of force, that force which, by the time they were born, had already been pushed back to the ends of the earth. There, near the snaking coil of Oceanus, sleepless or lethargic creatures could still be found, lurking in caves or on mountains, creatures that still possessed an unextinguished force. Apollo and Athena knew they would have to flush out those creatures, kill them, and make that force their own.

Bearers of an opposite perfection, new and unimagined, Apollo and Athena were jealous of the perfection of the undifferentiated. But, in line with the division of the spoils between the sons of Kronos, they couldn’t intervene in the watery realm of Poseidon, nor in the subterranean kingdom of Hades. That left the earth as their playground. And meant they would have to play out their game with the snake. Athena killed Gorgon, who was crowned with snakes. Apollo killed Python, coiled around the spring of Castalia. Gorgon’s snakes stirred in the wind on Athena’s breast. They had become the fringe of the aegis. Python’s teeth and bones were kept in the bronze pot of the tripod, from which the Pythia chanted Apollo’s prophecies. Python’s scales were wrapped around the omphalós, the navel stone. The navel is the point, the only and indispensable point, where the perfect links up with the perfection of the undifferentiated. It is Europa’s foot dipped in the sea.

Two sovereign lines descend from Zeus: that of Dionysus and that of Apollo. Dionysus’s line is more obscure than Apollo’s; only rarely does it emerge from the shadow. Since he is both snake and bull, all history before Zeus is recalled in him and begins again with him. Apollo’s line is the more visible, yet even more secret than Dionysus’s when it comes to Apollo’s transgression against his father. Apollo is neither snake nor bull, but he who kills snake and bull, either loosing off the arrows himself, as with Python at Delphi, or sending his emissary, Theseus, to bury his sword in the Minotaur in Crete or capture the bull in Marathon.

Dionysus and Apollo: one is the weapon, the other uses the weapon. Ever since they appeared, Psyche has been running back and forth into the arms of first one, then the other.

When Hades asked to carry off Kore, Zeus sensed the time had come for a new ring to be added to the knot of the snakes. But this time it wasn’t up to him to act. He would be a consenting witness. The invisible would now reassert its rights over the body of the visible more strictly than before: their dealings with each other, long diluted and mingled together in life on earth, would find a new center of gravity.

Hades was claiming the supremacy of a world that was other: isolated, separate, and silent. But this other world culminated in the flower of the visible, and that flower was Persephone. With her, the secret of the snake, a secret passed on from snake to snake right up to snake Zeus, would now go over to the invisible world, and Zeus himself would have to surrender it if it was to go on functioning. Hades’ visit was prelude to a moment of enormous imbalance, both on Olympus and on earth.

It was a place where dogs would lose their quarry’s trail, so violent was the scent of the flowers. A stream cut deep through the grass of a meadow that rose at the edge to fall sheer in a rocky ravine into the very navel of Sicily. And here, near Henna. Kore was carried off. When the earth split open and Hades’ chariot appeared, drawn by four horses abreast, Kore was looking at a narcissus. She was looking at the act of looking. She was about to pick it. And, at that very moment, she was herself plucked away by the invisible toward the invisible. Kore doesn’t just mean “girl,” but “pupil” too. And the pupil, as Socrates says to Alcibiades, “is the finest part of the eye,” not just because it is “the part which sees” but because it is the place where another person looking will find “the image of himself looking.” And if, as Socrates claims, the Delphic maxim “Know thyself” can be understood only if translated as “Look at thyself,” then the pupil becomes the sole means of self-knowledge. Kore looked at the yellow “prodigy” of the narcissus. But what is it that makes this yellow flower, used at once for the garlands of Eros and of the dead, so marvelous? What sets it apart from the violets, the crocuses, and the hyacinths that made the meadow near Henna so colorful? Narcissus is also the name of a young man who lost himself looking at himself.

Kore, the pupil, was thus on a threshold. She was on the brink of meeting a gaze in which she would have seen herself. She was stretching out her hand to pluck that gaze. But Hades burst upon the scene. And Kore was plucked away by Hades. For a moment, Kore’s eye had to turn away from the narcissus and meet Hades’ eye. The pupil of the Pupil was met by another pupil, in which it saw itself. And that pupil belonged to the world of the invisible.

Somebody heard a cry. But what did that cry mean? Was it just the terror of a young girl being carried off by a stranger? Or was it the cry of an irreversible recognition? Some early poets suggest that Persephone felt a “fatal desire” to be carried off, that she formed a “love pact” with the king of the night, that she shamelessly and willingly exposed herself to the contagion of Hades. Kore saw herself in Hades’ pupil. She recognized, in the eye observing itself, the eye of an invisible other. She recognized that she belonged to that other. At that moment she crossed the threshold she had been about to cross while looking at the narcissus. It was the threshold of Eleusis.

If the pupil is kórè, it follows that the eye par excellence is Hades’. For it was in that eye, as he carried her off, that Kore saw herself reflected. It was then that this girl within the eye became the pupil for us all. As if the eye had only now stormed out on a raid from the kingdom of the dead. Vision was a prey. And the eye pounced from the shadows to capture a girl and shut her away in the underworld palace of the mind.

The meaning of Kore in Hades’ eye is twofold: on the one hand, insofar as Kore sees herself in her abductor’s eye, she discovers reflection, duplication, the moment in which consciousness observes itself: and paradoxically that duplicated gaze is also the ultimate of visions; it can’t be divided up anymore, for every further division would merely be a confirmation of the first. On the other hand, in meeting the pupil, the cavity of vision for the first time welcomes and draws into itself its great desire: the image. For a split second the extremes of the mind are copresent in the eye of an abductor.

What happened in Eleusis was the separation and reunion of the dual goddess Demeter-Kore (Deó), she who sometimes appears as two barely differentiated figures, cloaked in the same mantle. It was the drama of the reflection that detaches itself from the body, from every object, from the earth even — to then be reunited with its origin. But only in certain recurrent moments. Like the eclipses.

With the arrival of Kore, the marvelous passes from the object to the act of looking. At the beginning of her adventure, Kore looks at the narcissus, “that wondrous, radiant flower, awesome to the sight of gods and mortals alike.” At the end, when she returns from the underworld, Kore herself is “a great wonder for gods and mortals alike.” By repeating the same formula, the anonymous author of the Homeric Hymns intended to underline the completion of an irreversible process: the passage to the soul. And the formula alerts us to the fact that the event was a source of amazement not just in the history of men but in the history of the gods too.

When Hades asked his brother Zeus for a living woman, he upset the simple world order that had pertained hitherto: life abounded, was marked and scarred by raiding gods, then consigned to an empty, inert, incorporeal afterlife. Zeus wouldn’t have his mortal mistresses vanish. He would possess them, then abandon them. But Hades wanted Kore as his bride, wanted to have a living person sitting on the throne beside him. We could say that with this demand death aimed to inflict a further outrage on the earth above. But it is precisely now, in its insolence, that death deceives itself. With the abduction of Persephone, death acquires a body, acquires body: in the kingdom of the shades, there is now at least one body, and the body of a flourishing young girl at that.

In the past, few had had the privilege of being led by a god to the Elysian Fields with their bodies still intact. And Hades was defined as that place where there is no body. But now, along with Kore’s body, Eros penetrated the kingdom of the dead. The slender-ankled Persephone was the supple arrow Aphrodite ordered Eros to let fly at Hades when the goddess summoned her son to the black rock of Eryx. The world had reached a point at which the economy of metamorphosis that had sustained it for so long through the period of Zeus’s adventures was no longer enough. Things had lost their primordial fluidity, had hardened into profile, and the game that had once been played out between one shape and another was now reduced to the mere alternation of appearance and disappearance. From now on, it was a question not only of accepting life in a single immutable form but of accepting the certainty that that form would one day disappear without trace. Demeter’s anger is the revolt against this new regime of life. But the goddess didn’t know that at the same moment a new regime of death had also been inaugurated.

When Persephone took her place on Hades’ throne and her scented face peeped out from behind the spiky beard of her partner, when Persephone bit into the pomegranate that grew in the shadow gardens, death underwent a transformation every bit as radical as that which life had undergone when it had been deprived of the girl. The two kingdoms were thrown off balance, each opening up to the other. Hades imposed an absence on earth, imposed a situation where every presence was now enveloped in a far greater cloak of absence. Persephone imposed blood on the dead: not, as in the past, the dark blood of sacrifice, not the blood the dead used to drink so thirstily, but the invisible blood that went on pulsing in her white arms, the blood of someone who is still entirely alive, even in the palace of death.

Dionysus wandered about Greece looking for an entrance to Hades. He wanted to go down to the underworld to bring back his mother, Semele. One day he found himself on the shores of a lake whose water was uncannily still. This was near Lerna, and the lake was called Lake Alcyonius. The water was still as metal. In the silence all around, reeds and marshgrass bowed in the wind. Dionysus saw Prosymnus (or was he called Polymnus?) coming toward him. He asked him the way to Hades. Prosymnus said he would show him, on condition that Dionysus let himself be made love to like a woman. Dionysus promised he would, but only after he had returned from Hades. Together they approached the water. Nothing could have been calmer than that dense surface. But the small lake was bottomless. Try to swim in it and it would suck you down, endlessly. Prosymnus told Dionysus he must dive into that water if he was to get to Hades.

To a man, the ancients kept quiet about what happened at the end of Dionysus’s journey to the underworld. But one of the Fathers of the Church spoke out. With the brutal directness of those early Christians who had previously been initiated in the mysteries, Clement of Alexandria tells how Dionysus sodomized himself. “Dionysus yearned to go down into Hades but did not know the way. A certain Prosymnus promised to show him, but not without a reward [misthós] and the reward he wanted was not a good thing, though good enough for Dionysus; this favor, this reward Prosymnus asked of Dionysus, had to do with the pleasures of Aphrodite. The god agreed to the reward and promised to grant it, if he succeeded in returning from his journey, and he backed up his promise with an oath. Having been told the way, he set out. But when he returned he couldn’t find Prosymnus (who had died while he was away); determined to keep his promise to his lover, Dionysus went to his grave full of amorous desire. He cut a branch from a fig tree that happened to be there and, having fashioned it in the shape of the virile member, pushed it into himself, thus maintaining his promise to the dead man.”

Dionysus wasn’t the only god who’d had to ask a man the way to Hades. When Demeter was searching for Kore, she asked Celeus, king of Eleusis, where she might find her daughter. Celeus pointed her to Hades. As a “reward” [misthós], Demeter gave him the secret of bread, but she also allowed him to possess her body, “illicitly.” It’s not a Father of the Church who gives us the details this time but an obscure scholiast. Gregory of Nazianzus “is ashamed” even to mention “those certain things that Demeter does and submits to.” Gregory had good reason to be scandalized: Demeter is the goddess of the thesmoí, the strictest of laws, and here she is agreeing to give herself athésmōs, “lawlessly,” to a mortal. Then from that union a child would be born, “out of mortal necessity,” as the Orphic hymn later puts it. At this point order has been turned completely on its head. How can Ananke, Necessity, who is more divine than the gods, because she precedes them, become “mortal,” and as such subdue a goddess to herself? The goddess’s humiliation took place in Eleusis — and marked an irreversible turning point in the history of the Olympians. But what had pushed Dionysus and Demeter to that point?

The Eleusinian crisis came about when the Olympians developed a new fascination for death. Zeus gave his daughter Kore to Hades, Demeter gave herself to a mortal. To find out more about death, the gods had to turn to men, death being the one thing men knew rather more about than they did. And, to get help from men, both Dionysus and Demeter had to prostitute themselves. A god surrendering himself to a mortal is like a man surrendering himself to death: every dead man has to bring a coin with him, to pay his way to Hades. Gods don’t use money, so they give their bodies. After all, from the Olympians’ point of view, men are already dead, because death lurks within them.

Just as Persephone let herself be carried off by the king of the dead, so Dionysus ties a fig branch to a gravestone and lets it penetrate him, and Demeter gives herself to the mortal Celeus. The memory of this divine prostitution was buried deep in the mysteries. We would know nothing of it at all were it not for the vindictive zeal of a Father of the Church and the loquacity of a scholiast. But no sooner have those events been disinterred from the silence than all kinds of other authors come running to confirm a complicity between Dionysus and Demeter vis-à-vis their love affairs on the road to Hades.

In Lerna, near the lake where Dionysus was sucked down into the underworld, people worshiped Demeter Prosymna. And Polyhymnia, partner of Polymnus, the other form of the name Prosymnus, was mother to Phylammon, founder of the mysteries of Lerna. Another Polyhymnia is mentioned as being the mother of the young Triptolemus, who scattered Demeter’s corn seeds across the world from his winged chariot. And his father was supposed to be Celeus: meaning that Polyhymnia has taken Demeter’s place as Celeus’s mistress. One of the Nymphs who suckled Dionysus was called Polymnos. And polýymnos was an epithet for Dionysus before coming to mean simply “whore.” Plato throws some light on this last development. First and foremost Polyhymnia is one of the Muses, patron of intimate lyric song. But in the Symposium Plato tells us that Polyhymnia is a fearful Muse, not devoted to “fine love,” at all, “which is of the heavens, and the realm of the Muse Urania,” but to eros pándemos, the love that grants itself to all and sundry. Divine prostitution and lyric song are linked together in the shadows. One of the many who offered hospitality to Demeter during her wanderings was Phytalus, king of the land of the Cephisus, on the road to Eleusis. The procession that went from Athens to Eleusis always stopped to rest here, in a place known as the “Holy Fig,” where a tree Demeter had given to Phytalus still grew under a tiled roof that the Eleusinian priests took care to keep in good repair. The inscription on Phytalus’s tomb read: “Hero and king, here Phytalus received the majestic Demeter, when first she brought forth the first fruit of autumn, which mortal men called the sacred fig.”

Having gone down to the underworld to ransom his mother, Dionysus found himself face to face with Hades, as though looking in a mirror. The eyes staring at him were his own. Hades told him he would let Semele go, but only on condition that Dionysus gave up something very dear to him. Dionysus thought. Then he offered a twig of myrtle to the lord of the invisible. Hades accepted. How was it that that humble plant could settle such a portentous deal? Myrtle was the plant young spouses were crowned with on earth. And Hades couldn’t get enough of spouses and their nuptials. He wanted the kingdom of the dead to be mingled with the realm of eros. Not so as to conquer it or subdue it: in fact Hades agreed to let Zeus’s lover, the mortal Semele, ascend to the heavens, “having been granted permission by the Parcae.” No, what he really wanted was to mix the two kingdoms together. The myrtle was Aphrodite’s plant before it was Dionysus’s, and until this visit to the underworld it had been just the casual, fleeting fragrance of lovemaking. But from now on it would spread the fragrance of another world as well, the unknown. Thus the myrtle became the plant of both eros and mourning.

Leading his mother by the hand, Dionysus returned to earth at a place that would later be the site of the town of Troezen. Years passed, and now a stadium had been built close to the spot where Dionysus and Semele had climbed up from the underworld. Every day Prince Hippolytus would train there. He was a disciple of Orphism and hence a vegetarian and a virgin. All he knew about sex was what he saw in plays or statues. The son of an Amazon, he didn’t care about becoming an important person in the town. He expressed amazement when people talked about the “sweetness of power.” He worshiped his books, and the intoxicating fumes of “majestic words.” He exercised, he improved himself, and that was all he cared about. His detractors said he practiced a “cult of self.” But in fact, sealed away in its integrity, his “virgin soul” adored only one being, at once outside himself and intimate: the virgin huntress, Artemis. He hunted for her in the forest, served her as a slave, protected her images.

Hippolytus assumed he was alone as he exercised naked in the stadium at dawn. His body was glistening, untouchable. But a woman’s eyes were following his every move. Hidden away in her observation post above the stadium, in the temple of Aphrodite Kataskopia, Aphrodite “who spies from above,” his stepmother, Phaedra, was familiar with every tensing of the young man’s muscles. Alone as Hippolytus was alone, she watched him and burned with desire. Her sweaty hands fidgeted with tender myrtle leaves. Then, when desire became unbearable, she took a brooch from her hair and, eyes following Hippolytus’s every move, pricked holes in the myrtle leaves with the pin of the brooch. As well as “myrtle berry,” mýrton means “clitoris.”

Detached though he was from the world, Hippolytus was not as yet beyond the world’s sorcery. He would meet his death when his young fillies fled terrified before Poseidon’s monstrous bull, risen from the waters of the Saronicus. Hippolytus tried desperately to control them and was flung to the ground, tangled in the reins. As the horses dragged his dusty, blood-bespattered body over the sharp rocks that tore it apart, as he felt “the approaching dissolution in his brain,” Hippolytus was also aware of being that same myrtle leaf, torn apart by the precious brooch of a lover who had known his body only through her eyes and had hung herself for him: Phaedra.

Hippolytus exuded the fragrance of death, which mingled in the air with another, purer fragrance, announcing the presence of Artemis. Dying, he spoke to her, and she to him, but toward the end the goddess deserted him, even though she did call Hippolytus “the dearest of mortals.” She deserted him because Artemis cannot “corrupt her eyes with a mortal’s death throes.”

When her abductor led her into the palace of the dead, Persephone noticed a young girl, “lying on Aidoneus’s bed.” It was Minthe, they told her, Nymph of the river Cocytus. So even in these still and silent woods, even in this freezing, marshy, corrosive river where the dead sailed toward their torments, there were Nymphs! And where there were Nymphs there was seduction, the invincible impulse. Just as Zeus, her father and celestial lover, came down to pluck them from the hills, so Hades, her partner, chary of word and gesture, coupled with them in his bed. Betrayal spanned the cosmos from end to end.

Persephone grabbed hold of Minthe and dragged her out into the light, on the sands of Pylos, gateway to the West. There she hurled herself on the Nymph and stamped on her with that fury she had inherited from her mother. She wanted to trample her to death, to tear her apart like a mortal woman. And as Minthe’s soft body was reduced to a pulp of flesh and blood, her lifeless limbs released an intense, balmy fragrance. It was the wild mint that would grow ever afterward on the slopes of Samikon, looking out to sea.

Not far away, her divine lover, Hades, had himself once been wounded by Heracles while fighting to defend Pylos. He was surrounded by corpses, so much so that he no longer knew whether they were his own subjects or the bodies of warriors freshly dead. And one of the hero’s arrows pierced his shoulder. When one remembers that on that very day Heracles also struck the white right breast of Hera, it is clear this was a moment of great confusion between heaven, earth, and underworld. In pain, “the monstrous Hades” took the unusual step of climbing up to Olympus to have his wound dressed. On that long Elean beach, death had exposed itself to the risks of life. And it was there that Persephone squeezed a sweet and sterile perfume from Minthe’s body.

Demeter sat in the temple of Eleusis, wrapped in her deep blue tunic: she was waiting for mankind to die of hunger; she was waiting for the moment when the gods would know for the first time what it meant to smell the smoke of sacrifice no more. She wanted to break the life cycle, now that the “unbearable deeds of the blessed gods” had taken her Persephone away from her. Demeter herself had ordered the Eleusinians to build this temple; she had taught them the ceremonies to hold for Demophon, the child who lost his immortality thanks to his stupidly devoted mother, Metanira, “stulte pia.”

But the temple and its ceremonies couldn’t survive much longer now: all around, the Eleusinian plain was a skinned and dried up corpse. Seeds, flowers, and fruit had withdrawn into the earth as though into an inviolable shell. The plows bumped across clods that were lumps of dust.

Hermes came to see Hades and Persephone sitting on their throne and spoke the words he had himself heard time after time: Demeter wanted to see Persephone again, “with her eyes.” But how else could she have seen her? Demeter’s insistence on this plainly pleonastic formula contained a hidden message for Hades, as if Hades knew of another way of seeing and was planning to play that card, as if he wanted to cheat men out of seeing “with their eyes,” counting on another vision, which needed neither light nor eyes, because it was in itself both light and eye. Thus Hermes, perfect among messengers, faithfully repeated the words Demeter had first delivered to Olympus, and which now echoed in the darkness.

Hades’ eyebrows arched in a hint of a smile: we know of no smile more mysterious than the one that wrinkled the forehead of the lord of death that day. It wasn’t the serving maid Iambe’s lighthearted, intemperate, feckless laughter that had irresistibly infected Demeter and shaken her from her stony immobility. It was the smile of one who knows, and registers with that faint allusion his distance from everything that is going on. Beside him, Hades senses the warmth of the queen he has carried off and set on his throne. No one, not even Zeus, could take her away, except perhaps for a time: and time is one thing death always has. Now that the Olympians needed him, and had even sent the most intelligent of their number to persuade him — a sign that they were losing their nerve — Hades thought he might pretend just this once to play along with their comedy, a comedy they usually kept him out of. With a gesture of kindness, he turned to Persephone. His hand touched her arm, and that arm communicated a mute disquiet. He told her, in the presence of the Olympian messenger, that of course she could go back to her mother, but she would have to preserve her serenity. Again his words sounded mysterious and ironic, because until now Persephone had never been serene with him. Then he urged her not to be ashamed of her husband: in the end he was a great king and he had made her a queen.

Persephone, who had been sitting motionless on her throne for days, leaped to her feet like a little girl, her face lit up with joy. She wanted to leave now. Hades ordered his dark horses to be harnessed to the golden coach. Then he arranged to be alone with Persephone in the well-kept gardens of the underworld. While they were walking along the paths, he picked a pomegranate from a tree and offered three seeds to his spouse. Persephone’s mind was elsewhere and she refused. But Hades insisted, in his subtle way. Persephone lifted the seeds to her mouth. She was distracted, her heart in a flurry at the thought of leaving. They imagined they were alone, but from the shadows they were being watched by a gardener: Ascalaphus, son of the love between Acheron and a Nymph. One day he would say what he had seen, which is how we know what happened in that garden. That tiny gesture of Persephone was perhaps the most important event ever, the most pregnant of consequence since Zeus swallowed Phanes and took up residence on Olympus.

The chariot was ready at last. Hermes grasped the bridle and whip. The horses came slowly out of the palace, then took off and flew away. From high above, Persephone once again saw the sea, and branching rivers and grassy valleys, like the one that had been her last vision on earth. Sitting on her throne in the underworld, she had often thought she would never see them again. Whereas now they appeared and disappeared, as though in a game, as the chariot came out of the fat, fleecy clouds. Finally they reached a place Persephone didn’t recognize. The chariot stopped before a newly built temple emanating a strong smell of incense. Demeter appeared between the columns. And ran like a Maenad on the mountains toward her daughter.

Persephone jumped down from the chariot, and the two embraced without a word. Then Persephone felt her mother restraining her; she had pulled her face away and wanted to say something. “Did you eat anything at all, when you were down there?” Persephone remembered the pomegranate seeds, a sweet, sharp taste, still there, like a distant memory, in her saliva. That taste of the invisible would never leave her. Sitting outside the temple, they spent hours and hours telling each other their adventures. They touched each other’s arms and hugged. From time to time, Demeter would walk away from her daughter and turn to stare at her. The pain flowed away with the words, and they rediscovered joy. Demeter explained the consequences of the three pomegranate seeds: every year Persephone would have to go back and be Hades’ bride for half the year. They didn’t actually say it, but both now accepted this decree from Zeus. The rigidity of stone was dissolved forever.

That day the only people to come to talk to them were two women. The first was Hecate, crow black and with a shining crown. She had helped Demeter when the goddess mother had been wandering about in desperation; now she would be a precious guide for her daughter. No woman knew the paths that linked earth and underworld better than she. Then Rhea came to bring a message from Olympus. Shaking her thick hair, she repeated Zeus’s promises and sealed the peace between them. Demeter stood up to go back to Olympus. As the goddess set off in her long blue tunic, the white barley that had remained spitefully hidden in the ground poked out into the light. The arid furrows became damp clods of rich earth, while leaves and flowers opened once again to the sun, as if nothing had happened and nature were lazily reawakening from a long sleep.