). In her lifestyle, too, Persephone was captive of that duality: she was compelled to spend part of the year in Hades, but by the permission of Zeus, she was allowed to spend the other part among the divinities on high. On the one hand, she was the queen of the underworld (that is one of the possible significations of her name; “destructive through killing,” 
+ 
);25 on the other hand, like her mother, she is also related to flowers and crops. As a goddess of both death and fertility, she spans the universe; love and strife appear jointly in her figure.26 As a member of the divine underworld, like the other chthonic deities (Demeter, Dionysius, Hades), she embodies and unites opposites in one person; as a goddess of the soil (
), she is nevertheless a representative of the darker side of existence. The path of initiates into the mysteries therefore called for sacrifices: death was not just a deliverance but also a destruction; birth was not just the creation but also the demise of something. The knowledge of prophets, madmen, and philosophers produced melancholia because it led them to a point of ultimate ignorance, to riddles undecipherable for mortals. They embody in themselves the irresolvability that is typical of the gods venerated in the mysteries — their existence concentrates every aspect of human existence in one moment. (It was not by chance that the twelve labors of Heracles, who was honored along with the chthonic gods, were interpreted as the sun’s passage through the zodiac. Heracles was just as much at home in the winter and in the night as in the summer and in the day: he rescued Theseus and Alcestis from Hades, but inflicted death on his closest blood relatives.)
The dual nature of initiation is nicely illustrated by Lucius, the narrator of Apuleius’s Golden Ass: “I reached the very gates of death and, treading Proserpine’s threshold, yet passed through all the elements and returned. I have seen the sun at midnight shining brightly. I have entered the presence of the gods below and the presence of the gods above, and I have paid due reverence before them” (ch. 9). Apuleius deliberately mentions the sun shining at midnight: he has in mind the mysteries of Egypt. According to their way of thinking, the glorified dead follow the sun god, who likewise steps into the realm of the dead (the initiates). This idea was not unfamiliar to the Greeks: according to Pindar, for example, the sun illuminates the realm of the dead at night. In the mystery of Mithras, Helios is evoked as an underworld god who — according to an extant text of the Mithras liturgy, resides in the realm of the dead, namely, in the Elysian Fields.27 At the same time, Apuleius, being a skilled connoisseur of magic, was well aware that the Babylonians worshipped Saturn, the planet stationed firmly in the same place, as the nocturnal equivalent of the sun. Its light might be weak, but they still called it brilliant, shining, and other cultures adopted this tradition. According to Plutarch’s record, the Egyptians held it to be the Night Watch (
), the Greeks called it “the visible” (
) and also “the sun star” (
), and the Indians worshipped it as the son of the sun. The first-century CE Roman poet and astrologer Marcus Manilius placed the sun and Saturn at the opposite ends of the world’s axis, and in his opinion, viewed from Saturn the world appeared from a converse parallactic angle. This gains its true meaning when we add that in the days of Hellenism in Rome of the first and second centuries CE, astrologers and philosophers discovered a profound correspondence between the planet Saturn and melancholy (everyone born under the sign of Saturn was melancholic). Consequently, when Lucius, in the course of his initiation into the mysteries experienced the spectacle of the midnight sun (rite of the black sun), by making that note in his Apologia, without lavishing any superfluous words on it, addressed those who understood what he was saying: alluding to a profound, never completely apprehensible affinity of saturnine melancholia and the mysteries, and in particular by mentioning Saturn, he made manifest what, for the Greeks, was a latent possibility contained in the mysteries.28 And when festivities were held for the gods of the dead in Rome in December, the holy month of Saturn and the last month of the year, then the Saturn-mysteries-melancholia connection was made all the more unequivocaclass="underline" the Romans believed that in that month, the inner essence of the world revealed itself, while on 17 December, the day of the Saturnalia festival, the souls of the dead, along with all the things resting in the soil, would rise up, and with that resurrection a demonic, lawless force would be liberated.29 The Greek equivalent of Saturn was Cronus (whom Plutarch classed as one of the chthonic divinities), and the Athenians likewise celebrated his day, the Kronia, as a time when everything broke loose. By Hellenic times, the notion had arisen that Cronus was the son not of Helios but of Uranus and thus, on the paternal side, was a half-brother to Lyssa, goddess of rage, fury, and madness. And to cast the net even wider, what could be more characteristic of the Greek belief system and its profound conception of existence than the fact that according to Orphic theology, melancholic Cronus possessed powers of prophecy: he was a promantis, that is, a foreseeing spirit or prophet who could foretell the secrets of being. (During the period of Hellenism, the view would gain ground that all who were able to foretell the future and were familiar with the esoteric rites of the mysteries were born under the sign of Saturn, the melancholy planet.) Thus emerges the logically almost incomprehensible and yet coherent and indestructible net that encircles melancholia, the nodes of which are soothsaying, madness, philosophy, initiation into the mysteries, the relativization of life and death, and resurrection, all in the sense that it had carried in antiquity.
A person who possesses knowledge is isolated from people who do not. A prophet speaks to those who see only dimly at best; to the sane minded, the thought processes of the mad cannot be followed; the path to the mysteries is common for everyone, but toward the end of the initiation, the crowd starts to break up, and in the course of the final acts, the would-be initiates make their own way alone. The mysteries are democratic, yet initiates could justifiably speak of election. The path is open for everyone, but not everyone reaches its end.30 The end, as we know, is the beginning itself. A person who has wisdom has a synoptic view of everything; things uncover their hidden face, and the initiate is transported into a new world that differs from any he had hitherto known. A consequence of the lethargy associated with Dionysian ecstasy is, in Nietzsche’s view, that a Greek’s “longing went higher, beyond the gods, he denied existence along with its colourful glistening mirror of gods” (“The Dionysian Worldview,” 89). The denial of existence, however, is not an absolute deniaclass="underline" the world opened up by longing is a new, admittedly never fulfilled existence. It differs qualitatively from all those that had existed up to that point: everything closed and confined collapses within it, and since deep insight reigns here, there is nothing that could gird itself to an observer’s gaze with the appearance of permanence. A person acquainted with wisdom, a prophet or madman, that is, a melancholic, is not lonely on account of longing for separation, but because he cannot live in any other way: it takes an extraordinary effort on the part of those who see through things to close their eyes and pretend there is nothing beyond that. Those who know something can play ignorant only at the expense of their own intellects. The very word itself, language, this objectified projection of the intellect, comes undone: it loses its definitiveness, and if language is a possibility for others, it will be an obstacle for the melancholic: “If you continue to be not too particular about names, you will be all the richer in wisdom when you are an old man,” Plato writes (Statesman, 261e). For anyone who glances into the inner mysteries of existence, words lose their signification; they crack and reveal their own fallibility. The melancholic is compelled to silence. Aristotle noticed the outer mark of that: “Some maintain a complete silence, especially those atrabilious subjects [i.e., melancholics] who are out of their mind (