)” (Problemata physica, bk. 30, 953b). That external silence, conspicuous to a listening stranger, leads on to the essence of the mysteries: initiates have to keep quiet about all that they have seen (the very word “mystery” derives from the verb 
, “to shut up”). Homer writes of the ceremony for Demeter:
She [Demeter] revealed to them the way to perform the sacred rites, and she pointed out the ritual to all of them
— the holy ritual, which it is not at all possible to ignore, to find out about,
or to speak out. The great awe of the gods holds back any speaking out.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
But whoever is uninitiated in the rites, whoever takes no part in them, will never get a share of those sorts of things [that the initiated get],
once they die, down below in the dank realms of mist.
(Hymn to Demeter, 476–82)
Knowledge acquired in the mysteries was unutterable (
). Indeed, even the names of the priests were sacred: it was forbidden to speak their names, and even in official documents only their patronymic and birthplace were mentioned. The main teaching of the mysteries was likewise not related verbally but through suggestion (
); the name for the priests literally means “holy presentation” (
).31 The order to keep silent arrives from the outside, though anyone who had been initiated had no need to be ordered: he would fall silent not for fear of being overheard by eavesdroppers or the curious, but out of an inner need: “In speaking we have men as teachers, but in keeping silent we have gods” (Plutarch, De moralia, 6:417).32 That inner silence, the need to keep quiet, strips down the world to such a degree that it almost vanishes into nothingness. We end up close to mysticism, the representatives of which, by no accident, have usually been recruited from among the melancholics of this world. “Accept my reason’s offerings pure, from soul and heart for aye stretched up to Thee,” one reads in a Hermetic dialogue from the Corpus Hermeticum—“O Thou unutterable, unspeakable, Whose Name naught but the Silence can express” (Hermes Trismegistus, “Pœmandres: The Shepherd of Men,” sec. 31). An infinite knowledge of (or love for) God can guide one to the unspeakability of God — and that profound, sincere feeling of ineffability can nullify God himself. “God is all Nothingness, knoweth not here nor now; / The more we grope the more elusive he will grow,” Angelus Silesius was later to write (Alexandrines, bk. 1, no. 25). It is this experience of ungraspability that runs at the bottom of the worldview of the Greek melancholics; if I am at one and the same time more and less than myself (at one and the same time a possibility and reality of myself), if being is burdened by nonbeing, the present by the future, life by death, resurrection by extinction, then one cannot speak about the world, because there is nothing to talk about. This is the greatest danger that the mysteries present to Greek public life: those who cannot bring themselves to a recognition of the relativity of life and death, the exclusiveness of desire, must be commanded to keep silent, but those who can reach that point do not need to be commanded: having sunk into perpetual silence, recognizing transience in becoming, deficiency in completeness, they are irretrievably lost for the rest of mankind.
The Greek physician Aretaeus of Cappadocia regarded the fear of gods and demons as one of the signs of melancholia. The lives of melancholic heroes and philosophers, however, prove that a loathing for the gods is sometimes stronger than fear: “Not even the gods fight against necessity” (a saying of the lyric poet Simonides of Ceos, quoted by Plato in Protagoras, 345d); an ambiguous relationship with divinity is possibly the most characteristic feature of Greek melancholics. On the one hand, man is an imperfect copy of god, but on the other hand, by virtue of his intellect, he is also divine. Put that way, this idea is very Christian in inspiration — just as the notion of an earthly vale of tears was also not alien to Greek culture. According to Empedocles, everything springs from suffering caused by the world, from sadness caused by human injustice. Ancient Thracians wept on greeting newborn babies and put on celebrations in honor of the dead — the melancholic view of life was hardly unknown to them. On seeing the human condition, melancholic Heraclitus wept, whereas the similarly melancholic Democritus burst into fits of laughter, though as Socrates hints in the final section of the Symposium (223d), it was most natural to the Greek spirit to see tragedy and comedy as closely related. After all, crying and laughter have their common wellspring in all-consuming despair. Man is mortal, although he knows what immortality is — for all their internal kinship, death and immortality cannot be confused. To Greek thinking, there was nothing new under the sun;33 death and immortality were conceivable only within the borders of this closed world. The melancholia of heroes and philosophers was rooted in this: their intellect was drawn to infinity, indeterminacy, the lifting of constraints and borders, disorderliness in the widest sense, but the exclusivity of the world, the ultimate boundedness and orderliness of existence, made this impossible.34 “[Ananke], necessity or fate personified (
), binds together our existence,” says Socrates in Plato’s dialogue Theaetetus (160b): while everything closes concentrically into one, man experiences his uniqueness as exclusiveness just as much as helplessness. His inner boundlessness awakens him not just to his life’s restrictedness but also to its attendant burden: the fact that the whim of an unknown force has, as it were, handed him over to existence. This force has entrusted him with existence, which he now cannot get rid of. This whim, this personified fate (Ananke), is standing guard over his existence like a Fury, and having received life from her, he can escape only at the cost of his life; and Ananke, the goddess of inevitability and necessity, behaves like one of the Furies according to Orphic notions as well.
For powerful Necessity holds it in the bonds of a Limit, which constrains it round about, because it is decreed by divine law that Being shall not be without boundary. .
But since there is a (
spatial
) Limit, it is complete on every side, like the mass of a well-rounded sphere, equally balanced from its centre in every direction; for it is not bound to be at all either greater or less in this direction or that. . For, in all directions equal to itself, it reaches its limits uniformly.
(Parmenides, Poem, frag. 8, in Freeman, Ancilla, 44)
But if there is not, and will not be, anything beyond existence, then is it conceivable that the shackles of limits would coil around it? And does not anything that lies beyond the limits equally belong to the existing? And if the only thing abiding beyond the boundaries is Ananke, holding in her grasp the whole of existence, then does that not imply that existence is permeated by Ananke? For a melancholic,