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.