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.