What is all this about? The gods aren’t content to foist guilt on man. That wouldn’t be enough, since guilt is part of life anyway. What the gods demand is an awareness of guilt. And this can only be achieved through sacrifice. On its own the law will serve to punish guilt but certainly not to make us aware of it, which is far more important. Sacrifice is the cosmic machine that raises our guilty lives to consciousness. After Sopatrus brought down the ax on the ox’s nape, he woke up from his rage as though from a dream and “became aware of [sunephrónēsen] what he had done.” He threw down the ax and fled far away. But Sopatrus was acting alone at this point; his was the action of one individual. And he was fainthearted. He buried the ox instead of eating it. His guilt took on no resonance; he didn’t go all the way.
The Pythia demanded that Sopatrus’s ax go on striking for all time and that everyone, the whole community, the pólis and every single member of it, participate in that act and be aware of committing it. Nor was that alclass="underline" the community must also welcome Sopatrus into its midst — Sopatrus the Stranger — and welcome him precisely because he had committed that act, that furious slaying of a working ox that had gobbled up the bread so that it disappeared in its mouth.
Kore and Demeter are a dual being, even in name (Deó). In a dazzling transposition, every gesture made by one corresponds to a gesture of the other. When their stories approach a stasis that would prove fatal — Kore sitting on Hades’ throne in funereal immobility and Demeter sitting on “the stone that does not laugh”—something happens to dispel that rigidity: Kore, distracted by what Hades is saying, eats a pomegranate seed; Demeter, distracted by Baubo’s obscene dance, eats the initiates’ broth like a hungry traveler. It was from these two gestures that the mysteries arose. By accepting and assimilating foods that were neither nectar nor ambrosia, Demeter and Kore shared in that guilt peculiar to men, exposed themselves to that special weakness the gods had always mocked: that submission to time that causes living beings to disappear, and at the same time the complicity of those beings with their own destroyer, since man cannot live without himself making something else disappear. The mysteries are the wound that opens in the hitherto intact Olympic epidermis, a wound which then tries in vain to heal itself in ceremony after ceremony. That that wound may never heal is the hope of the initiates.
The palaiòn pénthos, the “ancient grief,” persists undiminished across time and demands that men take some liberating action. Isn’t that what the mysteries are? For we live surrounded, in the invisible air, by wandering avengers who never forget the “ancient contaminations.” It is an Olympian paradox that this oppressive vendetta affects gods as well as men. Thus, when Apollo committed his primordial crime by killing Python, we find this proudest and most distant of gods humbly imitating men, offering libations and going into exile, as would Oedipus one day and Orestes.
When the gods come into contact with guilt, they lower their gaze toward men and begin to copy their gestures so as to free themselves from it. A parallelism thus develops between the way men imitate gods and vice versa. Men, writes Strabo, “imitate the gods chiefly when they are doing good; or rather, when they are happy.” The gods, in contrast, imitate men when they do or suffer evil (and for the Greeks the two things were bound by the same knot: adikeîn, adikeîsthai) or, rather, when they are unhappy. We have evidence of such unhappiness on the part of the gods in “what we hear tell of the gods in the myths and hymns — their abductions, secret wanderings, exile, servitude.” It was precisely with these elements, these precious clues, indeed the only clues to the experiences of the gods on earth, that men composed the mysteries. Here every gesture achieves its maximum density and enjoins us to silence: in the mysteries men repeat the gestures the gods made as they imitated men in order to free themselves from divine guilt. Hence the vertigo of the mysteries. More even than in their happiness, men approach the gods in their celebration of the gestures the gods made when they were unhappy.
For those not initiated in the mysteries, they seem to have to do with the immortality of men; for the initiates, the mysteries are a moment when the gods become tangled with death. “Many things related to death and mourning are to be found mixed together in the initiation ceremonies,” says Plutarch. But that most dangerous turncoat of the pagan world, Clement of Alexandria, is even more precise, indeed brutaclass="underline" “The mysteries can be summed up in just two words,” he says, “killings and burials.”
It is not the men who pass through the mysteries who are immortal but the mysteries themselves. When, in Smyrna, the public speaker Aelius Aristides hears that a raid by Costobocis has devastated Eleusis, he says: “The battles on sea and the battles on land and the laws and the constitutions and the arrogance and the tongues and all the rest have melted away: only the mysteries remain.”
Pelasgian: thus the Greeks designated the erratic block of their origins. There were Pelasgians on Samothrace: they celebrated mysteries with cranes and pygmies; they were the first to square stones from which young heads and erect phalluses would protrude. There were Pelasgians in Arcadia, Aeolis, Lemnos, Imbros, Argos, Athens. For thousands of years, from Ephorus right through to Klages, scholars have been obsessed by the quest to identify the Pelasgians. But Pelasgian man is elusive. You can never pin anything on him: he is always the mute “neighbor” (pélas), the thing language and history have split away from. Without dwelling on the point, Herodotus remarks that, “being Pelasgian, the Athenians changed their language when they were absorbed into the Greek family.” Thus the Athenians made two claims about themselves: that they were autochthonous, born from the soil, because they were Pelasgian; and at the same time that they had rejected the language of the soil, the lost Pelasgian language, which Herodotus himself already found incomprehensible.
What importance this might have had, Herodotus doesn’t say. But when, as a curious traveler, he arrived in Dodona, this is what the three priestesses of the sanctuary, Promeneia, Timarete, and Nicandra, told him. Long before, at a certain moment in the ancient history of the sanctuary, a group of Pelasgians arrived at Zeus’s oak (but did they call him Zeus? or was he just theós?). They had come to consult the oracle. Hitherto, the Pelasgians had “offered sacrifices of every kind to the gods and prayed to them, but without distinguishing between them with names and titles, because they didn’t know that any such things existed.” Now some sailor or other had come back from Egypt bringing the names of the gods with him. But was it right to use them? And were these unknown names the correct ones? The oak tree told them that the names were right and that it was right to use them. Zeus is the god who allows the other gods to be named. Zeus is the god who allows things to appear.
The story the three priestesses of Dodona told Herodotus is also the fable that ushers in the opposition and superimposition of nómos and phýsis, law (or convention) and nature, and hence the underlying structure of all thought from then on. Only that day, in Dodona, did the Greeks become Greek: if by Greek we mean nothing more than the coexistence of a dark, obscure background, like the rustling of a tree, dedicated to any and every power, with a sound that comes from a foreign land and forever superimposes on that background the sovereign caprice of a name. The Pelasgians went from a mute homage to the gods to an homage in which they evoked those gods with foreign names they knew nothing about. Thus did the Greeks tense their metaphysical bow; such was their style as they raised it to their shoulders.