One of the entries in Scott Siskind's book review contest this year was a review of Roberto Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, a famously strange book about the Greek myths. The review is not bad, but it is 8,600 words long and for all its length fails to grapple at all with the questions that I think are at the heart of Calasso's work: what does it mean to say that the modern world is disenchanted? What is enchantment, anyway? Why do ancient myths still fascinate us? and are we rational moderns too different from ancient peoples to understand what they believed, how they felt when they looked at the night sky and saw dots of light that bore the names of gods?
One thing our for-now anonymous reviewer gets right: this book is a carefully constructed work of literature, not a scholarly tome. In form Calasso's book is a retelling of various myths, often giving us two or three different versions of the same story in sequence, or mingling them together. Some of the stories Calasso tells may be unknown to most readers, even those who know something about Greek myth. That's because Calasso's favorite source is the Dionysiaca by Nonnus, a Christian writer who lived in the 400s AD. Some scholars consider Nonnus too late and otherwise suspect to tell us much about the Greek myths as they were known in the time of Herodotus or Plato, let alone Homer. But Calasso simply ignores that and treats Nonnus as an authentic ancient source.
Why does Calasso do that? Does he not understand that stories, even very traditional ones, can change across a thousand years? He does. He just doesn't care. He does not understand myth as something that undergoes historical change in response to economic or political or whatever other factors. To Calasso myth is something so fundamental to humanity that it might as well be outside of history altogether.
One of the things that fascinates Calasso about the Greek myths is their focus on transformation. In the stories, things are always changing into something else. He is hardly the first intellectual to have noticed this theme; Ovid gave us the Metamorphoses more than 2,000 years ago. Just as things in the myths are always changing, transforming, so the myths themselves are always changing and transforming. To freeze them is to destroy them.
Calasso begins with the famous tale of Europa and the bull, in which a Phoenician girl was carried off by Zeus in the form of beautiful bull, then used and abandoned in the new world of Europe. Is this not a very strange tale? Why would a god spend his time seducing and abandoning girls, and why would he have to transform into a bull to do so? Why do all of the women in these early tales end up as abandoned suicides, hanging themselves in the desolate spaces where god or hero abandoned them? The stories do not tell us, and neither does Calasso. Not directly, anyway.
Instead he takes us on a tour of things he finds fascinating about the Greek myths. For example, what is the salient characteristic of the Greek gods?
If, driven by an old compulsion, we were to define what the gods were to the Greeks, we might say, using the principle of Occam’s razor, everything that takes us away from ordinary sensations of life. “With a god, you are always crying and laughing,” we read in Sophocles’ Ajax. . . . When something undefined and powerful shakes mind and fiber and trembles the cage of our bones, when the person who only a moment before was dull and agnostic is suddenly rocked by laughter and homicidal frenzy, or by the pangs of love, or by the hallucination of form, or finds his face streaming with tears, then the Greek realizes he is not alone. Somebody else stands beside him, and that somebody is a god. (243)
The Gods are life at its fullest, life overflowing. (Nietsche, of course, picked up on this and made it central to his philosophy.)
The Homeric world is not one with much in the way of human agency; instead, it is the operation of the gods that drives the story. And yet the gods were not the ultimate power in the Greek universe. Above and beyond them lay the power that we sometimes call fate:
Whenever the dullness of the profane was left behind, whenever life grew more intense in whatever way, through honor or death, victory or sacrifice, marriage or prayer, initiation or possession, purification or mourning, anything everything that stirred a person and demanded a meaning, the Greeks would celebrate with fluttering strips of wool, white or red for the most part, which they tied around their heads, or arms, or to a branch, the prow of a ship, a statue, an ax, a stone, a cooking pot. The modern eye encounters these woolen strips everywhere in the fragments that have come down to us but doesn’t see them, removes them from the center of attention as mere decorative details, and hence insignificant. To the Greek eye, the opposite was the case; it was those light, fluttering strips of wool that generated meaning, gave it its boundaries, celebrated in. Everything that took place in the soft frame of those woolen strips was different and separate from the rest. What was it those woolen strips, those tassels represented? An excess, a flowing wake that attached itself to a being or thing. And at the same time a tether that bound that being or thing.
Isidore of Seville (c. 600 AD) could still write, “The woolen ties are so called because they bind.” But what was this bond? It was the momentary surfacing of a link in that invisible net which enfolds the world, which descends from heaven to earth, binding the two together and swaying in the breeze. (283-284)
Here is one of Calasso's great themes, the net of destiny that the Greeks called Ananke. Things sometimes happen because the gods will them, but even the gods are caught in the snares of necessity. What happens is what must happen.
Priam, standing with Helen on the walls of Troy, says to her, "It was not your fault; it was the gods."
No psychology since has ever gone beyond this; all we have done is invent, for those powers that act upon us, longer, more numerous, more awkward names, which are less effective, less closely aligned to the pattern of our experience, whether that be pleasure or terror. The moderns are proud above all of their responsibility, but in being so they presume to respond with a voice that they are not even sure is theirs. The Homeric heroes knew nothing of that cumbersome word responsibility, nor would they have believed in it if they had. For them, it was as if every crime were committed in a state of mental infirmity. But such infirmity meant that a god was present and at work. What we consider infirmity they saw as “divine infatuation” – átē. They knew that this invisible incursion often brough ruin: so much so that the word átē would gradually come to mean “ruin.” But they also knew, and it was Sophocles who said it, that “mortal life can never have anything great about it except through átē.” (93-94)
And one more point:
Socrates himself cleared up this point shortly before his death: we enter the mythical when we enter the realm of risk, and myth is the enchantment we generate in ourselves at such moments. More than a belief, it is a magical bond that tightens around us. It is a spell the soul cast on itself. “This risk is fine indeed, and what we must somehow do with these things is enchant ourselves.” . . . “These things,” as Socrates casually puts it, are the fables, the myths. (278-279)
So what was the enchanted world of the Homeric heroes? It was a world in which humans were weak creatures at the mercy of divine whims, whether than meant Zeus carrying off princesses or heroes forced to battle each other so the gods could be entertained. It was a world governed by destiny's grim dictates, symbolized by the streamers of wool that decorated every significant occasion, and by the long list of abandoned, dying heroines. A world in which humans experienced wonder only in the grip of divine madness that also brought them very near to death.
What happened to that world? In a word, responsibility. When humans decided that we could and should be captains of our own destiny, the world ceased to be the playground of gods and monsters and became the mundane place that we inhabit.
Calasso finds signs of this shift in the classicial world, and sometimes implies that the 5th century Greece was the first place where at least some humans disenchanted themselves in pursuit of rationality, success, and self-control. But with Calasso linear, historical time is never simple or absolute. To him, the shift from a universe ruled by destiny and divine power to one where men believe themselves to be masters of their own fate has happened and has not happened and is happening in every moment, in every person. These are two sides of a golden coin spinning through time.
That is my interpretation of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. But, really, that is not the point of this book. The point is to be led through the Greek myths by a writer who is an expert of the highest order, yet who cares about getting the myths right only as a doorway through which he shows us glimpses of the deepest human things. If you have any interest in myth and what it means, read this book, because it is wonderful.
My review of Calasso's most famous book, The Ruin of Kasch, is here.
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