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Authors: Roberto Calasso
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man lost, with ceremonial contact through sacrifice impoverished, man’s soul was left exposed to a gusting violence, an amorous persecution, an obsessional goad. Such are the stories of which mythology is woven: they tell how mortal mind and body are stillsubject to the divine, even when they are no longer seeking it out, even when the ritual approaches to the divine have become confused.
The twelve gods of Olympus agreed to appear as entirely human. It was the first time a group of divinities had renounced abstraction and animal heads. No more the unrepresentable behind the flower or the swastika, no more the monstrous creature, the stone fallen from heaven, the whirlpool. Now the gods took on a cool, polished skin, or an unreal warmth, and a body where you could see the ripple of muscles, the long veins.
The change brought with it a new exhilaration and a new terror. All previous manifestations seemed tentative and cautious by comparison; they hadn’t risked the boldest of adventures, which was precisely that of the gods’ disguising themselves as human in a human world, having passed through the whole gamut of metamorphoses. Then this last disguise was more exciting than any of the others. More exciting and more dangerous. For it might well be that the gods’ divinity would no longer be grasped in its fullness. On earth they would meet people who treated them with too much familiarity, maybe even provoked them. The unnatural gods, Apollo, Artemis, and Athena, whose very identity depended on detachment, were more subject to this danger than the others. Any old shepherd might claim he played his pipes better than Apollo; whereas it was unlikely that a mere hetaera would try to tell Aphrodite how to do her job. The people of earth were a temptation: alluring because full of stories and intrigues, or sometimes because isolated in their own stubborn perfection that asked nothing from heaven. But they were also treacherous, ready to stab a god in the back, to disfigure the hermae. A new state of mind emerged, something unknown in the past, that of the god who is misunderstood, mocked, belittled. The result was a string of vendettas and punishments, dispatches issued from an ever busy office.
That Theseus was a creature of Apollo one can gather from all kinds of signs and gestures of homage scattered throughout his adventures. Theseus is always coming up against monsters, and the first slayer of monsters was Apollo. In Delphi the young hero offers the curl that fell across his forehead to Apollo. When he arrives in Athens, Theseus hurls a bull up in the air. But it is important that this takes place in a temple to Delphinian Apollo. Theseus will go back to the same temple before setting off for Crete, this time bringing a branch of the sacred olive tree wrapped in wool, a request for the god to help him. When he catches the bull at Marathon, and the Athenians go wild with joy, Theseus has it sacrificed to Apollo. After killing the Minotaur, Theseus goes to Delos and performs the dance of the cranes. A code within the dance contains the secret of the labyrinth. And Delos was Apollo’s birthplace.
But Apollo makes no comment. All Theseus’s life, the only thing Apollo ever says to him is “Take Aphrodite as your guide.” The order is decisive. All Theseus’s adventures are cloaked in an erotic aura. During the Cretan expedition, it is Apollo who pulls the strings, but from the shadows. The mission is too delicate an affair for him to be seen to be involved. What we see on the stage is the struggle between Dionysus and the hero Theseus, but, in the darkness behind, Apollo and Dionysus have struck up a pact. What that involved was the
translatio imperii
from Crete to Athens: one god took over from another; power passed from the secret twists of the labyrinth to the frontal evidence of the acropolis. And all of this came about courtesy of Theseus, because the stories had to tell of other things: of young girls being
The twelve gods of Olympus agreed to appear as entirely human. It was the first time a group of divinities had renounced abstraction and animal heads. No more the unrepresentable behind the flower or the swastika, no more the monstrous creature, the stone fallen from heaven, the whirlpool. Now the gods took on a cool, polished skin, or an unreal warmth, and a body where you could see the ripple of muscles, the long veins.
The change brought with it a new exhilaration and a new terror. All previous manifestations seemed tentative and cautious by comparison; they hadn’t risked the boldest of adventures, which was precisely that of the gods’ disguising themselves as human in a human world, having passed through the whole gamut of metamorphoses. Then this last disguise was more exciting than any of the others. More exciting and more dangerous. For it might well be that the gods’ divinity would no longer be grasped in its fullness. On earth they would meet people who treated them with too much familiarity, maybe even provoked them. The unnatural gods, Apollo, Artemis, and Athena, whose very identity depended on detachment, were more subject to this danger than the others. Any old shepherd might claim he played his pipes better than Apollo; whereas it was unlikely that a mere hetaera would try to tell Aphrodite how to do her job. The people of earth were a temptation: alluring because full of stories and intrigues, or sometimes because isolated in their own stubborn perfection that asked nothing from heaven. But they were also treacherous, ready to stab a god in the back, to disfigure the hermae. A new state of mind emerged, something unknown in the past, that of the god who is misunderstood, mocked, belittled. The result was a string of vendettas and punishments, dispatches issued from an ever busy office.
That Theseus was a creature of Apollo one can gather from all kinds of signs and gestures of homage scattered throughout his adventures. Theseus is always coming up against monsters, and the first slayer of monsters was Apollo. In Delphi the young hero offers the curl that fell across his forehead to Apollo. When he arrives in Athens, Theseus hurls a bull up in the air. But it is important that this takes place in a temple to Delphinian Apollo. Theseus will go back to the same temple before setting off for Crete, this time bringing a branch of the sacred olive tree wrapped in wool, a request for the god to help him. When he catches the bull at Marathon, and the Athenians go wild with joy, Theseus has it sacrificed to Apollo. After killing the Minotaur, Theseus goes to Delos and performs the dance of the cranes. A code within the dance contains the secret of the labyrinth. And Delos was Apollo’s birthplace.
But Apollo makes no comment. All Theseus’s life, the only thing Apollo ever says to him is “Take Aphrodite as your guide.” The order is decisive. All Theseus’s adventures are cloaked in an erotic aura. During the Cretan expedition, it is Apollo who pulls the strings, but from the shadows. The mission is too delicate an affair for him to be seen to be involved. What we see on the stage is the struggle between Dionysus and the hero Theseus, but, in the darkness behind, Apollo and Dionysus have struck up a pact. What that involved was the
translatio imperii
from Crete to Athens: one god took over from another; power passed from the secret twists of the labyrinth to the frontal evidence of the acropolis. And all of this came about courtesy of Theseus, because the stories had to tell of other things: of young girls being
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