We all have books we return to over the years–dipping into them for inspiration, to examine how our relationship with them has changed over time, or simply in answer to their call. One such book for me is The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, by the erudite scholar and multilinguist Roberto Calasso (translated from the Italian by Tim Parks).
An evocative retelling of the stories of Greek mythology, in their endless multiplicity and abundance, each story resonant with its own echo chamber of variants, this book also offers a compelling account of the ways in which mythology can be a powerful mode of inhabiting and picturing the world. As Calasso notes, “To invite the gods ruins our relationship with them but sets history in motion. A life in which the gods are not invited isn’t worth living. It will be quieter, but there won’t be any stories … the gods get bored with men who have no stories.”
His writing is richly descriptive, evoking ancient Crete with “pots of grain numbered in the storehouses, seals showing beasts half one thing half another, delicate frescoes, ivory knots, lists of offerings, honey, inscribed poppy pods, ox skulls, double-edged axes.” Hercules’ buttocks are likened to “an old leather shield, blackened by long exposure to the sun and by the fiery breaths of Cacus and of the Cretan bull.”
In Calasso’s telling these myths are terrifying and beautiful, dark and violent and luminous at the same time. To return past sentimentalized Victorian retellings to the originals is to be confronted with a disturbing and alien world, a world that lies deep among the roots of our own. Calasso pulls thread after thread into the light for the modern eye: metamorphosis, possession, prophecy, guilt, image, desire, the gods.
Of the utterances of the Sibyls, the first women ever to prophesy at Delphi, Calasso writes that “the notion–seemingly self-evident to the moderns–that possession and formal excellence are incompatible would never have occurred to them.” A different possession is associated with Dionysus, “like a perennial spring gushing from his body, or the dark liquid that he revealed to men,” and is itself the terrible punishment for those unwilling to accept it.
The ancient Greeks knew that when “their lives were set aflame, through desire or suffering, or even reflection … a god was at work.” What we might call infirmity, they called “divine infatuation.” As Calasso notes, this is not a foreign idea to the modern mind. “No psychology 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 closely aligned to the gain of our experience, whether that be pleasure or terror.”
This reflection on Greek mythology, gloss and retelling at once, throws the world and the terrain of the psyche into sharp relief, dark shadows cast by a ferocious light from an angle that is ancient and, to us, new. Each time I return to it I find it bracing, even exhilarating, and then, I admit, I am relieved to return to our more domesticated view of life. But still I am left with the dance held in celebration of the mysteries: “The air is full of the smell of resin and roast pig. The dust is strewn with sandals and torn clothes.”
Jared is an adult services librarian at the Howe Library in Hanover. He purchases a range of nonfiction for the library and conspires with a colleague to devise the library’s programming. When otherwise free, he’s usually in the mountains, swimming in local ponds and rivers, trying his hand at new cuisines, reading, or dreaming of walking the Scottish Highlands.