The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony Read Online Free PDF Page A

deceives: she imagines Theseus is the god’s opposite; she sees him as the man who will take her as his bride to Athens, beyond the vicious circle of the bull. When he reappeared in Naxos, Dionysus was waving a shining crown. Ariadne looked at it and thought of the other crowns thathad been behind the other deceptions in her life. She realized now that that crown was the same crown and always had been. Her story really was over now; Ariadne would be forever alone, prisoner of that radiant crown in the sky: Corona Borealis.
    In any Cretan story, there’s a bull at the beginning and a bull at the end. At the beginning Minos summons Poseidon’s white bull up out of the sea. If it appears, he promises, he will sacrifice it to the god. The bull does appear, but Minos doesn’t keep his promise. The bull is too beautiful, he doesn’t want to kill it, he wants it for his own. It is for that bull that Minos’s wife Pasiphaë will develop her fatal passion.
    At the end, Theseus captures a bull at Marathon, and once again it’s the Cretan bull risen from the sea. After its couplings with Pasiphaë the bull had turned wild, and Minos had called for Heracles to capture it. The hero caught the bull and took it away to the mainland. For a long time the bull wandered about the Peloponnese before turning up in Attica. Where nobody had been able to get the better of it, not even Androgeus, Minos’s son, who used to beat all the Athenians in their games. Theseus captured it, at Marathon. He offered it to his father, Aegeus, who sacrificed it to Apollo. Everything between that beginning and that end, which is to say Ariadne’s destiny, takes place within the displacement of a sacrifice: from Poseidon to Apollo, from Crete to Athens. That passage is strewn with corpses. The mute, the sacrificial victim is part and parcel of the religious rite. But the myth claims other victims for itself, those who fall around the place of sacrifice, iron filings in the magnetic field. Out of the sacrifice, together with the blood, stream the stories. Thus the characters in the tragedy emerge. In the Cretan stories these characters are Pasiphaë, the Minotaur, Ariadne, Phaedra, Minos, Hippolytus, and Aegeus himself. Returning from Crete, Theseus forgets to lower the black sails, and Aegeus kills himself by leapingfrom the Acropolis. It’s the last footnote to the displacement of the sacrifice.
    “Finally, some people in Naxos have their own version of the story. They claim that there were two Minoses and two Ariadnes: one was Dionysus’s bride in Naxos and mother of Staphylus and his brother; the other, who lived some time later, was first abducted then abandoned by Theseus, arriving afterward on the island with a nurse called Corcyne, whose grave these people will take you to. The second Ariadne, who also died on the island, was not granted the same honors as the first: the festival to commemorate the earlier Ariadne takes place amid games and fun, whereas for the second there are only sacrifices mingled with mourning and sadness.”
    Ariadne’s is a dual destiny right from the start, and the rites held on Naxos celebrated that duality, without looking for relief in notions of death and resurrection. She who becomes Dionysus’s “bride,” the only one chosen from the crowd of women surrounding him, she who even receives a new name from him when he calls her Libera, is also the woman Dionysus has killed. He asks Artemis to do it. The goddess was always ready to draw her bow. Dionysus asks her to transfix Ariadne with an arrow. And he wants to watch too. Then time turns all to euphemism. All that will remain on the walls of Pompeii is an image of celestial love.
    Mythical figures live many lives, die many deaths, and in this they differ from the characters we find in novels, who can never go beyond the single gesture. But in each of these lives and deaths all the others are present, and we can hear their echo. Only when we become aware of a sudden