The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony Read Online Free PDF

consistency between incompatibles can we say we have crossed the threshold of myth. Abandoned in Naxos, Ariadne was shot dead by Artemis’s arrow; Dionysus ordered the killing and stood watching, motionless. Or: Ariadne hung herselfin Naxos, after being left by Theseus. Or: pregnant by Theseus and shipwrecked in Cyprus, she died there in childbirth. Or: Dionysus came to Ariadne in Naxos, together with his band of followers; they celebrated a divine marriage, after which she rose into the sky, where we still see her today amid the northern constellations. Or: Dionysus came to Ariadne in Naxos, after which she followed him around on his adventures, sharing his bed and fighting with his soldiers; when Dionysus attacked Perseus in the country near Argos, Ariadne went with him, armed to fight amid the ranks of the crazed Bacchants, until Perseus shook the deadly face of Medusa in front of her and Ariadne was turned to stone. And there she stayed, a stone in a field.
    No other woman, or goddess, had so many deaths as Ariadne. That stone in Argos, that constellation in the sky, that hanging corpse, that death by childbirth, that girl with an arrow through her breast: Ariadne was all of this.
    But would the story have ever been set in motion without the gadfly, instrument of Hera’s revenge? Wherever we look, among the lives of the heroes, we are met by the unwavering, implacable gaze of the goddess, that bovine eye that never seems to close. The very name Heracles (“glory of Hera”) tells us right from the start that glory is neither more nor less than a by-product of Hera’s revenge.
    But how did it all begin? As children, Zeus and his sister Hera quickly discovered secret love. “Unbeknown to their dear parents, they embraced in bed,” says Homer. They enjoyed the most extravagantly drawn out amorous childhood of all time. “Then Zeus petted [with Hera] for three hundred years.” In their ears they could hear the endless thunder of the Imbrasus, the river of Samos. They embraced between the river and the sea. They never grew weary, they forgot the world beyond those waters—and Zeus put off the moment when he would rule over it. Thousands of years later, in the wet sand of the Imbraso, a stone relief that must once have stood on a wooden bed was found. It shows Zeus,standing, moving toward Hera. Her chest is bare, and he is taking her right breast in his hand.
    Hera is goddess of the bed—she even worries if old Oceanus and Tethys, who brought her up as a girl, are depriving themselves of it. For her, the veil, the first veil, is the
pastós
, the nuptial curtain that surrounds the
thálamos
. In Paestum, in Samos there is still evidence that the bed was a central devotional object of the cult. And when Hera makes love to Zeus on top of Mount Gargaron, the earth sprouts a carpet of flowers for the occasion. “Thick and soft, it lifted them up off the ground.” The pseudo-bed is then surrounded by a golden cloud, to substitute for the
pastós
. The bed, for Hera, was the primordial place par excellence, the playpen of erotic devotion. In her most majestic shrine, the Heraion in Argos, the worshiper could see, placed on a votive table, an image of Hera’s mouth closing amorously around Zeus’s erect phallus. No other goddess, not even Aphrodite, had allowed an image like that in her shrine.
    And it was in the Heraion that the story of Zeus’s first betrayal, origin of all vendettas, began. To betray Hera, Zeus chose one of her priestesses, the human being closest to her, since it was she held the keys to the shrine. Her name was Io. In looks and dress it was Io’s duty to re-create the image of the goddess she served. She was a copy endeavoring to imitate a statue. But Zeus chose the copy; he wanted that minimal difference which is enough to overturn order and generate the new, generate meaning. And he wanted it
because
it was a difference, and her
because
she was a copy. The more negligible the difference, the more