A review by phileasfogg
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony by Roberto Calasso
4.0
A meditation on Greek mythology. Calasso teases out connections and threads in the myths, rescues obscure myths from the silence, pulls almost-forgotten variants from the shadows.
He is especially interested in the power of variants in mythology. Every important myth exists in multiple contradictory versions. If many variants of a significant story do not exist in the written record, we must assume they once existed and have been lost to 'the silence', that the variants which must have been told in ancient times were never written or the written versions have been lost; but we can imagine what those variants must have been.
It's interesting that the most fascinating heroes of our world likewise exist in mutually exclusive variants, which are often enjoyed by the same audiences with no confusion or discomfort. Sherlock Holmes can live in Victorian London, in World War II America, in 21st century London, and in 21st century New York, and the same audience can enjoy all those stories. The Doctor, of Doctor Who, has contradictory existences in a variety of media; he's a different character in the TV show, the 1960s movies, the various comics, the 'annuals'. Any effort to enforce a canon, to police 'unauthorised' use of a character, can only weaken and limit that character.
I've read Homer, and I thought I knew a little about the rest of Greek mythology. Reading The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, I soon realised that apart from Homer, I knew only a sanitised, Disney version of this world. Calasso's Greek myths are a more horribly real body of stories, a better reflection of the barbaric, unregulated world from which they sprang. The most common threads he exposes are rape and suicide.
The significance of the title? The marriage of Cadmus and Harmony was a singular moment in the affairs of gods and men; their wedding feast was the one time gods and men hung out together openly, eating and drinking at the same table, with no ulterior motives and no disguises. Most other contact between the gods and humans involved deception, disguise, metamorphosis, rape, abduction.
Towards the end of his book Calasso segues away from myth and into the realm of real history, to tell us how awful the Spartans were. This seems off-topic, but worth knowing about. It made me think less of those Hollywood people who made heroes of the Spartans, and who had probably done enough research to know what bastards they were. Yes, most people in the past look like bastards by our standards, but the Spartans really take the biscuit.
All the talk of sacrifice, and of tragedy (which was originally a 'goat dance', and associated with the sacrifice of a goat) made me think of how all story-telling is like a continuation of the ancient Greek practice of sacrifice, the ritual killing of an animal or person. Tragedy, in the technical sense, is a story that ends with the death of the hero; the performance of a tragedy is a ritual sacrifice where no actual people get hurt, only the fictitious hero.
In real life, if we live in a well-managed civilisation and do not work in the emergency services, we can go for years without ever seeing death. But death always features a lot in stories.
I started thinking about this a few years ago. My grandmother was dying, and had become almost immobile, and for the first time had developed a desire to read novels to amuse herself. But the one thing she didn't want to read about was death, and fair enough. It turns out it's really hard to find novels in which nobody dies. They're mostly about people making quilts or having sex. She read a lot of novels about people making quilts.
About the same time, I saw an excellent documentary series called How Art Made the World, which spends an episode on the question of why so much art, especially narrative art, is about death. This book reminded me very much of that episode's conclusion, as I saw it: that the stories we watch and read are the survival into our comparatively nice civilisation of ritual human sacrifice, sublimated into an imaginary form.
He is especially interested in the power of variants in mythology. Every important myth exists in multiple contradictory versions. If many variants of a significant story do not exist in the written record, we must assume they once existed and have been lost to 'the silence', that the variants which must have been told in ancient times were never written or the written versions have been lost; but we can imagine what those variants must have been.
It's interesting that the most fascinating heroes of our world likewise exist in mutually exclusive variants, which are often enjoyed by the same audiences with no confusion or discomfort. Sherlock Holmes can live in Victorian London, in World War II America, in 21st century London, and in 21st century New York, and the same audience can enjoy all those stories. The Doctor, of Doctor Who, has contradictory existences in a variety of media; he's a different character in the TV show, the 1960s movies, the various comics, the 'annuals'. Any effort to enforce a canon, to police 'unauthorised' use of a character, can only weaken and limit that character.
I've read Homer, and I thought I knew a little about the rest of Greek mythology. Reading The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, I soon realised that apart from Homer, I knew only a sanitised, Disney version of this world. Calasso's Greek myths are a more horribly real body of stories, a better reflection of the barbaric, unregulated world from which they sprang. The most common threads he exposes are rape and suicide.
The significance of the title? The marriage of Cadmus and Harmony was a singular moment in the affairs of gods and men; their wedding feast was the one time gods and men hung out together openly, eating and drinking at the same table, with no ulterior motives and no disguises. Most other contact between the gods and humans involved deception, disguise, metamorphosis, rape, abduction.
Towards the end of his book Calasso segues away from myth and into the realm of real history, to tell us how awful the Spartans were. This seems off-topic, but worth knowing about. It made me think less of those Hollywood people who made heroes of the Spartans, and who had probably done enough research to know what bastards they were. Yes, most people in the past look like bastards by our standards, but the Spartans really take the biscuit.
All the talk of sacrifice, and of tragedy (which was originally a 'goat dance', and associated with the sacrifice of a goat) made me think of how all story-telling is like a continuation of the ancient Greek practice of sacrifice, the ritual killing of an animal or person. Tragedy, in the technical sense, is a story that ends with the death of the hero; the performance of a tragedy is a ritual sacrifice where no actual people get hurt, only the fictitious hero.
In real life, if we live in a well-managed civilisation and do not work in the emergency services, we can go for years without ever seeing death. But death always features a lot in stories.
I started thinking about this a few years ago. My grandmother was dying, and had become almost immobile, and for the first time had developed a desire to read novels to amuse herself. But the one thing she didn't want to read about was death, and fair enough. It turns out it's really hard to find novels in which nobody dies. They're mostly about people making quilts or having sex. She read a lot of novels about people making quilts.
About the same time, I saw an excellent documentary series called How Art Made the World, which spends an episode on the question of why so much art, especially narrative art, is about death. This book reminded me very much of that episode's conclusion, as I saw it: that the stories we watch and read are the survival into our comparatively nice civilisation of ritual human sacrifice, sublimated into an imaginary form.