The following text is part one of the second chapter from Martin’s second book, titled »Vom Geist der Maschine. Eine Geschichte kultureller Umbrüche«, published in 1999.
Martin Burckhardt
In the Labyrinth of the Signs I
The Gods are from the Field of the Real
(Jacques Lacan)
Dazzled by the Blinding
What is it like to look into the sun? To feel small sparks burning into your eyes, expanding into rings, into a glaring brightness mixed with blackness, shimmering red, the feeling of growing tension. Tears gather under the retina, like a burn blister that will eventually burst under the mere pressure of a blink. And with the watery vitreous humor, my eyesight will also drain away. I imagine this loss: almost a relief, no more burning, just this liquid running down my cheek and leaving a taste in the corner of my mouth. But I can still see: pulsating, bullet-like flashing points. Are they specks of sunlight or already the first holes in my eye? It doesn’t matter, who knows? Basically, I'm no longer sure whether the radiation comes from outside or rather from the depths of my skull, a volcanic magma that wells up and, at the moment of discharge, causes my gaze to explode and fly off in all directions—as if, at the moment of dazzlement, I could see with a thousand eyes, like an insect. A piercingly bright pain, but this pain is accompanied by an equally clear thought, the amazement that here, where the light shines brightest, the path leads into the darkness of Myth.
Black. Nothing else. A calm black that stretches into infinity. And yet, this blink of an Eye [Augenblick] isn't accompanied by total darkness. Maybe it's because of the little noises making it feel like this blackness keeps changing color. Incidentally, it isn’t entirely dark to me either, but as if a residual radiation emanates from things, an almost imperceptible inner light. It takes time to get used to it. No, that's wrong, because you don't need time anymore. With your eyesight, time also runs out into timelessness. Everything returns to itself, like a kind of rhythm, so that it doesn't matter which tense I choose: I was, I am, or I will be. At the beginning, one sentence kept incessantly wandering through my mind: Fame is the Sun of the Dead—now I know it refers to that moment when there can only be light and shadow. In fact, this last and ultimate flashing blink describes the point at which the objective becomes one with the apocalyptic. There is the Bomb's blinding flash, casting a final, merciless glance at the World and simultaneously burning the body that its radiation has reduced to nothing into the ground as a shadow. Nunc stans.
No, here the shadows aren't burned in, much less anything else that can be grasped. As my eyes (or what remains of them) adjust to the diffuse residual light, I notice that a black sun is shining here too—or are there several? But perhaps the word ›Sun‹ is wrong, because these luminous bodies are more like Cyclops' eyes. Like spotlights, they roam through the darkness, creating multiple exposures, image overlays, and blurred streaks of movement.
Perhaps it’s this very presence-of-mind gaze that leads us to the Myth’s essence: that the individual body becomes invisible as an individual, composed of those silhouettes that the Cyclops' headlights, as its »pursuers«, cast onto the walls. Perhaps the Myth can be thought of as a layer of film, as a never-ending gaze in which large, intergenerational periods of time are inscribed. It would be misleading for the Myth to be interpreted as a face, or even as an individual being. If a name appears, it stands as a choir leader who embodies a long genealogy, a face assembled from many faces like that of a wanted poster. As in the receptive surface of the film, it’s only what’s inscribed in the Myth that corresponds to the substrate's receptivity (the exposure time): la longue durée. Just as the first photographs took hours until reality had burned itself into the image, and how a pedestrian could walk through the scene without leaving the faintest trace of his presence, so too can Myth be understood as a surface that remains unconcerned with passers-by and ephemera, anecdotes and episodes. When, on the other hand, something becomes visible in the picture, IT is because it is a condensation and crystallization of time. This explains how the one-and-the-same figure can appear multiple times, in different roles and stages of life. Like a long-exposure photograph, the Myth absorbs time, juxtaposes the sequential, and thus equates the different levels of history. The images may be dark, blurred, and shaky, but what is conveyed is pure architecture. There’s nothing random or arbitrary about them; rather, everything shares the same torpidity and heaviness inherent in our buildings and institutions. As an edifice of thought [Bauwerk des Denkens], Myth has always been Mytho-Logos.
It may seem as if the idea of a single Myth is erroneous, since so many myths vary depending on the place, region, and time. However, this diversity isn’t surprising; rather, it is a necessary characteristic of a culture that, equipped only with rudimentary writing techniques, listens to its Sagas. In the absence of a fixed, canonizing writing, history constantly reinvents itself. More precisely: it always finds itself anew, because it is not about the individual addition, but the general, the supra-personal. In this sense, myths, regardless of their apparent fluidity, are based on that enduring reality as something much denser than paper, much denser than the style and inventiveness of the individual author. Insofar, myths should be approached with the same respect afforded to all those things and institutions proving their own viability by themselves – which, even if we do not know their individual authors, allows us to speak of a self-evidence: an immediate insightfulness. Nevertheless, a methodological difficulty arises here. While the myths may have once possessed exactly this form of self-evidence, this no longer applies to us; we no longer understand them straight away. Instead, the myths lead us into areas entirely alien to our self-understanding and interpretation of the World. For myths are stories without history; they refer to events that are not dated and to people who are not tangible as persons. Entering the world of myths can create a feeling of sinking into a maelstrom, as you can constantly remind yourself of the invalidity of your mind’s inner coordinate system. Myth isn't realized in definition, but in its variation; it doesn't adhere to the logic of space, time, and causality, and as it has no Author, it represents a Text in our sense of the word.1
If we attempt to apply any of these concepts to myths, they fall apart – you are seized by the disconcerting feeling of being and remaining an illiterate [Analphabet] of the Myth. The impression of illegibility isn’t accidental. It points to its connection with Writing, or better, to the relationship of exclusion prevailing between Myth and Writing. The World of Myth precedes alphabetic writing. Only with alphabetic writing does the inexorable Logic of Signs emerge on the page, which definitively codifies the World and, in doing so, inextricably links cause and effect, text and author. Writing puts an end to Myth. The identifiable Author replaces the unrecognizable inventor of the myth; a story replaces the collectively thrown-together web of symbols and images with all its details of Who? Where? When? The Word replaces the evoked, conjured-up word made definite. If Writing eliminates Myth from the World, this raises the suspicion about Writing itself, as the crystallization form par excellence (the monument of all things, as Aeschylus says,2) has a mythical dimension, that Logos has absorbed the function of Myth and thus rendered it superfluous. But what does Myth tell the person who one day opens his eyes and no longer believes himself to be subject to the Laws of Myth, but to the Light of Pure Reason?
The Moment of Forgetting
Guided by the idea of gradual progress, people have sought to interpret the Greek alphabet as a stage in the history of Writing, as the perfection of a movement of thought arising with the first characters: a movement toward abstraction. One argument supporting this interpretation is that, as Herodotus reports, the Greeks themselves didn't regard their alphabetical letters as an indigenous invention, but as something borrowed. They were called phoinikoi3, meaning: the Phoenicians – thus referring to their Semitic origin. Such an evolutionary interpretation, however, overlooks the fundamental flaw inherent in the Greek alphabet. It was only on Greek soil that letters transformed into what we now call the Alphabet: that Symbolic Machine4 in which the Signs circulate, as if for themselves and without reference to any entity, as they run in the circles of the Sign. No letter has any attachment to reality anymore. Where the Signs are stretched onto the Typewheel [Typenrad] of Signs, the phantasm of a pure, otherworldly, metaphysical Sign emerges in its circularity. When it's said that the specific Greek contribution to the Alphabet lay in the perfection of the vowel system, it completely overlooks how radical this fundamental transformation was. Because this process goes hand in hand with the body’s expulsion, the Semitic alphabet, serving as the Greek alphabet’s model, has one or more meanings for each letter. Aleph is the Semitic Sign for the Bull. However, as you might think in the Saussurean tradition, this meaning is not arbitrarily attributed to the Sign. Instead, it is precisely the opposite: like in pictographic writing, the Sign serves as the placeholder for a body.
You can see the Bull’s two horns when you turn the Sign upside down. The Bull is the figure of the divine, and if the gods love to appear in its form, it’s because it symbolizes maximum procreative power. Aleph-Alpha-Phallus – the letters themselves allow us to read the letter Alpha as a phallic symbol. And yet, even in Sign’s ideographic form, enabling us to recognize the Bull's head, there is a fundamental ambivalence. Looking at the letter, you can see the yoke in the crossbar, the instrumental device that transformed the Bull into an ox, putting it into human service. The Sign Alpha thus reveals not only the presence of a god, but also the usurper’s gesture of seeking to wrest the secret of all fertility from the gods.5
The Greek Alpha marks the ending of that first revolution of the Sign. It is a revolution in the literal sense of the word, a rotation, because the Sign of the Bull, once turned, becomes the Sign of the Plow, the instrument that transformed nomadic peoples into farmers settling in one place.6 This progressive abstraction also includes the Bull Sign's refinement as it evolves from totem animal to instrument of agriculture until it becomes a symbol of love (which then soon turns out to be what we call the symbolic yoke of marriage). In fact, this line, which leads from pictograms to ideograms, from the body to the idea, describes the path characteristic of all pre-alphabetic sign systems. In this process, abbreviation prevails, with pictograms becoming increasingly stylized and simplified. However, (and this must be emphasized) the starting point is always the object being designated. Even there, where the first syllabaries emerge, the syllabic signs, which are recoded pictograms, still refer to this original image [Ur-Bild] that gave them their name7; the direction of movement is thus conceived as leading from the Body to the Sign (in the sense of representationalism). This line isn't only reversed in the Greek world to the extent that the Sign is considered primordial and the body as a shadow being; rather, it can also be said that a barrier is erected between the Sign and the Body, completely obscuring the connection between the Body and the Sign. If I can no longer see what a child can see, namely that the inverted A represents a bull's head, then this serves as proof of this barrier. However, it is precisely at this barrier where the phantasm of the pure and arbitrary Sign emerges: a Sign that is not an image, but autological, tautological: itself.
Europa
The Alphabet arrived in Europe in two ways. This statement is both true and false. It's false because it assumes that Europe is a geographical place, as if this continent had already carried this name since ancient times. Yet, having said that, Europe is a construct emerging from the migration of symbols, and is less a geographical entity than a symbolic one. It is not the tectonics of the land masses, but the texture of writing that emerges in this name. In this sense, the connection between the Alphabet and Europe isn’t accidental but a reciprocal event. But where does the migration of symbols, which culminates in the Alphabet, begin? As already mentioned, the Greeks refer to the alphabetical symbols as phoinikoi, highlighting their Phoenician origin or, more generally, the Semitic world of Asia Minor as the birthplace of the Alphabet. Europe itself is named after a Phoenician king's daughter who was abducted by a bull and carried across the sea—westward,8 where the Bull revealed his true form as the god Zeus. If the name Europa has an etymology, it traces back to the Semitic ereb, erebos, which means dark, suggesting that the movement into the West and darkness is already prefigured here. One might assume that the god who appears on the Phoenician seashores as a beautiful white bull abducts Europa to the land that has since borne her name. However, Zeus carries her to Crete, a land that wasn’t considered part of Europe in ancient times. Europa—and this is the story’s paradox—does not arrive in Europe.9
It's precisely this circumstance that is so remarkable, as it brings into play that other linked path, indeed, that is intertwined with the fate of Europe. In fact, the history of the Alphabet’s story is of two siblings who appear together in Myth for only the blink of an eye: the moment they're torn apart. Their paths then diverge. Nevertheless, both paths are strangely intertwined; not merely parallel, but constantly intersecting, mixing, and mirroring each other. Thus, the abduction of the young princess Europa by Zeus is only part of the story. The abduction of Europa results in a mission to bring her home again—a mission entrusted to her brother, Kadmos.
Europa and Kadmos are children of Agenor, which means the first man or leader of men.10 The siblings are named Phonix, Kilix, Cadmos, and Europa. Phonix and Kilix refer to Asian regions and peoples of Phoenicia and Calicia. It is therefore plausible that son Cadmos, the only son without land, is sent by his father to bring back the kidnapped Europa. Thus, Cadmos sets off, accompanied by a cow armed with the Oracle's prophecy. He crosses the Bosporus, finally arriving in Boeotia via Samothrace, where he founds the first Polis: Thebes.
However, Cadmus isn't only the city's founder but also a heroic bringer of Writing – the guy who brought the Alphabet to Greece, and thus: to Europe. The Greek alphabet marks Sign Revolution’s crowning glory. It goes hand in hand with an upheaval of the divine order. Karl Kerényi wrote that the Myth of the Gods merges into the Heroes Myth in the palace of Cadmus.11 If deities set out from Asia Minor, they arrive in Greece as heroes. While Cadmus represents this journey's heroic side, the abducted Europa's story illustrates the female perspective. Of course, the mythological Europa never arrives in Europe—which further places her among all the women left behind, of which mythology is full. If what we call Europe is the search for the vanished, lost Europa—a search that has turned away from its original goal and been transferred to other objects of longing12 – then we’re dealing with a process most accurately described by the term transference. This term, which has both psychoanalytical and technical connotations (and thus a fundamental ambiguity), is used in its simplest sense: as a transfer from one place to another. Europa is carried by Zeus to Crete, while Cadmus crosses the Bosporus, the ford that will separate »barbarian« Asia from Europe. The result of this journey is a sharp difference, a division between origin and destination, but also a division within the figures themselves (embodied in Europa, who, to become Europe, must disappear as a figure). If we translate transfer back into Greek, we encounter the word Metaphora, which means metaphor. As we know, metaphorical, figurative speech relies on shifting and condensing the original meaning into a higher meaning. However, the original meaning must be suppressed for this transition to a higher level to succeed. It’s precisely this rupture that characterizes the series of transfers/omissions recounted in Myth: from the Sign of the Bull to pure letters, from the village to the Polis, from the gods to the Heroes, from Myth to Logos, and from the figure to the metaphor. Once torn apart, the siblings will never see each other again.
Cadmus
Like all heroes, Cadmus is a figure devoid of psychology. Although he occasionally appears in Greek tragedy, such as in Euripides' The Bacchae, it makes more sense to think of him as the archetypal cattle herder: a lonely wanderer who sets off westward toward the evening sky. Occasionally, there's mention of a small, armed band of companions, a brother, and even his mother. However, you always hear about the cattle he is bringing with him, so the ford he crosses is called Bosporus, the Ox Ford, and the land he finally reaches is Boeotia, the land of cattle. If the Cadmus epic deserved an atmosphere, it would be that of a Hollywood western: wilderness, land grabbing, and cattle rustlers. Yet this herdsman possesses secret knowledge, a dark energy driving him forward. In Delphi, he consults the oracle and is instructed to seek out Pelagon, a Shepherd born to die; buy a cow from him that bears the Sign of the Full Moon on its flanks; and settle where this cow digs its horns into the ground
»A clear sign I will tell thee, thou shalt know it;
Where first that horned beast that dwells in the field
Shall kneel her down upon the grassy ground
There make thou sacrifice to dark-leaved Earth
Clean and holily. Thine offering made,
Found on the hill a town of spacious streets,
First sending Ares’ dreadful guard to death.
— So shall thy name be known of men to come
Thy consort be a goddess, blessed Kadmos.«13
Cadmus follows the oracle’s prophecy. The cow kneels and digs its horns into the ground. Cadmus sacrifices it and sends his companions to fetch water. However, no one returns because a terrible dragon resides near the spring’s cave. The companions fall victim to the dragon. Finally, it comes to a Showdown, the great Dragon Fight. The hero enters the battle almost unarmed. He overpowers the dragon with his sword or by throwing stones. He then sows the dragon's teeth in the ground, from which heavily armed warriors emerge. Cadmus throws a stone into the crowd of warriors to protect himself from them, whereupon they turn on each other. Only five remain: Udaios, the ground man; Chthonios, the earth man; Pelor, the giant; Hyperenor, the superhuman; and Echion, the snake man. They are also called Spartoi, the sown ones.
Harold Innis, the Canadian philosopher and teacher of Marshall McLuhan, analyzed this myth early on as the Alphabet's central myth, a kind of civil war of Signs in which the remaining warriors play the role of the vowels.14 Indeed, from this perspective, there are several reasons to study the myth of Cadmus, who is explicitly regarded as the bringer of the Alphabet. However, this leads us into a field of inquiry going far beyond the mere notation scheme—one that renders the sign legible instead as a symbolic reproductive apparatus. Not only does the Aleph Sign, which refers to the ox in the yoke, emphasize the correspondence between these two orders of fertility, Sign and Field, but also a series of fantasies pointing in this direction. When the Greeks refer to the early form of writing, in which the text alternates from left to right, as boustrophedon, meaning »the way an ox pulls a plow,« this is more than a metaphor: it reflects the Aleph’s logic. And the Oracle's prophecy that Cadmus should settle where the cow lowers its horned head also anticipates the reversal of signs – the Bull's head, the head standing upright.15
There is another dimension to which the myth points, and it will be discussed further under the heading of telluric sacredness: While Cadmus had only natural stone at his disposal, the characters who emerge from the earth are armed with iron weapons.16 The battle gives rise to what could be called the TYPE—and this will distinguish Greek culture, with its armies of hoplites, from the ›barbarian‹ cultures. The dragon's power, described in the oracle as the guardian of the god of war, and which falls victim to Cadmus' throwing of stone, is not entirely eliminated, but continues in the highly disciplined soldiers acting as a military alliance. However, this detail is part of a whole chain of transpositions foreshadowed in the Cadmus myth: from cattle breeding to the Polis, from the Shepherd born to die to the soldier, from stone to iron, from the hero to the collective – and from the dragon, guardian of the god of war, to the army. All these transpositions herald fundamental shifts. In summary, it can be said that the principle of Acrocracy, the towering, dark singularity, is replaced by new magical circles, which, like the Alphabet, consist of several elements. The original power is no longer visible as such but has entered into the concerted action of the elements. This, however, doesn’t mean a weakening, but rather a potentiation. If Cadmus was able to engage in a duel with the dragon as an individual, he can only defend himself against the superior forces of the armed fighters by throwing a stone at them, casting them into a state of disarray – an elemental confusion, if you will – from which the new powerful synthetic whole emerges.
When Cadmus later marries Harmonia (whom the myth calls a different Europa), this takes place amid the jubilation and great sympathy of the gods, who shower the couple with wedding gifts. This isn’t a coincidence, for this union articulates the apotheosis and beginning of Greek antiquity: the Marriage of Systemic Thinking. Ovid, who colorfully embellishes Cadmus' battle with the dragon, has a voice come out of nowhere:
»Son of Agenor, why are you gazing at the dragon you’ve slain?
You too will become a dragon for men to gaze upon!«17
This oracle's prophecy (like every oracle's prophecy) comes true. Cadmus and Harmonia are transformed into snakes—thereby endowed with divine power. Before being struck by the verdict of the Fall, the serpent was considered a sacred creature. When the pharaohs wore the sacred Cobra around their heads, when snakes were kept in pits and regarded as the Oracle’s protectors, it was because they were believed to possess a deeper knowledge of the reincarnation laws. In this sense, the transformation into a snake or dragon is both an apotheosis and a transfiguration of the knowledge originally reserved for the snake alone. Now, the story of Cadmus and Harmonia has a counterpart in their bridegroom’s dragon fight, the god Apollo. For Apollo also slays the dragon Python, thereby gaining possession of the Oracle. Another dragon-shaped adversary of Apollo bears the name Delphyne. This Delphyne, in turn, gives its name to the Oracle's site at Delphi—the place Cadmus visited on his way to the land of cattle. The name Delphyne reveals the essence of his quest, as Delphyne is an ancient name for the womb.18 And when Cadmus and Harmonia are deified in serpent form and carried off to the island of the blessed, it’s because they have replaced the mystery of birth with the Code of Nature. Perhaps this is the deepest reason why Europa – and with her all the mother goddesses of Asia Minor's World – will never arrive in Europe.
Crete
What is this island where Europa arrives? Crete: island of bulls and sacred snakes, childhood home of the Greek gods, a world of legends filled with miraculous figures, giants, and mythical creatures, all displaying unprecedented, memorable grandeur—just as in childhood stories. Crete is the home of early thinking that has not yet been alphabetized. Consequently, the way Greek authors write about Crete reveals the sentimental mellifluousness that clings to memories of preschool days. Sentimentality is sentimental precisely because it no longer believes in lost paradises, encountering them only in hypothetical form: a reality that would evaporate into nothingness if confronted in real life. Thus, the dashing formulas of disenchantment characterizing the School of Athens are not contradictions of sentimental affection, but rather its necessary counterpart. Whatever the outcome, it boils down to a denial of childhood, because all Cretans lie. This is a profound statement, not only regarding Cretans, but also the logical apparatus that produces it as a theorem. This marks a split between Mythos and Logos, a razor-sharp dividing line cutting through what cannot be separated. As the birthplace of Zeus, which shows the god in diapers, Crete reminds us of the shame of being born, of the fact that we have not created ourselves nor our own World of gods Consequently, in Greek thought, Crete represents not only the mystery of the primordial beginning but also a veritable taboo zone: the noli me tangere of the a priori, that form of not wanting to know which makes a specific form of knowledge possible in the first place.
So what is Crete's significance as the birthplace of the god? While it has been noted on various occasions that Greek culture reflects a tendency toward monotheism in Zeus,19 Crete narrates the emergence of this god, specifically during the time when he was not yet king of the gods and the highest of the Olympians. Perhaps this story's motto and embarrassment is that even giants once began as small. If Zeus is a creature, this implies that there was a time before, when his glory didn’t yet shine – and thus there may also be an after, the moment of his dethronement.20 This threat is linked to the birth cave of Zeus, leading us back to religious realms where the mother goddesses existed before any adult male deities. Indeed, Crete was idealized as the home of the Great Mother Goddess. Of course, the rule of this goddess is already strangely broken. The birth of Zeus itself describes a peculiarity: Rhea must kneel on the ground on Mount Ida, overcome by labor pains. But before she gives birth, the mountain convulses and births out small, metallic beings who assist her in the delivery: the Curetes. The word itself has a double meaning: the Curetes are the Cretans themselves (in Latin, Crete is called curetis), and there is also a connection to the word kouros, which means both »boy« and »core.« The Cretans who sprang from the earth, who are undoubtedly related to the fighters springing from the earth in the legend of Cadmus, have a metallic core. They immediately begin to dance with weapons, swords, and shields. However, they aren’t merely servant ghosts (like the seven dwarfs in Snow White) but priests who tell of the goddess's mysteries.
Here, a curious difference emerges. Why does the Great Mother require the Curetes’ assistance? Does she herself not represent Mother Earth? And what kind of Earth would it be from which the metal dwarves spring? In fact, the myth tells us about the replacement of two orders that are religious in nature, but it also relates to the laws of reproduction. In connection with the mastery of the ores, Eliade spoke of telluric sacredness, pointing out that the metallurgical process is essentially understood as one of symbolic birth. The craftsman takes the place of Mother Earth, with firing being understood as a synthetically induced maturation process—an artificial birth in which the metal embryo is prematurely removed from the womb and brought to maturity by firing.21 This assumes, conversely, that metals mature internally like the embryo in the womb—an idea that still lived on in the alchemical doctrine that every metal is a precursor of gold, which must inevitably find its final form in gold.
If the telluric sacredness represents an analogy to traditional fertility cults, then the »birthing« of the metallic form, as an act brought about exclusively by human hands, stands in clear competition with that event requiring natural forces. It isn’t necessary to look far to visualize the rift—in today's terms, the metallurgical process would be in vitro fertilization. And what's more, because the metallurgist doesn't return a removed embryo to the earth mother but grows it in an artificial environment, this process could be seen as a form of artificial reproduction. It’s precisely this interpretation that provides the key to the birth scene on Mount Ida. The mountain gives birth to its creatures without needing the Great Mother. Instead, when the Curetes intervene in the birthing process as midwives, the relationship shifts clearly in the direction of artificial reproduction. In another version of the myth, the Curetes are referred to as dactyls (literally: fingers or toes), bearing names that can be translated as anvil, hammer, and knife.22 Whatever the Curetes are – forges, sorcerers, warriors, or priests—it’s evident that the mysteries and secret teachings they recount all pay homage to a cult inadequately grasped by our traditional understanding of fertility. Against this background, the term telluric (although extremely useful as a concept) is ill-chosen, for tellus, terra mater, is the earth mother herself. In this context, it would be much more precise to speak of a Promethean cult, a self-made religion that no longer feeds on the mystery of birth and rebirth, but on the retort.23 In this religion of the retort, culture begins to celebrate itself. If Crete is regarded as the place of the Mother Goddess, the island is also the site of her gradual disappearance.
Iron Man
The Curetes represent a new type, the type Hesiod calls the Bronze Race, of whom he aptly says, »They did not eat grain, but their spirit was made of steel.«24 This race finds its most perfect expression in the figure of a bronze giant, a coastal guard who walks around the island three times a day, driving away intruders with stones. His name is Talos. While outwardly this Iron Man appears as a terrifying figure, inwardly he is the guardian of the Law. In Plato's interpretation, he's the one who goes around carrying bronze tablets inscribed with the laws and ensuring compliance with them, which earns him the nickname »Bronze«.25 Therefore, Talos would be the wandering letter, the arm upholding and ensuring compliance with their law. Certainly: the contradiction between the two forms of religion, between agriculture and ore, also characterizes him.26 On one hand, it's said that he had a human form, while on the other, he had the form of a bull.27 Indeed, this is reflected in a fissure inscribed into his being, a line marking his vulnerable spot: a long vein running from his head to his feet with a concealed access portal on his ankle. When the Argonauts land in Crete, the sorceress Medea succeeds in extracting his secret. She then opens his port, and the god’s blood, the Giant’s sekretum flows out28 – along with the Minoan Culture’s mental secretions being hysterically carried by their ships as Europa seeks the Europe she never finds.
This only happened when the Minoan culture was conquered and occupied by the mainland Greeks in the 14th century BC. As Talo's image suggests, in reality, the Minoan empire's downfall was more akin to a departure, in the sense that ships set sail. Only it is no longer the ironclad ships of the Cretans, but those of the Mycenaean conquerors, with which the secret of Minoan culture finds a home throughout Mediterranean culture. However, in the middle of the second millennium, Crete still remains impregnable. The watchman automaton Talos does his duty. Cyclopean walls protect the Minoan empire named after the legendary King Minos, while a cultural schism smolders within it: a rift between the Great Mother Goddess and Zeus, between the Bull and the Bronze Guardian.
The Lost Form
But what’s Crete’s secret? Where does the Minoan culture's superiority expressed in the Bronze Giant's form originate? The name Talos itself reveals the secret. Talos means Sun in the Cretan language, and the Cretan Zeus is called Zeus Tallios – an indication that Minos' automaton (which some attribute to divine origin) can be interpreted as a god’s representative.29 From here, a line runs to the Greek metallon, which originally meant the pit and tunnel, and only later referred to what was found in it.30 In the form of Talos, the heavenly fire has descended. What’s more, the sun has been immortalized in the bronze tablets, as it becomes the foundation of the law, the heavenly scripture that Plato calls Logos. Additionally, because this artifice [Kunst] is intimately connected with the Greek pantheon, Talos is also the guardian who preserves its secret. Now, the Crete of the 2nd millennium is not only home to Zeus' birth cave; it also has a metallurgical achievement elevating it above its surrounding cultures: bronze casting with lost forms. While bronze smelting is primarily based on mastering fire, bronze casting with lost forms represents a skill far exceeding the beginnings of bronze technology. Its ingenuity lies in producing a cavity that, as a hollow receptacle, can contain and accommodate the final shape of the bronze casting without melting. Instead of a hammered hand-worked object, a finished form emerges that has completely passed through the fire31 and cast from a single mold – which, drawing a parallel to the birthing process, actually evokes the fantasy of a second nature as we are not only dealing with in vitro fertilization but with a growth process taking place autonomously.
But what is the Lost Form? First, there is a model made of beeswax: the prototype. This waxy form is covered with plaster after candles have been affixed to create exit channels for the wax to flow from later. The plaster-covered form is then heated, causing the gypsum to harden while the melting wax flows out of the drain channels, leaving behind the hollow mold. Positive-Negative: The simultaneous melting and hardening is what makes the process so ingenious, as the same logic is applied in the final step. Now, the plaster-coated hollow mold is placed into a cavity in the ground, allowing for rapid cooling once the bronze is poured in, thereby ensuring a successful casting.32
It's easy to imagine how the artifacts produced in such a process must have appeared as wondrous objects to the more naive cultures of the time: swords and shields without any traces of the irregularities of human hands, instead exuding a formal unity and perfection unique to living beings. Impressive as the superficial shine of the swords and shields may be, the deeper knowledge behind their fabrication is that the Cretan blacksmith-priests must be credited because mastery of these techniques requires a high degree of metallurgical expertise. They had to know and regulate the melting points of metals without the aid of measuring instruments, and understand how metals behave in compounds and alloys. Through the lost form process, bronze technology emerged from the handicraft stage. Energetically, we are now dealing with a type of power plant technology [Kraftwerktechnik] that functionally reflects a highly abstract creation process. While this technical perfection is highly esteemed, its connection to the religious sphere mustn't be forgotten. If the forges of ancient times were attributed a priestly status, it is clear that those adept in this superior casting technique would have been accorded exceptional status. In fact, the categorical separation of this technology from the religious world is a division that has only existed since the Romantic era. For the world of the Cretans, knowledge of the process of lost form was a secret teaching in two senses: firstly, as knowledge of a technical practice, and secondly, as a religious cult that articulated this knowledge in an elevated, idealized form. Against this background, the story of Zeus' birth must be reconsidered. If the Bronze Guardian is the placeholder for the godhead whom the Cretans call Zeus tallios, then it arises out of a deep connection between the god coming to life here and the cult spread by the Curetes. Now, besides the story of Rhea giving birth to the divine child on Mount Ida, there are other birth narratives in which the lost form connection becomes even clearer. It is said that Zeus was born in a Cretan cave, in a hollow form,33 clandestinely, to escape the vengeance of his child-murdering father Cronus. In this version, the Curetes are no longer midwives but perform a noisy dance with their shields in front of the cave to drown out the telltale cries. There’s even mention of different caves: one where the birth took place and another where the Zeus child was nourished. While psychoanalytic thinking may be tempted to see these caves as maternal womb images, viewing them as transfigurations of the caves and grottoes used by Cretan metallurgists as forges for producing their products seems much more plausible. Thus, the cave serves as a temple of the lost form, and the child of Zeus (who clearly heralds a rift in the world of the gods; for why else would Kronos want to kill him?) as the first incarnation of this cult.
Following this thought, a line of further connections can be made linking the caves of Zeus to the Cretan cult’s most famous place—the Labyrinth. According to Mircea Eliade, the labyrinth was also originally a cave.34 Now, the alleged parallel between cult and technology would be mere speculation if there weren't a myth in the mythological world of the Zeus child, in which the lost form process is described in an almost unadulterated way that would seem bizarrely incomprehensible without this reference:
There live the sacred bees, the nurses of Zeus.35 A great fire breaks out in the cave once a year, always when the blood ferments that flowed at the god's birth. One day, four brave men enter the cave, clad in iron armor and fortified with honey from the bees, their faces whitewashed with plaster. When they see the god in his birth cave, wrapped in swaddling clothes and smeared with blood, their armor falls off, and giant bees attack them. When they see the god in his birth cave, wrapped in swaddling clothes and smeared with blood, their armor falls off, and giant bees attack them.
– When attempting to analyze this myth, it becomes evident that the uterine idea of the birth cave does not lead very far away. Rather, it's the story's details that are important. First, there's a layering of meanings: the annual fire breaking out in this cave plays on the circularity of ancient fertility cults, while the blood here is merely a remnant, having given way to the boiling metal. This transubstantiation conveys an essential message illustrating that Cretan culture, with its storehouses, palaces, and fortifications, no longer adheres to the mythology of blood unreservedly, but instead venerates metal as the source of wealth and general well-being.
Nevertheless – and in order not to simply break with tradition, efforts are made symbolically—or rather: symballically36 of bringing the two levels together. Accordingly, the sekretum of Zeus is also represented as a mixture of blood and molten metal. However, following the narrative, it becomes clear where the focus of the new cult lies. All details refer to the lost form process.
The sacred bees, Zeus's nurses, refer to the wax that serves as the raw material for the bronze sculptures. The four brave men with their shields (the artifacts of which Cretan culture is so proud) have whitewashed their faces with plaster, reminiscent of the plaster casings used in sculptures. The mention of fire is also unambiguous. There are two reasons why it takes courage to enter the heights: firstly, the real danger inherent in the casting technique, and secondly, it touches on the arcane secrets of Cretan culture. Insofar as viewing this world's interior is accompanied by the horror of theophany, a terror instantly disarms the warriors, leaving them at the killer bees’ mercy. At the same time, this brief glimpse reveals the secret of Cretan culture, the secret of the highest Greek godhead, whose Cretan childhood causes the Greeks a certain embarrassment. Wax, metal, fire, the falling bowls, and finally the image of the blood-stained god standing there in swaddling clothes—like one of those sculptures removed from their plaster molds but not yet cleaned. The details of this myth illustrate the miraculous technique that enabled the Cretans to create forms from a single cast for the first time. Zeus is such a figure, an ideal, complete body. With him, a new figure enters the World of Mother Goddesses, a figure that could be called HOMO-GEN in all its ambiguity: a human creation, cast from a single mold.37 The myth goes on to say that Zeus gave bees the color of ore out of gratitude for nourishing him. When honey becomes the food of the gods, and ambrosia is used for anointing while wax is used in mummification (as was still the case with Alexander the Great), this substance also experiences an apotheosis.
With the thesis that Zeus represents the godhead of Lost Form, the question is immediately raised about what constitutes the Lost Form of Myth as an analogy of the casting process. Initially, there may be a tendency to attribute this loss to the ancient pantheon's diminished function. If the ancient fertility deities owe their existence to the circularity of growth and decay, this tributary relationship melts away to almost nothing in the case of Zeus. Zeus owes his existence not to a particular substance, but to a trick: he is an artificial god. In its form, culture encounters itself. But here lies a contradiction, indeed, this god's birth defect. The god in whom human work celebrates itself does not exactly contribute to its own exaltation.38 To worship him as a god, it is precisely this aspect of the synthetic that must be suppressed—all the more so because, unlike natural material, the ingenuity of the lost form no longer holds any mysteries. It’s no coincidence that the birth cave of Zeus is shrouded in an embarrassing silence—the four brave men who see him, covered in blood and swaddling clothes, are seized by panic. What they see there is not something wholly different, but rather that their godhead is a self-made cult figure.
In the liquefied, creamy metal that takes on the role of blood in Zeus' birth cave, a new, ›artificial‹ form of fertility comes into play. From now on, when we refer to a logos spermatikos, we always mean this special ›blood juice‹ [Blutsaft]. The culture of Zeus is abstract, synthetic, head birth [Kopfgeburt] as a result of pure imagination. Nevertheless, Zeus tallios, the Cretan god who emerged like a statue from a lost form, still stands under the dictum of tradition. Because the old godheads cannot simply be displaced, Zeus, in accordance with the inertia of religious sentiment, takes on a different form – a form that must be more congenial to the older female fertility deities. If Amaltheia, another wet nurse, whose name again contains the honey aspect, nourishes the child of God with the horn of a bull, an inexhaustible horn of plenty, it is only right and proper that he should occasionally appear in the guise of a phallic bull. And in precisely the same way, in the guise of the Bull, he appears to Europa on the shores of the Phoenician sea—a guise he discards once he arrives in Crete. In this dual nature of the god, where the Lost Form is superimposed on the traditional bull's costume, lies the rift foreshadowed in the long, head-to-toe vein of his earthly double. Because here, two principles collide: the world of agriculture and the tamed fire, the telluric sacrality and that of the agricultural deities. In fact, for a time, molten metal still counted as a form of bull power – the equation of blood and red-hot metal holds. Accordingly, the Cretan religion can be seen as an attempt to unite the two competing orders. The highest object of worship is represented by two horns with a sun disk resting between them.
As in the birth cave of Zeus, which is described as filled with surging blood but is actually an allusion to the liquefaction of metal, the fusion of blood and metal occurs repeatedly. However, this isn't about the substances themselves, but about the competing religious orders they represent, which are reconciled with each other in the overlapping of the two levels of meaning. The new alloy of blood and metal is not limited just to Crete but spreads throughout the Greek world, just as myths can be seen as forms of migrating thoughts, representing a shift of names, places, and cults. Insofar, it is not surprising that the Cadmus myth has sequels and repetitions, as in the story of Jason. Jason has to compete in a contest to marry Medea, the king's daughter. Before the hero faces the dragon, the king sends him into battle with fiery bulls:
»Behold the bulls with feet of bronze! From steel nostrils, / They blow Vulcan's flames; touched by the embers, / The grass around them burns. And like full-grown oxen, they bellow, / Or as limestone burned in a limekiln hisses, / Or grows hot when sprinkled with a drop of water, / So from their chests and parched throats, / Came the rumbling-roar from flames pent up within.«
Jason, the hero, equipped by his enchanting Medea with a »Promethean ointment,« can approach them:
»...never feeling their fiery breath—so potent is the power of the spell — / He boldly strokes their hanging dewlaps with fearless hand, / And harnessing the yoke upon them: made them draw the heavy plow, / And cutting through the field that had felt a steel share before.«39
Then the battle with the dragon begins, which Jason defeats in the manner of Cadmus:
›Now he takes the dragon's teeth from the bronze helmet / And scatters them into the loosened soil. / The earth softens the powerfully enchanted seeds, / Growing into teeth and becoming new formations. / Just as in the mother's womb, a child takes shape, / Perfected within – limb and limb join together – / Not coming forth into the common air, until fully formed, / So, when the forms of men had been completed in the womb or the pregnant earth / They rose up, teeming from the fertile earth / And—even more astonishing!—each brandished weapons emerging with himself. (...) / He throws a heavy stone into the midst of his enemies, / Turning their attack away from him, onto their own ranks. / These sons of the earth took to wounding one another, / And struck down by the bands of their own kin, / They perish in civil war.‹
This short passage, in which Ovid examines a distant past, is remarkable because it intertwines all levels of the question, revealing the superimposition of two competing religious orders (figuratively summarized in the elements of blood and metal). Furthermore, this passage highlights that aspect of symbol formation which will find its enigmatic form in the pure Sign. In fact, we cannot yet speak of a symbol; instead, we are observing the various aspects in separate forms, all jumbled together. Now, sym-ballein, the throwing together, is the essential stratagem leading to the symbol as the ultimate form of condensation. All connotations of the Alpha-Phallus Sign converge here: the taming of the Bull, the replacement of the agricultural world by metallurgical, Promethean skills, and the hermaphroditic being of blood and metal (the fiery bull). The hero, armed with a Promethean ointment, the dragon seed, and the knowledge of the secret of reproduction, embodies the birth of the homogeneous and the horror of uniformity40, which in turn provokes a civil war but ultimately gives rise to the community that characterizes the Greek world: the Polis.
Semele
It's evident that when the center of worship shifts, the sacrificial offerings must also change. When the Greeks euphemistically said that a human sacrifice had ›passed through fire,‹ it was clear that the godhead was now being paid with a different currency than before.41 Now it's Cadmus' fourth daughter, Semele, who falls victim to this ritual against the express wishes of the god, who must step aside due to the law of tyche, that relentless goddess who determines how things have to be. Even the highest god must bow to this absolute necessity. How does the myth of Semele go? Semele, daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia, is impregnated by the god of lightning, who carries within him the energy and knowledge of Me-Tallon. Semele is the Phrygian word for the Greek Chtonia, meaning ›the underground.‹ At the same time, the word contains the seed of the Greek similis, which in Latin becomes simulacrum, meaning dream, shadow, phantom, or image of the dead.42 Semele, into whom semel, once and for all, the seed of Zeus has descended, is the hollow form of the god: receptivity in its entirety. Hera, the jealous wife of the gods, approaches her,
»Wrapped in a golden saffron cloud, / She rides to Semele's threshold; / Nor does she dissipate her cloud /Until she’s adopted an old woman’s guise, / Streaking her temples with white hair / And furrowing her skin with wrinkles.«43
Hera has taken on the form of her old nurse. In this disguise, the old woman instills doubt in her about the god's paternity: »Many have already entered chaste chambers as gods.« Doubt, this hollow form of reality in which what was real flows out, becoming a phantasmatic cavity – a cavity constantly producing new suspicions and possibilities—this doubt of demanding certainty. The god is to give her a token of his love, and he promises her this token, whatever it may be. And Semele, in search of the god's true identity, demands he reveal himself as he truly is, which becomes her downfall. The unhappy god struggles to tame his fire, wrapping himself in steam and clouds, rain and lightning, yet despite this, he appears to her as he is: as a bolt of lightning that burns Semele to death. The god can only save the son Semele carries in her womb, so he's sewn into his father's loins with a golden clasp. Zeus gives birth to him, who has a bull's head like himself: Dionysus. For this reason, he's also called the twice-born.
Mellis (the honey) Se-Mellis. Similis. Semele. (Se)meltan. Melting. The hardening of the god coincides with the melting of the woman. Semele leaves behind the hollow form, the doubt, the empty, burnt-out royal palace. And with the vine, that substance that will populate the reality principle with the power of imagination’s [Einbildungskraft] shadow beings, along with intoxication and delusion.
Hysterologos
Something new emerges from the technique of the lost form. The hollow form becomes productive. Whereas cultures previously had to act on the body itself to create an artifact, now bodies emerge bearing no trace of the human hand: hybrid beings, alloys, totalities. The exclusion of the human hand signifies the step into abstraction. Molten bronze poured into a hollow mold is a kind of plastic. The idea of perfect plasticity resides in the magmafication of the molten state: a flexible, malleable, and supple body. Conversely, this infinite plasticity corresponds to the body’s complete annihilation during the melting process. A strange dialectic emerges here. By melting down the natural body’s form along with its unevenness and bulkiness, all conceivable forms, FORM as such, become visible for the first time. While the wax positive still represents an analog of the body, the process of abstraction takes a decisive step further in the case of melting down and refilling. The fact that here the creative human hand no longer has any possibility of intervention describes only the external side of this process; however, we must bear in mind the extent to which metallurgical knowledge is assumed to grasp all the sharpness of this leap of abstraction. Against the background of these intellectual and abstract skills, it becomes clear that this melting process can only be understood as a mental process. With this step into abstraction, the view shifts from physicality (or, as one might say, the mother substance) to those cavities preceding the body. In this sense, Dionysus, twice born, is an image of this process. The child of his mother, who melts away (like wax) under the energy of lightning, and the child of his father, into whose thigh he is sewn (like bronze poured into a hardened plaster mold)44.
The body emerging from this hollow form is a strange hybrid creature. While it appears perfect, despite its appearance, it is no longer the archetype [Urbild], but rather a copy—and indeed a double copy. It may be a steel Ironman, yet inside, it’s as fluid as Talos – a Protean creature that is only invulnerable in appearance [Erscheinung]. The Technique of Lost Form inscribes a division into the thing: the division between being and appearance45. Strictly speaking, the things emerging from this process are already appearances: they embody the forms that preceded them—Wax and Air. Insofar, it is no coincidence that Semele, whose expressed desire made Zeus the idea’s father, gives birth to simulacra. Just as the hollow form gives birth to possibilities, doubt gives birth to illusions. Moving along these lines, Euripides recounts in The Bacchae a version of the myth circulated by Semele's sisters about her death. They claim that Semele only pretended to be impregnated by the god on the advice of Cadmus, which was the reason why the god killed her.46
Like Semele, her son Dionysus, »born of lightning,« is a master of appearances—and at the same time his mother's avenger. When Pentheus, the son of one of those envious sisters, dares to deny the presence of the god in keeping with family tradition, Dionysus mocks him by appearing in human guise and conjuring up a bull out of thin air. — The deluded Pentheus, whom Dionysus has persuaded to go to the Maenads in the guise of a woman, suddenly believes he sees two suns and a double Thebes – and finally Dionysus himself appears to him, as his father had appeared, in the form of a bull. Perhaps there’s no stronger image for the totality of illusion than this: the appearance of a second sun. Where it’s impossible to decide what reality is and what delusion is, doubt encompasses the whole world—thereby marking something like a counter-world formula. Just as the Lost Form’s production process shifts the creation of form into the invisible, the reality of Dionysus shifts into the intangible.47 But only here, and not in his concrete manifestation, can the presence of God be felt. Pentheus, the godless rationalist who takes the form of the god for the god himself, who believes he can capture the god with a ribbon, is punished for his trust in appearances with the multiplication of appearances. And at the moment when doubt about the world seizes him, his fate is sealed: he is to be dismembered himself. He is torn to pieces by his own mother and her maenads.
The idea of appearance makes sense only in front of the hollow form. The bronze sculpture is the realization of something absent, the phenotype of a genotype that is lost in the process itself.48 Latin speaks of ars fingendi, equating casting with counterfeiting or faking. This is where the realm of Dionysus begins, who is the god of theater and, for a long time, dressed in the costumes of the great tragic figures—the only hero on stage (Nietzsche). Dionysus has been too readily proclaimed a reincarnation of earlier fertility deities. In fact, he belongs to the Technologos—only that, unlike Zeus, he doesn’t want to be turned into statues and statutes. Dionysus embodies the sacred fire49, that immense, all-consuming force hidden in the hollow of the process of the Lost Form. When Nietzsche says in The Birth of Tragedy with precise instinct, »Dionysus of the mysteries, a god experiencing in himself the sufferings of individuation,«50 this suffering leads to where the potency of Cretan culture has its highest expression.
In one Orphic myth, the infant Dionysus is attacked by the Curetes; in another version, by the Titans. With their faces painted with plaster (!), they approach the playing child, dismember him, and throw him into a boiling cauldron. The dismembered and overcooked body is finally transformed, restored by the gods, into a vine, into pure mind. If it is said that Zeus brought about fulfillment, but it was Dionysus who made fulfillment complete, then it is clear his contribution lies in a realm that cannot be grasped through physical abundance or pure positivity. It's more like a formlessness that Dionysus embodies: as an enthusiast who excites the Bacchantes, who clouds their minds and blurs the line between the sexes, between madness and reality. — But it would be wrong to see this god as the opposite of reason. He is more like that part of the process hidden from view. This affiliation with the Technologos explains Dionysus's special relationship with Hephaestus, that limping, dwarfed monstrosity whom his own mother hurled down to earth. If Hephaistos trusts only Dionysus, it is because this god, in whom the sacred fire and the mutability of form pulsate, embodies the mind of his craft like no other among the gods. And if, conversely, the god of wine is responsible for elevating the god of blacksmiths, this is further proof of their deep kinship. Intoxicated by wine, the metalworker ascends to heaven.51
However, a self-made god whose mysteries owe their existence solely to human artistry presents a problem, for the day inevitably comes when he is revealed as a creation of human hands. Xenophanes initiates this process by suggesting that the gods could only be the shapeless creations of humans. From that point onward, only what isn’t anthropomorphic can be considered god: »One God is greatest among gods and men, / neither in body nor in understanding equal to mortal men.«52 Here, where the twilight of the Olympian gods begins, reality, or rather the formlessness of Dionysus, comes into play: that a god can only be invisible.53 Whatever form this great nothingness may take, whether it leans toward the god of philosophers or follows the path of monotheism or Christian crucifixion, it is always great, absent eternities making themselves felt. In fact, without wanting to reduce this story to a mere technical aspect, it's possible to discern the birth of this idea in the Lost Form’s melting process: magmafication.
Translation: Hopkins Stanley & Martin Burckhardt
and here’s part II
In the Labyrinth of Signs - II
This is part two of the second chapter from Martin’s second book, titled »Vom Geist der Maschine. Eine Geschichte kultureller Umbrüche«, published in 1999. You can find part one here:
A brief methodological remark: In the following chapter, as well as in the previous one, when I repeatedly jump from one register to another, making it unclear whether I’m offering an interpretation inherent to the Myth or a historical one, this is simply due to the subject matter’s nature. There is no doubt that myths refer to social institutions and, at times, to historical events, but all these historical references can only be understood through the medium of Myth.
»For truly the number, a thing most ingenious, / I invented for them, and the order of writing, / A monument to all things, the mother of the Muses.« Aeschylus: Der gefesselte Prometheus, trans. Walter Kraus, Stuttgart 1965, v. 464-466.
See Herodotus – Historien, trans. Eberhard Richsteig, München 1961, Book 5, Chapter 58.
See Burckhardt, M. – The Universal Machine, Ex nihilo, August 28, 2023 (Emergence of the Psychotope) for the English translation of my initial thinking on the Symbolic Machine in Die Universale Maschine, Merkur, No 501 12/1990.
This precarious religious background, the fading and shadowy form of an original animal power religion, appears in Homer when he says that the bull sacrifice owed to the gods isn’t aimed at the subjugated creature, but at the bull that’s never borne the yoke of man—its horns alone are worthy of being gilded. More generally speaking, the bull sacrifice, as such, is no longer considered sufficient; it requires a double detachment from the ordinary to be accepted as a sacrifice: aesthetic and abstract gelding on the one hand, and the wildness of nature on the other.
The connection between the plow, literacy, and the flourishing Polis may seem far-fetched. However, the clash of cultures has provided an opportunity to study this connection without necessarily going back to the dawn of writing, which historians disparagingly refer to as material culture. When European settlers populated the American West, they encountered cultures unfamiliar with using the wheel, the plow, the loom, and writing. The American Cherokee, however, eagerly absorbed what the settlers had to offer, providing a kind of fast-forward view of the transition from tribal culture to forms of organization based on codified law. Sequoya, the son of a British trader who grew up with his Native American mother and never learned to speak English, understood that the white man's alphabet was the source of his cultural superiority. Therefore, he set about the lengthy task of developing an alphabet for Native American languages. He first experimented with pictograms and a syllabary before creating his own alphabet. Within a short time, half of the tribe became literate, and the Cherokee adopted a written constitution, collected their own traditions, translated Christian writings, and published their own newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix. Between 1837 and 1839, they were driven from their land along the Great Trail of Tears and settled in reservations. The philosopher Sequoya's writing survived the tribe's destruction for some time. See Foremen, G. – The Five Civilized Tribes, University of Oklahoma Press, 1934.
This means: in the Sign realm, there's a form of acrocracy. See Kallir, A. – Sign and Design: The Psychogenetic Source of the Alphabet, London, 1961.
This abduction of women is just one link in a chain. Io is abducted on the shores of Argos and taken to Egypt. The same fate befalls Medea in Colchis. Herodotus begins his Histories with this series of abductions. It’s here, he says, that tensions between Europe and Asia began.
Herodotus, who approaches these questions with clear and simple rationality and distrusts any mythological connotations, writes: »No one knows where Europe got its name or who gave it, unless we want to say that the country was named after the Tyrian woman Europa. Before that, it was naturally nameless, like the others. But this Europa apparently came from Asia and did not come to this country, which is now called Europe by the Greeks, but only from Phoenicia to Crete and from Crete to Libya.« (See Herodotus – Historien, translated by Eberhard Richsteig, München 1961, Book 4, Chapter 45) Crete is considered part of Asia, as can be read in Plato, where Minos is presented as a native of Asia. Plato: Gorgias, edited by Kurt Hildebrandt based on the translation by Friedrich Schleiermacher. Stuttgart 1989, p. 118.
Agenor is considered the twin of the Asia Minor fertility god Baal or identical to him; later, he is even identified with Zeus himself (as the god Belos). However, in a constant battle with his great rival Mot, the god of sterility, he's primarily a fertility deity who may also be doomed to death. Essentially, the genealogical classification doesn't hold much significance; it merely marks the migratory movement that is coming to an end in Europe: namely, the fertility deity’s demise in monotheism.
See Kerényi, K. The Gods of the Greeks (vol.2 of The Mythology of the Greeks), trans. H.J. Rose, London, 1959, p. 18.
This idea corresponds with Remy Brague's finding that Europe has a »secondary identity.« However, Brague stops at the finding of cultural heterogeneity and the resulting willingness to learn and accept, essentially painting the image of a voracious melting pot. This perspective, however, fails to explain that the not-yet-unrealized, utopian explosive force goes hand in hand with a movement towards homogenization, which is by no means limited to borrowed elements. In fact, European uniqueness can be defined more precisely if it's not tied to geography, but to the symbolic apparatuses and the longings they generate. Seen in this light, Europe is a portable, imaginary landscape—as expressed in Novalis's essay Christianity or Europe, a grandiose cultural history in miniature that’s still worth reading. In this sense, the Alphabet itself serves as a model of what is vaguely referred to as European Identity. It’s a closed cycle of signs and, at the same time—and precisely because of this—capable of neologism and predestined to incorporate all languages. In this sense, the thesis of Harold Innis, who wrote about an Imperial Communication Machine in the 1950s (though he didn’t explicitly address the European problem), would be much more appropriate. Curiously, what is considered genuinely European always coincides with the most advanced writing technology. See Brague, R. – Europa: Eine exzentrische Identität, Frankfurt/M, 1993.
See Kerényi, K. – The Heroes of the Greeks (vol.2 of The Mythology of the Greeks), trans. H.J. Rose, London, 1959, p. 29.
Harold Innis: Empire and Communication. Toronto, 1950, p. 66.
One of the most astonishing theories on the genesis of the Alphabet comes from Alfred Kallir, a private scholar who wrote a book entitled Sign and Design: The Psychogenetic Sources of the Alphabet in the 1960s. Here is the fact that the Aleph Sign means the bull in the yoke, thus serving as a fertility sign, signifying the starting point for a major investigation into the psychological connotations of the individual letters, which are derived from their original pictographic meanings (or rather, from their meanings, since each letter describes a whole field of meaning). What particularly impressed me, apart from the idea of the fertility sign, was the notion that signs from the pre-alphabetic era don’t have to be read as equivalent; instead, we’re dealing with a Sign hierarchy that reflects the hierarchy of social meanings (Alpha, the phallic Sign; Beta, the sign of femininity; and the like). Kallir describes this concept as acrocracy, meaning the rule of the higher. Although the Alphabet – insofar as it presents the Signs as structurally equivalent – puts an end to this order, residual forms of this acrocratic principle can still be found within it. This is reflected in the order of the letters, which were also used as numerals in Greek, reflecting their assigned importance (with Alpha, the number one, representing the highest). Overall, Kallir's theory, even if it follows a Jungian archetype theory that I don’t share, provides a platform to which these present thoughts owe a great deal. See Kallir, A. – Sign and Design: The Psychogenetic Source of the Alphabet, London, 1961.
This scenario reappears in Aeschylus' tragedy, which deals with the Dioscuri's battle for Thebes. »Messenger: In a shield with iron edges, they slaughtered / seven fierce leaders of men, a bull / and dipped their hands in the animal's blood / And swore an oath to Ares, Enyo, and Phobos / Who lusted for slaughter, either to destroy / The city of Cadmus and plunder it, or to mix / This land with their own blood in death.« SeeAeschylus – Sieben gegen Theben, trans. Emil Staiger, Stuttgart, 1970, v. 43-48.
Ovid – Metamorphosen, trans. Hermann Breitenbach, Stuttgart 1971, 3, 97.
Another story connecting Crete tells how Apollo, searching out priests for his Oracle at Delphi, chose a ship sailing from Crete to Greece. In the form of a dolphin, the god straps himself to the ship and steers it to Delphi. There, the Cretans are ordained as priests. The tale of the wise Teiresias is also interesting; he is a gender changer and is consulted by the gods to determine the relationship between female and male lust (10:1). It is said that to transform into a woman, Tiresias killed a female snake, and to become a man again, he killed a male snake. See Apollodorus of Athens: Bibliothecae libri tres et fragmenta, ed. Christian Gottlob Heyne, Hildesheim/New York 1974, Book 1, 365.
See Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, U. – Zeus, in Kronos und die Titanen/Zeus, Darmstadt 1964, p. 36; Nilsson, M.P. – The Mycenaean Origin of Greek Mythology, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London 1972.
This is precisely the theme Aeschylus addresses in his tragedy Prometheus Bound, in which Zeus appears not as the absolute ruler of the gods, but as a usurper: »CHORUS: (...) For at the helm of Olympus now / New rulers sit; and old laws yield to laws/ Newfangled, and the will of Zeus/ How is the might of the mighty fallen!« Aeschylus – Prometheus Bound, vv. 149-152)
See Eliade, M. – History of Religious Ideas: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries: vol. 1, trans. W.R. Trask, Chicago, 1978, p. 53.
See Kerényi, K. – The Gods of the Greeks (vol.1 of The Mythology of the Greeks), Trans. N. Cameron, London, 1951, p. 85.
The etymology is revealing: retort comes from the Latin retorquere, which means to tie back, throw back, bind to the back, or lift up. Precisely the fate that’s been reserved for Mother Earth.
The word type itself is illuminating in this context, as it originally meant the combination of typos and antitypos, hammer and anvil. When someone takes a blow in this or that direction, the phantasm of typification already takes effect. Seen in this light, it is no marginal detail when one sets out to measure infinity with this meter: ›nine days, it is said, does an anvil need to fall from the heavenly sphere to the earth, and nine more days to sink into Tartarus finally.‹ See Hesiod – Werke und Tage, in Lactacz, J. – Die griechische Literatur in Text und Darstellung, Archaistche Periode, Stutttgart 1991, v. 148 f.
See Plato – Minos. In Sämtliche Werke, ed. Walter F. Otto, newly ed. Ursula Wolf, Reinbek near Hamburg, 1994, vol. 4, v. 320c.
In his Minos, it’s interesting how Plato describes the transition from the peasant order to monarchy. Just as the farmer, by adhering to the laws of the land, brings forth fruit, the legislator can also work fruitfully by following the laws of the human soul. See Plato – Minos. In Sämtliche Werke, ed. Walter F. Otto, newly ed. Ursula Wolf, Reinbek near Hamburg, 1994, vol. 4, v, 317d f.
See Apollodorus of Athens: Bibliothecae libri tres et fragmenta, ed. Christian Gottlob Heyne, Hildesheim/New York 1974, Book 1, 9, 26.
Apollodorus of Athens speaks of Ichor, the blood juice. Ibid.
There are widely conflicting interpretations of Talos' origins. Some say he was a gift from Hephaestos, the god of blacksmiths, while others claim that Hephaestus himself was a descendant of Talos. If these interpretations, which are necessarily plural due to oral tradition, have a core meaning, then it's that Talos is a god-like, titanic entity: the epitome of bronze technology itself.
It isn’t unusual for a culture to equate metal with the sun; even in the 15th century, when Cortés asked the Aztecs about the origin of their metal weapons, they pointed to the sky to mean: that is the fire of heaven.
What in Greek was synonymous with human sacrifice found its embodiment in the Sicilian tyrant Phalaris, who put it into practice. Tradition has it that Phalaris owned a Bronze Bull in which he had people killed by roasting them within it—starting with the sculptor himself.
To appreciate the significant impact this process may have had on culture, one must remember that metallurgical techniques were still unknown to the peoples of the South Seas in Captain Cook's time in the 18th century. In Melanesia, iron nails were so coveted that British sailors could obtain a woman’s favor in exchange for one, prompting Cook to impose severe sanctions on his crew, as the sailors didn’t hesitate to remove them from their own ship. However, the Melanesian perspective on these nails appears more consequential than mere barter trade, highlighting the cultural divide and potential gap associated with the Bronze Age, as they didn't use the nails as utensils—but as cult objects and sacred items. (I owe this information to ethnologist Karl Heinz Kohl, who lectured on using European artifacts at Literature WERKstatt Berlin on May 16, 1998.)
See Kerényi, K. – The Gods of the Greeks (vol.1 of The Mythology of the Greeks), trans. N. Cameron, London, 1951, p. 84 – Rhea gives the father Kronos a stone in its place to protect the child. See Apollodorus of Athens: Bibliothecae libri tres et fragmenta, ed. Christian Gottlob Heyne, Hildesheim/New York 1974, Book 1, Chapter 9. Hesiod: Theogony, in Complete Poems, translated and annotated by Walter Marg, Zurich/Stuttgart 1970, v. 485 ff.
See Eliade, M. – History of Religious Ideas: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries: vol. 1, trans. W.R. Trask, Chicago, 1978, pp. 131-132.
Pseudo-Apollodorus mentions the nymphs Ida and Adrastia, daughters of Melissus or Melissa, which in turn means bee. See Apollodorus of Athens: Bibliothecae libri tres et fragmenta, ed. Christian Gottlob Heyne, Hildesheim/New York 1974, Book 1, Chap. I.16.
A comment on symbolization would be appropriate here. When we speak today of the overdetermination of symbols, we're referring to a symbol's ability to combine several different registers of meaning.
The HOMO-GEN: Created by humans, but it's also Humans who make themselves. At this level, the term corresponds to what Philosophy calls immanence – yet the term goes beyond this by emphasizing the reference back to the subject's constitution. Finally, it should be noted that this self-generation isn't subject to arbitrarily chosen ways of life but always stands within the Sign's Order of Production and Reproduction, whose signature is essentially a logic of homogenization.
Remember the biblical story of the golden calf, which has a real historical background in a religious crisis that stretched from the Exodus to the reign of King Jeroboam I in the 10th century BC.
Ovid – Metamorphosen, trans. Hermann Breitenbach, Stuttgart 1971, Book 7, 102 ff.
If the symbolon denotes that which has been thrown together, endowed with the synthetic power associated with Harmonia’s name, then its dialectical counterpart lies in the diabolon, which represents discord and division. Indeed, the prize that Jason wins through his heroic deeds, namely Medea, will tell the other part of the story, as she’s by no means alone in this. The house of the great cultural founder, Cadmus, is also plagued by disasters, the furies of dissociation. Dismembered, severed limbs are everywhere. It’s Cadmus' daughters who are haunted by the diabolon’s power: In Bacchic frenzy, Agave tears her son apart with her bare hands, Autonoë gathers the bones of her offspring, who has been torn to pieces by dogs, and finally Ino throws her son Melicertes (the honey cutter) into a boiling cauldron and casts herself into the depths of the sea with him. See Apollodorus of Athens: Bibliothecae libri tres et fragmenta, ed. Christian Gottlob Heyne, Hildesheim/New York 1974, Book 1, chapt. 9.2. In this version, the reference to the process of lost form is abundantly clear.
The cleansing process, purification, becomes a pyrotechnical act. Wilamowitz-Moellendorf points out that Zeus's »original nature« is lightning and that Pindar, whenever he speaks of this Olympian Zeus, knows him only as such. See Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, U. – Zeus,in Kronos und die Titanen/Zeus, [Chronos and the Titans, Zeus] Darmstadt 1964, p. 28. In this sense, the transfer of Zeus to heaven could be seen as a reflection of the movement toward abstraction that accompanies the process of lost form.
The simulacrum cerea – a wax doll for magic. Similarly, cera (wax) is used as a metonymic term for the image of an ancestor.
See Ovid – Metamorphosen, Book III, v. 272 f.
An analogue of the Dionysus myth is the story of Metis and the birth of Athena, who, like Dionysus, can also be understood as twice-born. Metis, the wise counsel, becomes pregnant with Athena but is swallowed by Zeus because he fears she could give birth to a being stronger than his lightning bolt. Thus, he gives birth to Athena from his head without the help of his wife. Depending on the version of the story, Hephaestus or Prometheus is called upon to perform a somewhat brutal form of midwifery, splitting Zeus's skull with an axe to allow Athena to leap out into the light of day.
See Burckhardt, M. The Shadow of Things: How to navigate in a post-material World, Ex nihilo, 12/26/2024, for the English translation of my 1996 Im Schatten der Dinge.
See Euripides – Die Bakchen, trans. Oskar Werner, Stuttgart, 1968, v. 25.
»DIONYSUS: In it, I outwitted him, / so that he seemed to bind me, / But did not touch me, only indulging in false hope. At the stable, where he'd locked me up, he found a bull. He threw ropes around its knees and hooves, letting sweat pour down his body as he raged. He bit his lips with his teeth while I sat quietly, watching him. / At that very moment / Bacchus threw the house into ruins, / Set fire to his mother's grave. As soon as he saw it, he realized / That his house was in flames, / Ran here and there, calling „Bring water from the river!“ Every servant / Was at work; but it was all in vain! In the midst of it all, he abandons his distress because he believes I have fled, and rushing into the house, he grabs his sword of doom. Then Bromius—it was he, I think—created an illusion in the courtyard; and he rushed toward it, stabbing and piercing only the clear air, believing he was killing me.« See Euripides – Die Bakchen, trans. Oskar Werner, Stuttgart, 1968, v. 25.
Considering that the word typos contains the word hammer (which in turn is replaced by casting technology), the limits of these neologisms become apparent. When something is conceived according to the genotype, it is overlooked that the genetic code model may also have something hidden. The molecular biologist Erwin Chargaff, whose Essays on Nucleic Acids (1963) paved the way for the discovery of DNA, dismissed the scientific positivism of his students Watson and Crick as nothing more than gene hacking.
In Crete and archaic Greece, fire festivals were celebrated during which wild animals were driven into the fire. It remains unclear which deity these festivals served. See Werner Burkert – Griechische Religion der archaischen und klassischen Epoche [Greek Religion in the Archaic and Classical Periods], Cologne/Mainz 1977, p. 60.
Nietzsche, F. – Die Geburt der Tragödie. Der griechische Staat [The Birth of Tragedy. The Greek State], with an afterword by Alfred Baeumler, Stuttgart 81976, p. 98.
Pausanias – Description of Greece, trans. J.G. Frazer, London, 1898, Book I. Attica, Chap. 3, p. 28.
Xenophanes: Fragment 34, in: Die Vorsokratiker, edited and trans. Jaap Mansfeld. Stuttgart 1986. 2 vols. Vol. I, p. 225.
It’s no coincidence that Dionysus, as the suffering Dionysus, has been repeatedly associated with Christ. Of course, their shared story of passion only reveals a deeper problem: namely, that neither of them is of this world. While the illusory nature of Dionysus is evident, it was predominantly the Gnostics who emphasized the Son of Man's otherworldliness, striving to prove that his earthly body was a mere apparition while clothing him in a body of light that couldn’t be corrupted by flesh. If a theological term were needed to describe the overlap between the destinies of these two gods, it would be docetism.
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