MElAMPOUS AND EPIMENIDES: TWO GREEK PARADIGMS OF THE TREATMENT OF MISTAKE

PHILIPPE BORGEAUD

One might think of rituals in general as being treatments of an orig• inal mistake. From this viewpoint the Promethean crisis, as developed by Hesiod both in his Theogony and in his Works and Days, and as it is prolonged by the Greek tradition transmitted in the Library of the Pseudo-Apollodorus, is particularly eloquent. Starting with a trick concerning the distribution of meat between mortals and immortals, in a world still deprived of an essential distinction between gods and human beings, a world still ignorant of transcendence, the story recounts stroke and counterstroke (stealing of fire, invention of woman• hood, necessity of work, and setting, so to say, of the human condi• tion), unto what could have been the end of the story: the flood, the cataclysm by which Zeus decides, apparently, to reduce humanity to the status of animality, if not to destroy it altogether. The result, thanks to a last trick of Prometheus, is nothing else than the establish• ment of religion (Pseudo-Apollodorus, Library I, 7,2, translated by Sir James Frazer): "Deucalion (the Greek Noah, son of Prometheus) by the advice of Prometheus constructed a chest, and having stored it with provisions he embarked in it with Pyrrha (his wife, daughter of Pandora). But Zeus by pouring heavy rain from heaven flooded the greater part of Greece, so that all men were destroyed, except a few who fled to the high mountains in the neighbourhood. It was then that the mountains in Thessaly parted, and that all the world outside the Isthmus and Peloponnese was overwhelmed. But Deucalion, floating in the chest over the sea for nine days and as many nights, drifted to Parnassus, and there, when the rain ceased, he landed and sacrificed to Zeus, the god of Escape (ekbas thUei Dii phuxioi)." Starting from this first ritual action (a sacrifice, a thusia), everything becomes possible again: Zeus sends Hermes to Deucalion and allows him to choose what he wants, and he chooses to get men. At the bidding of Zeus he picked up stones and threw them over his head, and the stones Deucalion threw became men, and the stones which Pyrrha threw became women. Hence people were metaphorically called people (laoi) from 288 PHILIPPE BORGEAUD

Iiios, "a stone." The conclusion of this story, a new beginning of human• hood, means the establishment of a renewed relation, a new deal, between the gods and the humans. A relative transcendence has hence• forth been established, between entities (gods and human beings) issued from the same origin (the Earth). Now that they are no longer homotrapezoi, "table-companions" of men, the gods have to be addressed through the mediation of a ritual: the first sacrifice repeats the initial meal uniting men and gods, at the same table, on the same spot, on earth, at Mekone. Indeed, the distribution of the sacrificial meal be• tween the human and the divine will also precisely duplicate the tricky distribution inaugurated by Prometheus, at the beginning of our story. But the bones covered with fat will no longer be refused or rejected: they will henceforth burn on the altar (the bomos) for the gods above, who will receive the ascending smoke, while the eatable parts (splanchna and hiera, internal organs and meat) will become the object of a precise and complicated, but strictly human cooking and distribution, on earth. So, as it has been recognized by Jean Rudhardt, and by Jean-Pierre Vernant, the sacrifice (the thusia) accomplished for the first time by Deucalion, at the conclusion of the flood, reveals itself as being as much a correction of the initial failure as a comme• moration of it. 1 The Greek story, setting such a configuration, uniting in the same act the memorization of the initial trauma and the heal• ing of it, may be interpreted as anticipating what Freud will tell in Totem and Taboo. The totemic sacrifice, established at the issue of the crisis which led to the murder of the father, should at the same time be a commemoration and a reparation of the culpability. A curious mixture of guilt and adoration. But is there any guilt discernable, and where would the guilt be in our Greek story? This is the ques• tion that I would like to raise here, without pretending to answer it. It is an important question because the Promethean story could be looked at as being not only a paradigm for Freudian mythology, but already for a series of cultual (ritual) greek aitiologies: let us think of what happens during the arkteia (the "bear-festival") at Brauron and Munychia for example. A similar, comparable outline (the can• vas) is repeatedly found in such origin-stories: what could be called

I Jean Rudhardt, "Les mythes grecs relatifs a l'instauration du sacrifice. Les roles correlatifs de Promethee et de son fils Deucalion," Museum Helveticum 27 (1970): 1-15; cf. J.-P. Vernant, "A la table des hommes. Mythe de fondation du sacrifice chez Hesiode," in: La cuisine du sacrifice en Pl9's grec, eds. M. Detienne etJ.-P. Vernant (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 37-132.