In the Labyrinth of Signs - I

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.


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,) 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
phoinikoi, 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 Machine 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.


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. 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 name; 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, 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.


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. 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. 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 longing – 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 fieldShall kneel her down
upon the grassy groundThere make thou sacrifice to dark-leaved
EarthClean 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 comeThy consort be a
goddess, blessed Kadmos.«


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. 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.


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.
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!«


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. 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, 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.
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. 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. 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. 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.« 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«.
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. On one hand, it's
said that he had a human form, while on the other, he had the
form of a bull. 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 out – 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. 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. 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 fire 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.


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, 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. 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. 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:
symballically 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. 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. 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.«


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 uniformity, 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. 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. 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.«


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).


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 appearance. 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.


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. 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. 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
fire, 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,« 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.


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.« 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. 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


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