The symbolism of Orion, the hunter of the heavens

What happened in the rites of Eleusis is a mystery. So are all the unwritten parts of human history. Our pre-literate past is a history without a clear story: excavated stones and waste pits, fragments of myth and philological association. The early literate past is little clearer. The later Bronze Age of the Myceneans, the Minoans and Moses is a speculative assembly. Later, the surfaces of the Athens of Plato and Pericles are solid in marble and rational in thought, but the myths remain strange and violent memories, subject to an alien, evasive logic we cannot quite follow. ‘These Greeks,’ Hugo von Hofmannsthal mused as he climbed up to the Acropolis in 1908, ‘where are they?’

The Celestial Hunter is the latest instalment in Roberto Calasso’s exploration of what makes us modern, which is also the rediscovery of what made us ancient. This time, Calasso narrates the religious prehistory of ancient Greece, from shamanic origins to the ages of gods and heroes, and then to Athens’s uneasy incorporation of the Eleusisian mystery cult. The effect is akin to that experienced by Hofmannsthal when, entering the Acropolis museum, he encountered five korai, robed female statues, standing in a semi-circle: ‘An unnamed fear… a light much stronger than real light’, a sense of ‘something liquid’ in the stone, ‘as if the eyes of the statues had suddenly turned towards me, and in those faces was a wholly inscrutable smile’.

The meaning of that ‘Archaic smile’ remains obscure, and so do the reasons for its fall from artistic or theological taste in the fifth century BC. Behind the statues lies the hinterland of origins: the ‘traumatic and irreversible’ metamorphosis of our species from scavenger to predator through imitating animals such as the hyena; the emergence of hunting as the ‘central’ activity and the hunter as ‘first self-sufficient being’; the ritualisation of killing and being killed; and then the consolidation of shamanic religion and the metaphysics of hunting in the image of Orion the hunter.