Oh! If the
doors of your sanctuary should
crumble by
themselves
O Ceres, you
who reigned in Eleusis!
Drunk with
enthusiasm, I would
shiver with
your nearness,
I would
understand your revelations,
I would
interpret the lofty meaning of the
images, I
would hear
the hymns at
the gods’ banquets,
the lofty
maxims of their counsel.
Even your
hallways have ceased to echo,
Goddess!
The circle
of the gods has fled back to Olympus
from the
consecrated altars;
fled from
the tomb of profaned humanity,
the innocent
genius who enchanted them here! —
The wisdom
of your priests is silent, not one
note of the
sacred
initiations
preserved for us—and in vain strive
the
scholars, their curiosity greater than their love
of wisdom
(the seekers possess this love and
they disdain
you)—to master it they dig for words,
in which
your lofty meaning might be engraved!
In vain!
Only dust and ashes do they seize,
where your
life returns no more for them.
And yet,
even rotting and lifeless they
congratulate
themselves,
the
eternally dead!—easily satisfied—in vain
—no sign remains
of your celebration,
no trace of an image.
For the son
of the initiation the lofty
doctrine was
too full,
the
profundity of the ineffable sentiment was too sacred,
for him to
value the desiccated signs.
Now thought
does not raise up the spirit,
sunken
beyond time and space to purify infinity,
it forgets
itself, and now once again its consciousness
is aroused.
He who should want
to speak about
it with others,
would have
to speak the language of angels,
would have
to experience the poverty of words.
He is
horrified of having thought so little of
the sacred, of having made
so little of it,
that speech seems
to him a sin, and though
still alive, he closes his mouth.
That
which the initiate prohibits himself,
A sage law also prohibits the poorest souls:
to make known what he had seen, heard,
felt
during the sacred night:
so
that even the best part of his prayers
was
not disturbed by the clamor of their disorder,
and
the empty chattering did not dispose
him
toward the sacred,
and
this was not dragged in the mud, but
was
entrusted to memory—so that it did
not
become a plaything or the ware of some sophist,
who
would have sold it like an obolus,
or
the mantle of an eloquent hypocrite or
even
the rod of a joyful youth, or become so
empty
at the end, that only in the echo
of
foreign tongues would it find its roots.
Your
sons, Oh Goddess, miserly with your
honor,
did not carry it through the streets and markets,
but
they cultivated it in the breast’s inner chambers.
And
so you did not live on their lips.
Their
life honored you. And you live still in their acts.
Even
tonight, sacred divinity, I heard you.
Often
the life of your children reveals you,
and
I introduce you as the soul of their acts!
You
are the lofty meaning, the true faith,
which,
divine when all else crumbles, does
not
falter.
Georg
Hegel, Eleusis,
in
Giorgio Agamben, Language
and
Death: The Place of Negativity, translated by
Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 6-9.
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