There's an obscure myth that casts light on the Genesis story. It's the myth of Glaucus and Polyidus. Glaucus was the son of King Minos and Queen Pasiphaë [of Crete]. When he was a young child he was playing in the pantry of the palace, one day, and he fell into a jar - a huge vat of honey. (You may or may not know that across the Middle East, the dead were buried in these kinds of jars and sometimes Kings were buried in honey.) Glaucus - this little kid - he fell into this honey pot and drowned, and no one could find him. No one knew where he was. No one thought to look in this particular honey pot in the pantry, and the King and the queen were frantic.
They went to their diviners: "Help us find our son." The diviners replied: "Well, we can't find your son, but we know who can, and it will be the man who can compose the most apt simile regarding a three-colored cow in your herd." Now, what this means is not clear. Obviously the story may be garbled at this point, but "a man of language" is was what they were saying. A man who can compose this simile. So the king called everybody together, and asked people to compose a simile on the three-colored cow. Lo and behold, Polyidus, which means "man of many ideas", produced a brilliant simile on the three colored cow. The king said, "This is great, you will be the person who can find my son."
So Polyidus went into trance and saw young Glaucus pickled in the honey pot in the basement. He said to the king and queen, "I've located your son, you're not going to like this, he's dead." They went and they got him, and he was dead. The King said "Well, you seem to be the smartest guy around Polyidus. You found the boy, I want you to bring him back to life." Polyidus said "No way that's not my -- I'm not that kind of a magician." The king waxed wroth, as kings do, and imprisoned him with the body. The king said "You're not coming out until my son lives". Polyidus was completely freaked out by this situation, didn't have a clue on what to do, and was just basically wailing and tearing his hair in this cell.Then, he noticed a snake come in a little hole in the wall. He thought that the snake was going to do something to the corpse of the boy, and that he would get into even worse trouble, so he took a stone and threw it at the snake and killed it. The snake was lying there dead on the floor, and then he went back to freaking out about his predicament.
A while passed, and another snake came. The snake came and it took one look at the first snake. Before Polyidus could make a move it backed out, and the snake was gone. Time passed, and the second snake came again. This time, it had some leaves in its mouth. It went over to the dead snake and did something, and the snake lived! Polyidus rushed forward and seized a little fragment of the plant, and saw what it was. He rang his jailers, and asked for quantities of this plant to be brought. With it he revived Glaucus and brought him back to life.
Everybody was delighted, and Polyidus thought that now he would be allowed to go back to Syracuse, his home. The King said "No, you're too valuable a man to me, I can't let you go. I'll only let you go once you teach my son everything you know."
So he did. Polyidus settled down, and he took on young Glaucus as his student. He taught him everything he knew, and then years later Glaucus is a young man. The King has given Polyidus permission to return to his homeland. They all walked down to the boat together. At the very last moment Polyidus says to the young man, "Glaucus, your old teacher has just one request of you. I want you to spit in my mouth."
So he does. He spits in his mouth. At that moment, all of the magical teaching and understanding returns to Polyidus. He walks up the plank and sails away.
Now, this is an interesting myth for several reasons. The connection to Eden, you see - the snake knew the secret of immortality in both stories. The snake had information about the tree of life and the snake had information about the plant of immortality.
What's also interesting about this story is Glaucus means "blue-gray", and blue-gray is the color that psilocybin-containing mushrooms turn when bruised. Preserving mushrooms in honey was a well-known maneuver in those areas. What this may be is a death-and-resurrection myth connected with the mushroom as both the thing raised from the dead and the thing then which is somehow caught up in this Hieros gamos of transformation.
I'm not sure that formal storytelling is exactly my metier but having a group of people together like this is an opportunity to tell a story which puzzles me. I think all good stories should be puzzling, and all myths that are authentic and haven't been rewritten for daytime television maintain a kind of dreamlike surreal quality. So I'd like to tell you a story [...] in the hope that you can perhaps help me to understand it. Like all good stories, it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense, but I felt that there must be something important in it because it was very easy to memorize. That clued me to the fact that there must be something in it.
This story comes from that ultimately pivotal moment in Western civilization when the last outpost of the goddess culture which was Crete - Minoan Crete - fell. It was in the process of falling to the pirate paternalist of Mycenae who, with advances in shipbuilding and an economic base built on grain, were beginning to conquer the eastern Mediterranean. One by one, the last bastions of the goddess religion were falling. There were also great earthquakes in the eastern Mediterranean at this time, which also contributed to the disruption of this civilization.
The story that I want to tell is a story that occurs from the very oldest stratum of Greek mythology. This is not about the Pantheon of classical or even Doric Greece. This is an older story, Mycenaean, perhaps older than that - going back even to the pastoralists coming out of Africa and into the Fertile Crescent. It's a story set in the setting which is probably familiar to most of you, although this story is only told in [...] Aeneas and alluded to in Herodotus so it is not some story that even classicists are too familiar with. Robert Graves in his four-volume study of Greek mythology gives it only passing reference.
You may recall that King Minos was the king of Crete, and was most famous for having built a labyrinth in which to house the Minotaur. [...] King Minos built the labyrinth - had need of it - because his wife, queen Pasiphaë, was an extremely sensuous and experimentally-minded young woman. She became so interested in the sexual habits of cattle, that she had Daedalus, the craftsman who was later to break out of this scene later on the first flying machine, fashion for her an artificial cow in which she hid. She hid in order to have sexual union with the bulls in the royal flock, and out of this hanky-panky came the Minotaur. Her husband, trying to cover up the series of faux pauxs built the labyrinth, and installed the Minotaur. They grew older, did less swinging, and began to settle down.
[...] A few years later, the king and the queen apparently, under quite normal conditions, conceived a child who was in due time born. This child's name was Glaucus. Glaucus means "blue-gray", and is to this day a term preserved in taxonomy to describe the blue-gray color typical of the peyote cactus and of the bruising reaction of psilocybin mushrooms.
Young Glaucus had the run of the royal palace at Knossos, and in his sixth year he was exploring the pantries of the palace. He discovered a huge urn filled with honey. He took the lid off the honey urn and was reaching into it, and fell into the honey and was drowned, and died there. No one knew what had become of the son of the king and the queen, and there was tumult as you can imagine in the court.
Eventually queen Pasiphaë, in a state of complete hysterical distraction, went to the great seer who advised the king's general and the king's weather makers. She said, "You must find our son." The seer looked into the surface of oils poured on water and burned hyssop leaves. "My magic is not sufficient to find your son, but I can lead you to one who can find your son," he said. (This is the part of the myth which is so bizarre that you suspect that there must be textual corruption or some kind of misunderstanding, because it's so weird what follows.)
The seer said, "The person who can lead you to your son is that person who can compose the most apt simile on the tri-colored cow in your herds." (What the tri-colored cow is, what kind of code language we're dealing with, can only be a matter of conjecture. Obviously the story at this point is couched in a secret language which conveyed meaning only to the initiative.)
The king and queen commanded each citizen of the principality to appear before them and compose a simile on the tri-colored cow. There was a man there - a minor philosopher whose name was Polyidus. Polyidus - you only have to have spent two weeks studying Greek before you transferred out to something a little less horrifying - means "many ideas". So Polyidus, the man of many ideas, went before the court and he proposed a simile, which according to the account of [...] Gnaeus, was brilliant. He doesn't preserve it, and hence it's lost forever. Whatever this simile was, it carried the day.
Polyidus was actually a very humble man. A minor healer and magician, he was puzzled that out of all the people in the kingdom, he had been chosen - or he had by fate been singled out - as the one who could solve this extremely racking dilemma of the lost son for the king and queen. He said to the king, "I have no idea how to go about this, how to find your son."
Polyidus, once chosen, dreamed and saw the [dead] body in the honey. They were so flipped out that their kid was dead that the fact that he had found the body and enough didn't buy him much slack. The queen flew into a rage, and said "he should be sealed into a crypt with the body of our son, and he can come out when he comes out with our son alive." So Polyidus was seized by force. (Notice now the motifs of incarceration the dark night of the soul, the alchemical, and closing of the primal materia - means this is a rich rich myth.)
Polyidus was placed into a crypt that was walled up, and the body of Glaucus was laid beside him on a slab. As Polyidus sat there bewailing his fate, and rending his clothes, and calling out on the gods to help him, a snake entered the chamber through some unseen tiny chink. The snake approached the corpse of the child lying in a dripping pool of presumably dark attic honey on the polished stone of the sarcophagi.
Polyidus emerged out of his reverie and struck out at the snake and killed it because he was afraid it would violate the body of the child. Then, seeing that the snake was dead he went back to his reverie. A few minutes later, second snake appeared, and came to the body of the first snake, and reacted very violently. Before Polyidus could move to catch it - quick as a wink - it was across the room and lost through a small aperture in the floor.
Hours passed, and the depth of Polyidus's despair grew and multiplied as he realized the hopelessness of his situation. Suddenly, the second snake appeared again, and this time it was carrying in its mouth a branch of a small herb. It approached the corpse of its companion and regurgitated the branch into the mouth of the dead snake. The dead snake was revived, and the two snakes went away.
Struck dumb with amazement, Polyidus called to his jailers and he described this herb to them. The herb was well-known to him for its use in other medical matters. The herb was brought to him, and he chewed it up and he regurgitated it into the mouth of the corpse of young Glaucus. The child was revived, and Polyidus'a ass was saved.
So he emerged, and the king and the queen were jubilant, and the court was jubilant, and the king said "You can have anything that you wish." Polyidus, who was actually a foreigner in Crete, said "I want to journey to my homeland." The king was on the brink of granting the boon, when queen Pasiphaë intervened and whispered in his ear, "You cannot allow a magician of this power to leave the kingdom. We must somehow gain his knowledge before we allow him to depart from us."
So King Minos backtracked and made a different deal. Hes aid "You can return to your homeland, but first you must teach all your magical arts to my son Glaucus who you have resurrected." Polyidus, not liking it but seeing the power of the king, acceded to the demand. Over the course of many years, he taught all his shamanic and magical arts to Glaucus, and he schooled him in all of the esoteric knowledge that had made Polyidus the unique person able to recover the find the lost child.
Finally, he went to the king and said, "I have taught all I know to your son. Now, fulfill your promise and allow me to leave your kingdom." The king was agreed. On the appointed day of departure, a royal retinue accomplished accompanied Polyidus to the key where he was to grab the boat out to Syracuse. They were embracing and the last goodbyes were being said, and finally had only remained for Polyidus to make his departure to Glaucus.
Polyidus approached Glaucus and he said, "As as my pupil, as the one that I have initiated, I have one last request. It is that now at our farewell you spit into my mouth."
Glaucus thought it was a bizarre request, but he did as his master bade him. Polyidus boarded the ship and they cast off and sailed away. As the royal family was standing on the key looking out to sea, Glaucus realized that all the magical information that had been given to him over the years had been contained in the glob of spittle. The master had reclaimed his knowledge and sailed away.
So that's the story of Glaucus and Polyidus.
I found this story while searching for proto-Hellenic myths related to mushrooms, and the there's something funny going on in this story. The blue-gray child is preserved in the honey and then is resurrected through the intercession of another herb, an herb known to the snake. Recall from the Genesis myth that the snake is always the keeper of the vegetable secrets it was the snake who had the inner skinny on the flora and fauna of Eden.
So the snake comes bearing information that concerns this herb of immortality, and the ability to resurrect the dead. It shows, I think, the very late persistence of these Paleolithic themes of shamanic power carried and transmitted through plants.
For people in Mexico [...] who collect mushrooms the on-the-road old-style way of preserving the mushrooms was to put them in honey and it turns into a totally black mess. It turns into the alchemical primal materia. It turns in to the exudate of the grave. If you have the courage to eat it, it is then reborn inside of you.
Honey, [...] is a symbol of semen of sunlight of sweetness - I mean it's a very rich kind of symbol. There are even, it's reputed, hallucinogenic honeys in the Amazon. This is a whole unexplored area where nobody has ever been able to walk into a laboratory and slam down a quart jar of hallucinogenic honey but there are persistent reports filtering back from wild-eyed travelers.
The metaphor of honey, the manas from heaven.