"Then time turns all to euphemism..."

In the beginning of 'The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony', Roberto Calasso takes us on an osculating carousel of stories and figures as he tries to nose his way back to the decisive moment when "it all begins." What he uncovers, however, is that every event and character he tries to cling to in the fast-swirling landscape of classical myth is never isolated, never a solitary point on a map, but instead all woven with threads, and mirrored with doppelgangers stalking the pages forward and back; echoes through the cathedral of the universe.

"Mythical figures live many lives, die many deaths, and in this they differ from the characters we find in novels, who can never go beyond the single gesture. But in each of these lives and deaths all the others are present, and we can hear the echo."
pg 22

Even if Calasso himself manages to sort through the shifting mirrors that line the halls of these myths to reach, by the end, an ultimate beginning, casual readers fresh-emerged from the storm of his first few chapters must surely doubt the chances of ever discovering any beginning at all.

But what if therein lay the answer?

"Stories never live alone," writes Calasso (pg 10). In every retelling, in every so-called 'original myth', in every carefully woven 'origin story', there lurks the echoes of all the stories, the only stories. These are the stories we have always lived, and the stories each of us today continues to tell through every action and word and gesture we make.
Perhaps the gods of old were not the first. Perhaps they are merely the first we bothered to remember. Of Zeus, of Dionysus, of Theseus, and Ariadne, of every character of myth, we could say they are merely ancient facets of the exquisite human gemstone that continues to flicker to this day.

Would it be unreasonable to assume each of us, walking today, is embodying the life and death of these figures yet? It is a simple thought, but one with curiously deep implications. It means no matter how hard we try, we are merely echoes—just as the gods were merely echoes—of the eternal human story. The stories were not new, were certainly not beginning with things as young as gods. The stories were there before them all, because the stories have always been there, and always will.
Proof of this is no further away than a glance out the nearest window.
Look around.
The blood of gods, the blood of the monsters, the blood of, more than anything, their stories, streams through us yet, and always has, and always will.

"Out of the sacrifice, together with the blood, stream the stories."
pg 21.

Stories are not things with beginnings and ends. To seek such things simply leaves one groping, as poor (though admirable) Calasso does in his first chapter, forward and back and upside -down. The origins are not there.

But where does it all begin?
Right here. With this breath.

And where does it all end?
Here as well. Breathe it out. Behind each of us winds paths paved with the husks of stories we, through living, have sucked bone-dry. And before us, new tales and tasks and beasts to fight rise up to meet our feet, springing eternally—never new, never old—from the very fabric of our world, and, indeed, from the chests of we ourselves.

"As if for them," writes Calasso (for us? one might ask), "The process of killing and being killed was as simple as undressing and getting dressed again."