Trickster Makes This World. Lewis Hyde
a sign of Hermes’ “youthful theft.” It has something to do with childhood and with cunning appropriation. Moreover, if this scene describes the invention of sacrifice, if sacrifice is ritual apportionment, and if Hermes’ invention is rightly read as a change in apportionment, a change in the rules—then the meat in the barn betokens all of that as well. It is a sign of a shift in the order of things, a new wrinkle in the code by which the portions are to be distributed.
Finally, let’s not forget that the immediate context of this sêma is the pivotal moment in which Hermes desires but does not eat the sacrificial meat. This seems crucial: there could be no meat from which to make a token if Hermes had eaten; therefore, the token must carry with it the meaning “meat-not-eaten” and with that the memory of appetite restrained, the belly denied in favor of something else. In this line it is useful to know that in Homeric Greek the word sêma belongs to a group of related words, a semantic cluster that includes the word for “mind” (nóos) and verbs that have to do with noticing, recognizing, interpreting, encoding, and decoding. Nóos and sêma go together; you don’t get the one without the other. You don’t get a sign without the mental faculty to encode and decode its meanings.
My suggestion, then, is that this “sêma of his youthful theft” marks the move from incarnate life (meat one actually eats) to symbolic or mental life (meat made to stand for something else). It marks that transition and stands for that transition. Furthermore, marking the move from belly-meat to mental-meat, it marks as well the awakening of the nóos, the mind that creates and reflects upon signs. This nóos is no flounder-brain with its hard-wired reflexes, but the mind of a mammal without a “way”—one that can step back from the objects of its desire and imagine them. The scene is a little nóos creation story in which Hermes, getting wise to the bait, imagines but does not eat the mortal portion.
This trickster tale also tells us several things about how that encording (imagining, signifying) mind comes into being. First, it implies that nóos awakes with restraint of appetite. We do not get a sêma until we have the “not” of meat-not-eaten. It should be pointed out that this restraining “not” comes from Hermes himself, rather than any external authority. This is not the psychoanalytic narrative in which a child’s acquisition of language coincides with his or her growing sense of parental constraint. Here we get the link between mastery of symbols and a prohibitory “no,” but when Hermes’ heart says that “no” to his salivating mouth, the constraint is self-made and the mood is one of bright-eyed duplicity rather than loss and guilt.
Such bright-eyed duplicity, in fact, is the second thing the Hymn marks about the encoding mind. After all, stolen from Apollo and then used in a sort of Hermetic shell game to change the character of ritual sacrifice, this meat-not-eaten appears as the consequence of a series of cunning subterfuges. In this story, only a thief could have effected the shifts in question; it is by virtue of that thief’s duplicity that the meat takes its double or, rather, multiple meanings. In A Theory of Semiotics, Umberto Eco has this to say about what makes something a “sign”:
Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign. A sign is everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else … Thus semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie . If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it annot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used “to tell” at all.
The baited hook, that “first trick” we looked at early on, might make a good example of a sign in this sense. A worm with no hook in it, a worm the fish can eat in safety, has, by Eco’s way of thinking, no significance, but the worm that says “I’m harmless” when in fact it hides a hook tells a lie and by that lie worms begin to signify (and fish, if they are smart, will begin to read before they eat). Only when there’s a possible Lying Worm can we begin to speak of a True Worm, and only then does Worm become a sign.
We shall return to questions of lying, but first I want to link Eco’s defin ition of a “sign” to the substitutions involved in thieving, and to the duplicity that produces the meat-not-eaten. To begin, I need to say a bit about what Apollo’s cattle mean and how they come to have that meaning. The classicist Jean-Pierre Vernant tells us that the cattle of the unmown meadow are somewhat unusual before Hermes steals them: they are neither wild nor domestic; they do not reproduce sexually (and thus have a fixed number); they are peaceful, beautiful, and immortal. Hermes, Vernant says, “takes these cows from the divine world … to the world of men, where they acquire domestic status” and where they become part of “the world as it is”; henceforth they live in stables, reproduce sexually, and are slaughtered to be eaten by humankind.
Eco is arguing, it seems to me, that what Vernant has as the cattle’s initial meaning—their immortality, and so on—exists only retroactively. If meaning cannot exist without the possibility of substitution, then so long as the cattle cannot be moved from their unmown meadow they cannot mean anything. Conversely, the moment at which they may be butchered and eaten is the moment at which their earlier state acquires its significance. Their meat means one thing on the hoof, another in the fire, and yet another hung in the barn. Hermes-the-Thief moves the meat from one situation to another and by such substitutions it comes to have its significance; it becomes a sign that can “tell” something. Especially in a case like this, where there is a rule against moving the cattle, there can be no signification without trickster’s duplicity, and the mind of a thief is the mind most fully able to encode and decode.
That given, let me come back to the idea that nóos is also born of restraint. We usually think of restraint as a virtue and when the Hymn mentions Hermes’ “proud heart” it’s hard to get away from the notion that something good is happening—this youngster is maturing, getting control of his impulses, and so forth. That is obviously the case in one regard, but we must not forget that duplicity surrounds the whole endeavor. No one imagines Hermes is about to shape up and become an Apollonian banker. This young god is restraining appetite now in favor of appetite later. Remember again what he says to his mother:
“Why should we be the only gods who never eat the fruits of sacrifice and prayer? Better always to live in the company of other deathless ones—rich, glamorous, enjoying heaps of grain—than forever to sit by ourselves in a gloomy cavern.”
In short, we are seeing appetite deferred or displaced rather than any full restraint or denial. As I argued earlier, Hermes has not given up eating; dedicating the smoke of sacrifice to himself, he forgoes the mortal portion so as to feast on a portion that will do him no harm.
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It may be helpful at this point to summarize the ground we have covered and formulate a few conclusions. I ended the last chapter by presenting several ways in which trickster’s cunning has been imagined. He knows how to slip through pores, and how to block them; he confuses polarity by doubling back and reversing himself; he covers his tracks and twists their meanings; and he is polytropic, changing his skin or shifting his shape as the situation requires. Natural history offers wonderful examples of each of these. We see this cunning in the humpback whale casting its bubble net, in the fox doubling back to baffle the hounds, in the octopus blending with its chosen rock.
And yet these images fail to catch the full flavor of what we mean by cunning. We are speaking here of a kind of mind, and mind has a plasticity not usually found in the animal world. Odysseus and the octopus are both polytropic, but Odysseus is more so. Like an octopus, Odysseus could put on a rock-colored cloak if he needed to, but the octopus can never, like Odysseus, dress as a beggar against regal surroundings. The octopus does not consider its coloration. Odysseus and those who imagine him, on the other hand, have nóos, the mind that can form an image or representation of some sort and “float” it, detached, to be considered and shaped or changed before it is either discarded or acted upon. The story of Hermes hanging his meat-sign up in the barn suggests one answer to how such a mind came to be. Duplicity and deferral of appetite are key to its emergence, the implication being that signification evolved to help this animal slip the trap of appetite or at least better manage its constraints.
However the