The myth offers two contradictory realities: one must find a way to accept both.

Reading note

The Celestial Hunter

by Roberto Calasso — read in November 2025

A dense, metamorphic, mysterious book. The myth offers two contradictory realities: one must find a way to accept both. Every hero must kill a monster, every hero must become that monster.

Simulation, imitation, possession, metamorphosis: the rose of the psyche's winds. And a serpent that bites its tail. These are related powers: sometimes they merge, sometimes they oppose, sometimes they brush against each other. Where they act, it's easy to get confused. The art of distinguishing them was called the discretion of spirits.

I reflect... And what is very different from that practice which consisted (and still consists) in consulting the "spirits"? Waiting in front of a table, a deck of cards, an idol or a weeping and groaning Pizia, or instead in front of what is called "ourselves"...

Paul Valéry, cited by Calasso

Literature is the place of what is not binding

Only the index, the sequence of chapters can give an idea of the journey within this epic:

• I. Time of the Great Crow
• II. The Sovereign of the Animals
• III. The javelin with a golden tip
• IV. The brief age of heroes
• V. Wise and predators
• VI. The last night of Zeus on earth
• VII. Suma fui
• VIII. Night Council
• IX. The night of the hermocopids
• X. The contemplative
• XI. Statues
• XII. O Egypt, Egypt...
• XIII. The divine before the gods
• XIV. The return to Eleusis

This constellation of myths dialogues with the return to the beginning of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.