James Joyce is said to have joked that if his hometown of Dublin were ever destroyed, it could be rebuilt brick by brick from the pages of his novel Ulysses. The Italian publisher and writer Roberto Calasso might be able to make an even bolder claim: that most of Indo-European civilization could be reengineered from his books. From the pages of works such as The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony and Ka, about Greco-Roman myth and the Vedic hymns, respectively, rise the dormant foundations of our deep cultural past. Calasso rewrites and analyzes these ancient stories with such intoxicating verve that they come alive again within us. He is a sort of charmed necromancer of our pagan past, and, in his latest work, The Celestial Hunter, his powers are on full display.
In The Celestial Hunter, Calasso has blended philosophy, myth, theology, and literary analysis to create a masterpiece of what Friedrich Nietzsche called “impure thought,” described by Calasso in an interview as “a kind of thought where abstractions are so mixed with the facts of life that you can’t disentangle them.” The eighth installment of Calasso’s decadeslong project to map the origins of human consciousness, The Celestial Hunter is essentially about the role that hunting played in man’s understanding of his self and his place in the world. It was the act of killing from a distance, Calasso maintains, that led not only to “thought that for the first time felt no need to be presented as a story,” but to an overpowering blend of guilt and reverence for the killed animal, which culminated in the complexity of culture itself. He writes:
The Celestial Hunter oscillates wildly between mythopoetic statements and anthropological fact. This movement, or intellectual buffet, really, might not appeal to everyone. The book begins by recreating the experience of a shaman from the inside out. “The first sound of the drum is like the humming of a swarm of insects and a distant roar of thunder. When it is animated, it becomes a horse, then an eagle,“ Calasso writes in the first chapter. He then moves on to shamanic anthropology, Henry James, and the omnipresent figure of the hunter in different cultures all over the world.
Calasso reads quickly but not erratically. His chapters move at a hypnotic pace, rediscovering themes and tying disparate threads together before introducing new topics, seemingly from left field. But never, through all of his meandering, does Calasso ever stray too far from the book’s organizing idea: that hunting is a relatively recent human activity, the fruits of which are the basic building blocks of complex civilization. Hunting, Calasso would have us believe, was the birth of prosthetics, which allowed man to mimic the predators that had preyed on him for hundreds of thousands of years. It forever complicated man’s relationship with nature and confused his role in the world. As Calasso writes, “Hunting, then, will no longer appear as the precondition and basis for every sequence of human development, but as a crucial and belated discovery and acquisition, almost to the point of being considered the true threshold of all modernity.”
Calasso’s “impure thought” works best when he is writing about literary or historical figures we’re already acquainted with, showing them to us from novel vantage points and in a new light. His chapters on Ovid’s Metamorphosis and Plato’s The Laws stand out as particular successes. Who else but Calasso could write something like:
But every strength is also a weakness, particularly for a writer. We’re used to reading arguments. Disputations. Things that move from point A to point B. Calasso’s books, by contrast, resemble webs more than they do syllogisms. The only thing for a reader to do is to get caught up in it or not. Calasso himself makes a similar point about Nietzsche in the book, explaining that in modern Western thought, philosophy is used as a prosthesis “placed over the mind” in order to engage with reality and bring order to the world. “This apparatus,” Calasso writes, “can be innatist, empiricist, idealist, materialist, etc. Each apparatus has its own outline and its own character. Each has vast consequences in the ways in which the subject onto which the apparatus is superimposed will deal with the world. This is not so for Nietzsche. Any page of his writing requires a reaction from those who read it. It can be one of rejection, agreement, or even plain shock. No prosthesis is placed over the mind of the reader.”
This is exactly what Calasso brings to the reader as well. You can learn from him. You can be entertained or bored. You can reject him outright. But, in digging so deeply into the catacombs of human experience and in so eloquently presenting his discoveries, Calasso has found a way to express human experience that avoids contemporary cliche. He doesn’t just write about civilization. His writing is a ritual, conjuring civilization itself.
Scott Beauchamp is the author of Did You Kill Anyone? and the novel Meatyard: 77 Photographs. He lives in Maine.
